The latest episode of our podcast is available now featuring Jessica Bennett from Got Writer’s Block. Jessica and Miranda cover written and visual content for social media platforms. You can find this and all previous episodes on your favourite podcast app including Apple, Google, Spotify and Amazon.
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Full video transcript:
The nurture… the nurture element of like using LinkedIn or emails is really big because if you’re high ticket, they’re not going to buy. They’re going to need maybe like 10 to 20 touchpoints with you. They’re going to need case studies. So this is where the repurposing comes in, right? You have that video shoot from Miranda. Now what do we do with it? We’re going to make we’re going to make short video clips to post on LinkedIn. Maybe we’ll post one as a webinar…
Hello again and welcome to our Video Storytelling for Community Engagement podcast. Today I talk with Jessica Bennett of Got Writer’s Block. Jessica and I talk all about content in this episode from different types of content for different stages of the funnel, how to repurpose content across platforms and where we think user generated content does and does not work in communications. Look out for more episodes of video storytelling for community engagement by The Art of Storytelling on all podcast platforms. We’re going to talk about all kinds of ways you can be using written and visual content in your social media and in all of your marketing.
Jessica First of all, why don’t you tell me briefly what is Got Writer’s Block?
I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase before. Oh, I have got writer’s block. That’s exactly what our content agency does. So basically, when you are stuck on email marketing projects, LinkedIn writing projects, social media campaigns, we are there to help you get from that confused writer’s block to actually putting your thoughts into captions, email marketing, LinkedIn posts, and turning that into strategy. And what kind of industries do you work with? So we work a lot with health and wellness, social impact. We really like working with CEOs and founders that have a really big mission and they want to use marketing for good. As well, we definitely work with financial professionals and technology too.
That’s great. Yeah. I do have quite a lot of experience with health and nonprofit as well. So with your writing, what do you see that is different at different stages in the funnel? So like, what kind of content are you producing for the different stages that the customer goes through?
So basically with the funnel, you have brand awareness content at the top. So these are new people who don’t know about your company. You’re not really trying to pitch them yet. It’s just more like introductory educational content, learning about the company, maybe their values, things like that. Stories are really good to pull people in. And then Mid Funnel is I’ve decided that I really want a goal, like with this health provider. I want to learn more information. So maybe that’s when you start putting out webinars, you start putting on tutorials, you start putting out case studies to try and convince them that yes, they’re the solution or you’re the solution for them and choose me. And then when it gets really targeted at the bottom, that’s when you’re really putting content to convert them. So very personalized. Like I was saying, it could definitely be very targeted towards their specific need. So maybe it’s like a physio, like here is a sample plan of what could happen when you come and visit. So very targeted to their needs versus more general at the top.
Okay, great. And how are you getting stories into your content? So like for me, I often do like employee stories or customer success stories or maybe like an about us or a founder story. What kind of stories are you putting in with your content? Really similar, as well a lot about community building. Like we recently worked with a video game company and their mission is to stop like the bullying and harassment side. So then we’ll put stories from their community into the newsletters. So yeah, very similar style, like customer stories, employee stories and things like that.
Nice. Okay. And so what do you think about using like personal stories about people? Do you think that human element is really important to get into your content?
Of course. And personal branding is on the rise. People buy from people they like. Whether you like to think that or not, it’s true. So when you really put out that type of content where they connect, they’re going to want to talk to you more versus just like a sales pitch, like buy this now.
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk about repurposing content, because this is like this is really where it is because there’s so much you can do. So many opportunities. For me, repurposing content from a video production kind of looks like this: we do these long interviews not long. They’re like 15, 20 minutes. We have these long, long format interviews. And from that we we you know, we narrow it down to like 3 to 5 minutes or depending on what the client needs or the strategy that we’re going for, we narrow it down, but we have this long, long format and that has a lot of interesting stuff that just doesn’t make it into the final cut. And what we do with our clients is we give them either the full audio file or we get it transcribed, We give them the transcript file, and then, you know, a writer like you or your team can now take all of this content and start to repurpose that in words and text right. And it hasn’t really cost you much time because you didn’t have to go to the interview. We just give it to you. The other thing we do is we repurpose even the short three minute videos, which usually go and live on a website. We take those and we shorten them and repurpose them for like Instagram reels.
So a reels edit is completely different from a three minute about us website video. But it’s interesting because you can, you can keep editing the content to get different pieces for different platforms or different needs. We also give our clients some photos from their session. Now they have the photo which looks the same as the video. It’s the same photo from the same section and they have the text content and then someone like you can now write that into a blog or a newsletter or a email or something or a post. So, you know, the options are pretty broad. And, you know, we like to try and help our clients to make the most out of every session. So it might look, it might look and feel like, oh, this is you know, this is a big thing to do and it’s going to cost us a lot of money to get it started.
