You’ve got to create content for your business, but why settle for that when you could absolutely crush content with the best content marketing tools around?
This week, we’re looking at marketing tools specifically for content creators who are producing podcasts, videos for YouTube, and blogs. These are the tools you’ll need to turn that piece of content you create into hundreds of other pieces of content in a way that doesn’t drown you and become more than you can handle.
Right now, there are plenty of content creators out there who I feel like are missing the boat because they haven’t developed a system for turning the content they create into a marketing system, a marketing machine that benefits their business.
You put all this effort into creating content, but how much effort have you put into building a system of marketing tools that turns the content you create into shareable highlights? How are you creating more pieces of content you can use on a daily basis to reach more of your audience, affect them in different ways, and engage with them?
Simply put, after you create the pillar content for your business, how do you extract the highlights?
Highlights can be many things: clips, snippets, memes, verbal cues, jokes, quotables … all those things. What marketing tools will help you pull them out and extract them in a way that doesn’t kill your time but actually amplifies your time?
There are three basic steps:
- Finding highlight moments in your content.
- Systemizing the process of creating those moments.
- Extracting and creating them.
Finding highlights
How do you find the right highlights with your content?
You can design that ahead of time. Before you ever record something, you can write down what you want to make sure to say or call out.
However, for most of us, highlights are going to happen more organically. You’re going to get out there, you’re going to create, and then you’re gonna have to go back and find that golden nugget of information.
The first step in that is figuring out, well, what does an amazing highlight mean? I want you to think about a few things in terms of the context of the highlight. I want to make sure the content itself is intriguing, impactful, or has authority.
Intrigue
Intriguing content is content that drives curiosity. It’s striking a chord with someone, making them think, “I want to know more about that. I want to know what the next step is.”
Creating intrigue is all about knowing what your audience wants, likes, and might need as a next step. Then you can say, “I might have a solution for that” or tease them with someone who’s already found success.
Creating intrigue makes people want to know more about the rest of the episode, so creating a highlight in that way helps you drive people to your episode.
Impact
How else can you find these highlights? Look for something that has impact. In other words, it’s tapping into an emotional cue for someone. It’s a moment in the episode when you were very passionate about something or were sharing something vulnerable.
Those kinds of moments resonate with people because you are finding common ground. So find a moment of impact that connects to an emotion.
Authority
The last technique is to find a moment of authority. An authority piece is something that demonstrates your expertise.
You want to build trust with your audience, and one way to build that trust is to demonstrate your expertise, thereby building authority.
One example is a moment in your content where you rattle off an expert opinion on something that you know very deeply. That might be the process for doing something or the details of something that’s very intricate.
Whatever it might be, if you can demonstrate your expertise in a concise and quick way, that’s going to demonstrate authority and build trust.
Be clear, concise, and relevant
The other qualities that make good highlights have to do with the format of the content itself. You need to find pieces of content that are concise. A highlight can’t run on for three minutes, and it can’t go all over the place. It needs to be concise and focused.
If you can think about that when you’re delivering content, you will be much better prepared to pull highlights out of the content because you went into it thinking, “I need to make sure I deliver my points in a concise way.”
When you deliver an idea in a concise way, it resonates with your audience. It’s focused, it’s clear, and they can understand it. Anything that is clear makes a better highlight.
If you can clearly convey your idea in a way that is not confusing and not too technical, it’s more likely to make a good highlight because everyone can understand it without deep knowledge or having to pull out a dictionary or read three books.
Lastly, you have to build some relevance. You have to communicate relevant information to your audience. If you understand your audience and you consistently deliver the same message, you should know by now what is relevant to the people listening.
It’s something related to problems they’ve expressed and that you’ve been trying to solve with these shows over and over again. If it’s something completely off the cuff and not related, or off the beaten path from what your content is usually about, then it’s not going to be relevant to the audience you serve, who are tuning in for a particular reason.
Marketing Tools for Systemization
Now, let’s move on to marketing tools to help systemize finding your highlights. You need to figure out the easiest, fastest way to get through your content. What’s the fastest way to read through, listen through, watch through and find those moments of inspiration, those moments that are exciting and intriguing?