But once you get it started, you realize that you have so many opportunities to keep using it and reusing it in different ways that it really becomes so worth your while, you know? And I like to say that if you start with a story you have endless opportunities and ideas. And I think you really hit that on the nail when you said it’s worth the investment, because a lot of people get like sticker shock when they hear how much a video shoot is. But everything you just said shows that like, this content lives on. It’s not just one time. And like you said, like it can be little videos for the website, it can be Instagram reels like you’re thing of the transcript. A lot of times we’ll be given a transcript. Of course, we can put it into a blog, we can put it into a newsletter, we can shorten it depending on what the content is. It can be a mini e-book if it’s learning. It really depends. The content just lives on, and you could turn it into different social media posts like you were saying, you could categorize things. So I think in terms of repurposing, it’s endless opportunities.
Yeah, and I think the clients that aren’t seeing that, they’re the ones that are missing, they’re missing the opportunity and they’re just seeing, you know, the price tag and they’re seeing one item. But really it’s never just one. You can make it into so much more. Mm hmm. And then as well, if you’re a corporate brand, really having that video element is really going to like, I think, elevate your profile and make you look that extra bit professional so then you can attract those larger customers that you’re looking for and also portray that really professional image. Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know if you do a lot of writing for people’s websites, but you can tell when a website has been written in a professional way, similarly with video. So like I feel like on corporate websites, you need to have a professional video. So if you’re a big company and you are making lots of money and charging clients lots of money, then you need to put your money where your mouth is and you need to have a professional video the same way you have professional written content. So there’s nothing that I dislike more than going on to on a serious corporate website and finding some user generated vertical phone video that someone made and they thought that that was acceptable. And and I feel like that’s you’re not doing yourself any justice and you’re really almost insulting your clients because it’s like I could not be bothered to do this properly. So I just did it quickly and cheaply and myself on my phone. I think that’s that’s where I don’t like to see the wrong kind of content being used in the wrong way.
But as we were talking about before, there is a place for user generated content. I think you’re right, but it’s not on a corporate website because like we’re saying, that basically lowers your brand image and it also may have prospects questioning if you care that much about your video, how much do you care about me? You may not think that, but that’s what customers are going to see when they see like a little phone video on your website. It comes down to it’s to me, it’s similar to saying, well, you know, all of my staff have on like really nice clothes or nice uniforms because I made the effort or we just showed up, however, and we don’t really care how we look, even though we’re in a really professional setting. And we should we should care more and we should put our best face forward to our clients.
Now for corporate, I’ll talk about user generated, then I’ll go into more small companies, small business. There is a place for user generated for sure. You could do like behind the scenes clips, more like corporate culture showing off your corporate culture. You could even have like a day in the life showing what employees do or how products are done. But then you could have a professional video actually showing like your values, your mission, your story. And then I would say for small business, user generated content is everything, because small businesses rely on community and a lot of relationship building. So I feel like as a small business owner, you can definitely get away with more user generated content. But I would also argue that small businesses also need a professional video on their website to elevate that image and actually get clients to trust them and want to pay that higher price tag. Yeah, I totally agree. I think there’s definitely a place for both. I mean, even in in our business, we share lots of client work, which is professional videos, but we also share a lot of behind the scenes. And people like to see the behind the scenes. They like to see, you know, where are we? Where are we today? What are we doing when we’re shooting? And I think it gives our clients some some confidence because they can actually see, hey, this is what a video shoot looks like. And has the team at this business and this is what they’re doing. And that’s why we always we always take behind the scenes and we use it in our social media.
We use it more, I think in in stories and maybe reels not so much in posts. Yeah. So I don’t know how you feel about social media and what should be, what should be used in different pieces of the platforms. I’m totally with you. Yeah. Yeah. Those types of posts can be reels or stories depending on what they are and maybe depending on like the audio and the trends. Yeah. And a lot of reels then become stories because you share them, right? Yes.
How do you find social media is going these days with trends and what is getting more traction? You know, is it texts and photos? Is it just text, is it is it video and text? I know like LinkedIn keeps changing the algorithm. What about carousels? LinkedIn is loving carousels, LinkedIn, love selfies or authentic, authentic photos. If you put a photo, your impressions are going to go up. It doesn’t even matter what it says. LinkedIn is also definitely favoring video. You can see that in your impressions as well, because it shows that like human element. And then another one on LinkedIn would be newsletters that they’re really pushing right now. Mm hmm. And then of course, on Instagram, they’re really pushing the reels and the video element. I don’t really do TikTok, but of course, videos are really that’s what TikTok is all videos becoming really popular for building a brand. Yeah. And you know, as we’re talking about TikTok, what so what kinds of clients or businesses or industries do you think need to be on TikTok and which ones don’t? Because sometimes, you know, sometimes I hear from a client, Oh, we want to go on TikTok and I just think, Wow, I don’t think TikTok has your audience. I don’t think this is where you really want to be. But you know, what are other content creators doing and thinking. Yeah. Like I said, I’m not a TikTok expert, but I have seen a lot of B2B experts actually go on TikTok. A lot of different businesses are going. So I would say just test it out and then always have a strategy of engagement, just like on any other platform to post and then also be liking your prospect’s content so then they can find you. You can always test, you never know because a lot of people with TikTok, they’ll post something that they don’t think is going to convert and it blows up or they’re like, Oh, this is definitely going to convert and then it doesn’t. So it’s really an experiment.
So what about, you know, using stories and using content to talk about the culture behind the company? Because the culture behind the company is so important and it’s important for, you know, the leadership teams to have a company with a really strong culture. And it’s important for the employees to understand the culture as well. How do you find, you know, written content or any kind of social media content? How do you find that is being impacted by the culture or impacting the culture? Well, you definitely see, like when there is a corporate event or a team party, like different employees posting about it and showing how they had a fun time, You don’t know internally if it’s like you have to post or they wanted to post but that definitely showcases like a positive brand and that like that togetherness that people are looking for. So I would say a lot of like team pictures and internal pictures showing off events. And then occasionally I do see kind of like what we’re seeing like behind the scenes videos. of like we did this or like this is how this project goes, like step by step kind of things. Mm hmm. And do you have do you have any tips on the frequency of posting to the platforms or the frequency of newsletters? You know, people are always asking How much should I do? Is it too much? Is it not enough? If I do too many, will people unfollow me or unsubscribe? So what do you feel about that and how do you advise? Yeah. So in terms of posting, I would say it’s better to be consistent then like post for two weeks then not. So it’s really better to say, okay, I’m going to post like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every week and every week be there so they know to look at you. You can post every day. That’s great. You’re going to get more views, you’re going to get more engagement. But then if you stop, people are going to wonder where you went. So I would say pick a schedule and stick to it as well. You want to be putting out the quality content versus just posting to post because you really want to bring people in, show your values, show your educational content, things like that. And then newsletters, I think weekly is good. I think it depends what kind of campaign you’re doing. Like if you’re doing a promotion, then maybe you start off with a bunch of like educational emails, story emails. Then every day or so you’re sending a message because it’s a campaign. So I think it really depends if it’s like a campaign and it’s like a month period and you’re sending emails every day or every other day, or if it’s kind of like a round up email and it’s like here is the summary of the month.
Yeah. Okay. And with email campaigns, what is a good open rate? Minimum 20. But I’ll tell you that open rates aren’t entirely accurate because they, they put up that new Apple thing where it automatically like opens your email. So it will just say open even if you didn’t. Mm hmm. 20 plus is good. 30 is great. What was the other thing we just talked about? open rates and click through rate at least over one or two is really good. And then the other thing I was going to say about frequency is test your audience, because a few years ago I was doing this campaign and we were editing it for a health coach and we realized that these people were moms and we were actually sending them too many emails because they didn’t have time to open them. So then we we actually went through the time periods and we’re like, Oh, like we should send these at 7 a.m.. So then when they wake up with their kids, they’re looking at them. We’re sending them really late. They wouldn’t even get to it. Yeah. So I think you have to test with your audience and know who they are to do that. Yeah. And it takes time to get that data right. Like, you can’t just be one month or two months and then think, well, this was was successful or not because it takes it takes a while to get those that kind of information coming back to you. Mm hmm. And you can, of course, like you can Google like, studies and stats, say, like, when do health care professionals check their emails? Like, I know there’s stats on Instagram or when, like to post health care when to post retail products. So you can definitely Google those stats and then use them and then tweak.
Okay. So what about B2B? I mean, B2B is kind of where where I am. And I think that’s where a lot of a lot of businesses are in the B2B area. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, good content for B2B or good strategies for B2B? So B2B is a longer game. So you need a you need a really strong nurture strategy and presence. So one thing that will make you stand out is video, because a lot of B2B companies are like boring, right? And they don’t want to post content. But if you post content as a B2B company, say on LinkedIn, you’re your instantly going to stand out, You’re instantly going to show your personality and why you versus like every other tech company that does the same can be very competitive in B2B. And then the nurture, the nurture element of like using LinkedIn or emails is really big because if you’re high ticket, they’re not going to buy. They’re going to be maybe like 10 to 20 touchpoints with you. They’re going to need case studies. So this is where the repurposing comes in, right? You have that video shoot from Miranda. Now what do we do with it? We’re going to make we’re going to make short video clips to post on LinkedIn. Maybe we’ll post one as a webinar. I personally love webinars. I would say webinars are a good strategy. I know you like them too. Yeah, yeah. So B2B is really having that ongoing content as well as engaging with the prospects we want to engage with. So they remember you want to just be top of mind because it’s a longer sales game for you. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.