First, look at the way you’re consuming your own content. You’re skimming through, or possibly having someone else skim through for you.
If you’re doing this yourself, you have to figure out when in the creation process is the best time to search for highlights.
If you edit your own podcasts or your own videos for YouTube, that editing period is a great time to make sure you’re jotting down timestamps. Note when something resonated or stood out as a moment that was clear, concise, and hits all those points we talked about.
Pulling highlights while editing works within your normal flow. You’ll already have to go back and listen a second time to review the content, so do it then.
If you have someone else who’s helping you with the content, have that person do that work for you. If someone is editing your sound or video, have them do the same thing. Have them jot down three or four mentions. They can note a timestamp or just write out what those quotes were and send them to you. Then, you can look through them and pick one or two that you like the best.
The people who are already reviewing the content should be the ones pulling out the highlights for you. They may not need to be the ones who are executing, turning that clip into something else, but they should be the ones finding it.
Pull from written content
For me, there’s something about written content that makes it easier to find. Sometimes, an editor is moving through your content so quickly looking for the things they’re looking for that they aren’t actually listening to the words you’re saying. So they may not find the best clips, or it may take them longer to slow down and look for it. And it’s not their expertise.
However, if you can somehow get your content into a written format, it might be easier in that format to find highlights. For me, I can read and skim written text much faster than I can process audio or video.
I like to make sure I get my podcast transcribed so I can skim through the reading. Very visually, within a few minutes, I can go through 10 pages of a podcast, find the three or four key areas, and simply highlight the areas I want to pull out as highlight content.
Transcribe it
A transcription service is a marketing tool I’d recommend for anyone. If you’re a video creator and you upload to YouTube, it has some automatic transcribing options.
If you are a podcaster, there are a couple of transcribing tools that can help you get your content into that written format. One is Rev.com. Rev is a good tool that not only transcribes your show, but when you push play, you can read the transcript while listening.
That way, you can go to areas where maybe the words were messed up, and it’ll say the words to you while it’s highlighting them, so you can spot problem and get through them quickly. I believe it’s a dollar a minute or something like that.
Another marketing tool I prefer because of the cost saving is Descript. Descript has a software that I think is $10 a month, and you can pull transcripts from that as well.
It does the same thing Rev does in terms of highlighting the words and letting you listen to them. However, you can also choose sections of the text as highlights, and Descript will automatically pull them into a new composition that you can then export as a new audio or text file.
That’s huge for me. I can find the timestamps if I have a video format and send those to the editors, and that saves a lot of time. I can pull three, four highlights from every show, put them into new compositions, and I’m done. Then I can just access those whenever I go into the next step, which is turning that extracted content into something else.
So Rev is an amazing marketing tool, and Descript is another amazing tool.
Subtitle it
I do want to mention there are some subtitling companies out there. One is called Quicc, which adds subtitles to your videos. If you’re a video creator, it’s an easy way to just overlay subtitles on top of your video.
And it’s not just boring looking text. You can play with the look of it, and that’s an amazing, quick tool. Hence the name Quicc.
So think about automation marketing tools. What is the easiest, fastest way that you can skim through this content? And can you do that while you (or someone else) are already doing something else you’d have to do anyway.
Find a complementary way to move your content to a different format. That’s where you start with systemizing.
Marketing Tools for Extracting highlights
Now that you’ve found them, how do you take those highlights and turn them into something else? How do you extract it, format it, and distribute it?
You do have to find a way to pull the content through tools like Descript, but I’d also want to talk about some places you can put it and some automation tools. And these tools are a lot simpler than you realize to use, so they’re really worth exploring.
Repurpose
One marketing tool for extraction is called Repurpose.io. This is an amazing tool for taking already built pieces of content, whether it’s full episodes or clips, and pushing them into something else.
I use Repurpose for the podcast. Every week, my RSS feed is uploaded automatically, so my podcast is automatically feeding content into this website. And every time there’s a new episode, it automatically translates that episode into a new audiogram, which is just a graphic with a waveform on it, and my entire sound below that. It does that automatically for me every week.