The other question that comes up a lot is should you be working your personal LinkedIn or your business LinkedIn page? So for like small, medium sized businesses, I mean, any business that has both employees and a business page on LinkedIn, what do you think gets the most traction? Personal branding is on the rise. You need to be posting on your personal profile. It’s the same idea as people like know who they buy from. But then corporate also really likes using the company page, so the company page can be used for like updates, educational posts. What else? Maybe stats, maybe big wins and achievements. And then the personal side is more like the thought leadership where you’re talking about like maybe issues in healthcare. Like what do we think about the shortages of doctors or what do we think about different products versus the conpany page is more like educational stats, employee based, and then the personal is more your feelings and thoughts about different things. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, like for me personally, my personal LinkedIn works a lot better. I get a lot more followers. You can connect with people so much easier. People don’t always really want to follow your business page. So I find like the followers are less. And yeah, I think just working working your personal LinkedIn is is really working better for us at least. There is a new trend though I may try it or have a client try it is basically turning your company page more into a publication. Almost like a Reddit feed or like a like a magazine. So people want to engage in those articles and then they want to follow you to get those posts, to get the news right. So is that like sharing more articles on your business LinkedIn, but your articles from your company. Mm hmm. Okay. Yeah, it’s an interesting one. Yeah. So they will just pick, like, one topic. Maybe they want to talk about, like health care content marketing, and that’s all they talk about. Yeah. Or maybe they want to talk about A.I. and popularity, and that’s it. It’s just very like, niche and then people want to follow for all those little updates. Mm hmm. Yeah, there’s lots of potential with LinkedIn. Are you like a LinkedIn power user? I love LinkedIn And one of my favorite things that I’m going to start again is the LinkedIn live same as Facebook Live, Instagram live. Because when go live it pings all your users Yeah. Versus when you post only like five or 10% see your content. Yes. And I’m a really big fan of also using Sales Navigator to really filter and target your audience and find those those clients that you’re looking for who don’t show up on your feed because you’re not connected to them yet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You like Sales navigator, too, right? I’m trying. Yeah. I’m trying to get a little more to grips with Sales Navigator. I might have to ask you some other questions. Another time about how to work with it. Yeah. But it’s for anyone who doesn’t know why we like Sales Navigator. Basically, it has all these filters. So you could say like New York, Miami, the exact position of the person, like maybe it’s director of marketing or sales that, you know, is the one that has the decision making power for video. And then you could choose the company side. So I feel like all small companies don’t really have a budget, we’re going to go for companies 500 plus, right? And then it spits out a list and then you can know who to engage with. Yeah, I definitely need to to try and spend a few more hours on it. You started before and I know it worked you just got to go back in and pick it up. Yeah. Yeah it is. It does work when it works. It does work really well. Yeah. Okay. So last question.
Do you have any, like, client success stories or any favorite clients stories of some projects that you’ve done that you really liked and you really like brought some impact to the clients and their company? Yeah. So one of them that we worked with was a little while back, but it was an eco friendly product company. So first of all, I love working with like the health and wellness and beauty space. It was female owned and that was really fun. And the reason that it was such a fun project was because myself and my team, we really got to work together. So she came to us having like no brand presence. My team helped her with the email marketing building out her campaign, so it started in the fall and then basically we did like Black Friday, we did a winter sale, we did a Boxing Day sale, and we showed her that even with a small list, because they were engaged, you could get sales if you if you know what to say and, you know, like how to do email marketing. And then from the brand presence side and the Instagram side, it really helped her account just because of the brand imagery and basically bringing that brand to life. And it just goes to show that when you have like a brand strategy email marketing, you don’t need a big following to make money and to have an impact, right?