Repurpose pulls my show notes into the text of the audiogram, and it can post that. It can just download that to a folder for me, whether it’s through Dropbox or Google Drive, or it can upload that straight to YouTube. It does all that automatically. Or, I can save it and do it manually.
Now, Repurpose doesn’t just do all that without my knowledge, but what a great automation marketing tool. Check that out because it doesn’t just do the full episode. You can also go in there and select clips from your episodes and have pre-formatted clip videos.
For example, I can do a one-minute Instagram clip. I can set it to one minute in a box format, or one minute in a rectangle format, horizontal or vertical. It will automatically translate those from audio into an audiogram or something else.
Repurpose can do that with video, too. If you have a video clip, you can pop clips in, and it can automatically convert them in whatever way you need and post them places. It’s built mostly for podcasters, so most of its functionality is built for an audio-forward platform, but it’s worth checking out.
Headliner
Another marketing tool out there is the Headliner app. Headliner does a lot of the same things, like taking prebuilt content and translating it into audiograms or into short clips or ads … whatever you might need.
I don’t love the design elements of some of their audiograms as much, but it is another great app to get a lot of different things done that you might have thought you’d need to outsource.
GetAudiogram
Another marketing tool I really like is called GetAudiogram.com. All they do is audiograms. You put your audio clip in, and it turns it into an audiogram. That’s it. So it’s not automated in that way, but the design functionality is amazing.
There are so many different templates and formats, or you can create one from scratch, add subtitles, and move them wherever you want. You can add background pictures, and it’ll pull in your titles. There’s a lot of functionality there. And in some cases, it even has movement and animation going on in the background, so the clips are a little more interesting than just a still photo.
So, there are lots of tools out there. You need to start by figuring out what you need right now in your business. Obviously, these things can be free, but they also tend to add up. You might have only $5 or $10 a month on some of these, but once you add another tool, another tool, another tool, it starts to get expensive.
These tools are all there for you to help not only extract your highlights, but also to format them in a way that really makes them pop on the media platforms like social media channels and things like that.
Make it look good
If you want to get a little creative with the format of your highlights, there are amazing marketing tools that will take your content and turn it into something else.
For example, if you have a video and you want to wrap it so the header and footer have a title on it like those Gary Vee style videos, one of the websites you can use is called Wrapr.com. You pop in your video and choose a prebuilt wrap. Then you can type in your headlines and it’ll output videos for you. It’s a low monthly fee or maybe even a low one-time fee and you can have it for a lifetime. It turns a boring video into a very polished, professional looking piece of content very quickly, very simply.
Another one I think is really interesting is called Lumen5.com. You can put audio into this, and it’ll pull in every new show and turn those shows into slides.
It can take the words from a particular clip and write them on top of an image, then change the images over every 30 seconds or so with a new slide that it’s pulling from stock images. It turns speech or your audio into a slideshow presentation, which is amazing.
It’s another new format that can make your content more interesting than just text on a boring background. I haven’t found ways that I love to use it because an hour-long show could get really long for a slideshow, but definitely for it’s definitely a great presentation for clips.
Distributing highlights
When you are getting your highlights built and distributed, again, you don’t have to do it yourself. One of the best things I’ve started doing to keep up with all of this is get some help via graphic designers, writers, audio editors, and video editors.
I know that sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a small price to actually have someone working on your show for you every week. Why? Because that time you’re spending on these low-quality skills could probably be spent doing something you’re more skilled at that could help bring money into your business.
By low quality, I mean low quality for you because you’re probably not the best graphic designer in the world or the best writer in the world. Let other people do that for you.
Use freelancers
If you want to find people like this, obviously, there are freelancing websites. The couple that I like to use consistently are Upwork.com and FreeUp.net.
Upwork is very project-based. I love to set a project and have a bunch of freelancers work through it with me for a very small set price. I see how they do, and guess what. If multiple people are doing well, I now have a group of people who I can access for projects I might need. I can also outsource it. I can refer those people to other friends of mine who might have the same problem.
It’s great to have a pool of people to access. For example, I needed some social media templates for my Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds. For a small price, I’m getting 10, 20, 30 different templates that I can use over and over and over again.