Yeah, And how would you start an email marketing campaign from scratch if you have no followers? Totally brand new… Where do you start to get these emails? That’s hard. Okay, so you can do a few things. I know on LinkedIn when you have posts, sometimes people just at the bottom. I do this too. You can say subscribe to newsletter and definitely people subscribe. People like to do freebies. So like you could say, download my checklist and then get on the email list and you could also do webinars. And then once they’re on the webinar list, they’re on the email list. That’s what I used to do a lot. So I could those are three main ones. But basically and then also on Instagram, you could do contests, I guess on any platform, but on Instagram you could do a contest, say, put your email in and then we’ll choose a winner. But definitely collecting emails can be tricky, but you have to at least ask. Otherwise you’re not going to get emails. Yeah, yeah. Or make it exclusive like you get on my list to get a promo code, things like that. Mm. Okay. Yeah. And like, how do you, how would you make sure that you’re being careful not to break any laws with spams? So that way you have to say like, You’re not just adding people like get on my list and then you have the form like first name, last name, and then they go into your email software. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You need to be careful. And when you’re doing your email campaigns with clients, are you sending the emails for them, like from using like MailChimp or something? Yeah. So it depends. Some of them are tech savvy. A lot of them like to use Mailer Lite, MailChimp or ActiveCampaign. Mm hmm. What we’ll do – so there’s two ways. So sometimes we’ll build them out templates and then each time we’ll just copy and paste the text in and the images, and then some of them are like, please do it for me, and then we’ll actually insert it. We’ll put the subject line, we’ll schedule it. And then the other thing that you also have to think about is segmenting. So that’s done before. But basically when you add certain people what list you want them to go on, like, do you want to be emailing your health care clients the same content as your financial clients? Or do you want like different segments? You have to use that. And most of the time clients don’t know how to do that. So I help them segment, which is really key. Yeah. And I guess like the sooner you start segmenting the better. Because if you just collect a whole set of email addresses and they’re not segmented, then how do you go afterwards and start to segment… Yeah, every single event I make my own group and it doesn’t matter. So I’m just like, Oh, this is from Staples, okay, I’m going to email Staples, people, these things, right? Oh, I went to a health care conference. This is here. So yeah, as soon as I put them in, I group them. Otherwise you’re going to forget. And then even I think it’s okay to have them all in one group for a while because you can also see like click through rates and opens and maybe there’s specific people who like really like specific topics, then you can make a group for them. So it’s not always segment right away, but you can learn to look at the data. Always learn. Yeah.
And I was talking to a client today who had done she had done a video project and she got like no views and we looked at her YouTube and there was like, you know, less than 100 views. And she’s like, I don’t know what I did wrong. And, you know, it’s there’s probably so much that she did wrong, probably like just from the posting and the sharing and even just, you know, did you post the actual file or did you just share the YouTube? Like what did you do? Yeah. So it’s you have to look at the data, but you also have to know why the why the data is the way it is is. Sometimes it’s just a mistake that was made. It doesn’t mean that, you know, your campaign or your project wasn’t good. It just means somewhere somebody dropped the ball and made a mistake with something. And, you know, and that’s why you didn’t get a lot of engagement. So, yeah, you look at the data, but you also have to look at the context of how this data was generated. Yeah, I think that’s really smart. And especially with YouTube, there’s lots of optimization, so maybe things were missed and like you’re saying, maybe she didn’t actually post the file, she posted the sharing link. Yeah, you need to know that. And that’s why you work with a video expert. Yeah. Yeah. It’s only when you really start to ask these questions and dig a little bit deeper as to, okay, why did this previous project not work that you find You know, where the little mistakes were made that the client doesn’t know about?
The last thing I want to say is also think about learning styles. So there is a benefit of having video content for people that are like audio visual. But then there’s also a benefit of having like blogs and emails because some people like reading. And then the podcast, maybe some people just like audio and listening. So having all the different formats and repurposing just helps you hit more clients. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, we were at a at a women in business event and one of the women she wrote this wonderful book about women’s health and someone I was with said, Oh, well, you know, I don’t really have time to sit down and read the book. Do you have it as an audio book? Yeah. And she said, I had I had no idea that you could have audio books. Okay. Granted, she was, you know, a senior and she just didn’t know about the technology. Yeah. You know, it was a thing. And she had just got this book and the book was doing so well and someone asked if audio book and she was like, Wow, I had no idea. Let me go and look into that because that’s like a whole other avenue that she hadn’t even thought about that could be, you know, doing just as well as her actual printed book. Oh, that’s… yeah, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. It’s just a whole other audience. Yeah. And it’s the same thing. It’s the same content. You just have to now take that content and use it in a different way. Like she doesn’t have to write a second book. She just needs to get her book as an audiobook. And yeah, like I love audiobooks for the car if I’m commuting.
Well, I think we had a great discussion about so many different topics. I mean, we could talk about each of these topics for hours on end, but thank you so much for your time today and I look forward to doing this again with you another time. Perfect. Thanks so much. Miranda take care.