It’s a quick thing, and I don’t have to think about the design. Now I can just pop in a picture, or I can ask that designer to go in once a week for a half hour and pop in photos and relevant titles so I can just post them. That’s good because that helps me.
Pick your priorities
Then I can decide, do I want a freelancer to do this task, or do I want to do it? You might want to hire for something like posting on social media so you don’t have to spend time on everything.
Another great one for me — honestly, the most important thing for me — has been to hire a writer. My big challenge has been how do I develop a blog? How do I turn my show into a written format so there’s SEO value? Hiring a writer has been really important for turning my transcripts into readable blog posts.
And those writers, while they’re at it, can come up with show notes and catchy headings and pull out quotes for me.
That’s tackling a lot of barriers all at the same time, so I would think about getting a writer, or at least an editor to go through and be able to build that stuff for you. It takes a lot of that brain work out of it, so you can just sit there and create and let them do some of that other work for you.
Consider an intern
The other great marketing tool that’s kind of new that I heard about through listening to another podcast is called Acadium. I can’t vouch for this yet. I’ve signed up, but I haven’t finished using it. Acadium is a site where you can hire an intern. Basically, you pay a flat fee and commit to giving an hour of your time a week, and they give 10 hours of their time a week.
It’s such a low price. It’s like $300 to $400 or something like that to get three months’ worth of work at 10 hours a week. Now, you have to go through and vet the people, but the primary sourcing has been done. I know some very credible people who have used it and said it’s worked well for them. Imagine having an intern for your business, especially if you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner. That’s huge.
Let’s get help in our businesses so we don’t run out of time and hit burnout. Let’s actually enjoy the work that we’re doing.
Crush the title
Once you’ve done the creating, extracting, formatting, and distributing, there’s one more vital step. You’ve got to give your content a title.
A title is one of the things we take for granted.
But guess what.
A title is the No. 1 thing people read when:
- Skimming an email.
- Choosing a podcast to listen to.
- Picking a video to watch.
- Scanning search results.
Obviously, you have to have some work to do with the content itself, but if your title is off, you’re really hurting yourself. So, I use a couple marketing tools to help me with that.
A new one for me that I’ve started using since last season is the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. They have a feature where you type in your headline, and the analyzer gives you a score of how good the headline is. Your goal is to keep making it better and better.
What makes the CoSchedule tool good is whatever the issue — you’re not using enough energetic words, it’s boring, it’s too short or too long — they tell you why.
If you’re having trouble creating headlines to begin with, there are also headline generators out there that will help you generate new headlines from scratch. So play with those. See which ones you like. I don’t have one that I recommend, but I do love CoSchedule’s tool for sure.
Choose your keyword
Now, all of this is great, but if you don’t have the right keyword to start with, then what’s the point of having a catchy title?
Again, marketing tools to the rescue. Make sure you go to a site that looks at the search engine keywords. One I love right now that I’m using a lot is SEMrush.com. I subscribe to and pay for this. You can type in your keyword, and SEMrush will let you know if that keyword is something anyone’s searching for.
So for example, my topic today was supposed to be about highlight content. How do you create highlight content? But no one is searching for the phrase “highlight content.” More people are searching for the word “repurpose,” and then more people than that are searching for the word “content marketing tools.”
So I had to keep switching the name of this podcast until I figured that out. And now this is about content marketing tools under the umbrella of creating highlight content. So I started with the question of how to create highlight content, and then I ran it through some of these creative ideas and marketing tools.
The angle that performed the best was to focus on the best content marketing tools to start using today. And then I kept playing with it. I settled on finding the best marketing tools for crushing content. Obviously that sounds a little more energetic, a little more interesting. And that’s the one that won.
That’s the process. And if you can put the effort into those steps, then you have more of a chance of taking this thing that you put all this effort into creating and having people find it, actually listen to it, and subscribe. Because what’s the point of putting all this work into something if no one’s listening, no one’s watching it, no one’s reading?
Start checking out those marketing tools today that can make better use of your time.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
Want to learn more about designing a strong episode? Check out Episode 121, What is Content Marketing Strategy?
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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Talk soon!