Daren:
If you’re not learning, you’re dying. All facts, zero lies. You might say, the content marketing space is so crowded. How do I find out about the latest and greatest new marketing trends? Well find out the answer to that and get great tips on revolutionizing your content marketing on this episode of Digital Ninjas d Lake Media. Hey, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to this podcast series, a collaboration between Digital Ninjas, d Lake Creative and Pod Paste. We’re on a mission to supercharge your brand, company or organization and help you change the world through digital strategy, training, and insights. Each episode we answer questions and talk about one specific idea to help you market and run your business better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we’ve all got a business to run.
Daren:
And it’s actually a panel discussion that I ended up being a part of. That was really awesome. And I was joined by Natalie Refa, who is the founder and CEO of Splash Up, which is an e-commerce software company. Also Gensen Gleer, who is a growth hacker extraordinaire, absolute wizard. And Brendan Hill, who’s another content creation wizard. And he also is a venture capitalist investor. And then obviously myself, I was a part of it. Darren Lake D Lake creates, I do a running fitness brand. So what will you learn in this episode? Learning by doing, understanding your platform and the best way to do it, the power of non-marketing content to help inspire you to do your marketing content, how and why you should content stack. Starting from the podcast and much more, let’s get into it.
Brendan:
I wanted to move the conversation to marketing educational resources. So it’s great because I always can come to you three in your specific areas for new marketing knowledge. And you know, I can always find out what’s working on the frontline, but what other marketing resources I mean, who do you guys learn from? Any specific communities or sites?
Natalie:
You’re gonna laugh, but I actually, I don’t know how this might come across, but I love Twitter. I think there’s so much good content there, it’s underrated. The first
Daren:
Australian to love Twitter that I’ve never heard somebody say before.
Natalie:
Met. I mean, I don’t tweet. I’m more of like these locals on the outside usually. But it’s such a good place to, you know, get short form content on the things that you want and the things that you like. And marketing is big, you know, like you can, you can go niche and follow like an SEO blog with some guru, or you can go like really, you know, wide. But Twitter is one thing like I that I love. I’ve also love if you’re sort of like, depending on what your goal is, if you want to learn the basics, then something like getting certified like Google. There’s lots of things around like SEO and like analytics and understanding that. So it depends on what you really wanna learn. And if you wanna sort of like niche, then there’s sort of like different ways that you can, you can learn, you can do courses or you can even subscribe to like newsletters. There’s a really good one called Irene or something like that. I can send it to you later. But it, it’s a vast place and for me it’s like do it going like the DIY sort of approach of, of, you know, being all, all across like different things and, and also learning by doing. Yeah,
Genson:
I agree. There’s like the fundamentals that you need such as, you know, understanding each ad platform. Most like social media platforms will have their own education process for understanding how to utilize it and get the most out of it. Facebook, Google, everything else. But I think for more the nuanced stuff, you want to look at additional marketing micro influences, and you’ll find those on TikTok. You’ll find, I’m very adamant about TikTok because you’ve gotta look at what’s the next fastest growing social media platform and how do you take advantages, advantage of that platform’s actual growth. And at the moment, tos on the rise, it’s gonna be on the rise for quite some time. Every other major platform’s following it with short form content. So going with the trend is the best way to go. For additional resources, there’s a myriad of stuff. For your long tail stuff, I’d look@medium.com because normally you have like professionals that are writing long form blogs. So content CK has a number of different bits and pieces that could be great, but realistically just search via hashtag, jump onto TikTok and start watching. Yeah.
Brendan:
Or put a link to your TikTok channel Jensen in the show notes as well. Some great short form content on that.
Daren:
I’d say it’s personal and again, I, I consume things differently. I, I realize that most people are saying the same stuff and as far as like new trends and new, new, new, everyone’s gonna be reporting on the same thing. So I follow, I think three. I like newsletters. I love newsletters. Even though I am a podcaster. I have a podcast production company. I’m an audio guy. I actually don’t listen to podcast that much. I’m very particular one cuz my ear space, my all my, you know, just, it’s, it’s all being taken up cause I’m making stuff and very particular. And I also sometimes just don’t wanna learn. I just want to be motivated and influenced by Disney Marvel movies. So Marvel not really Disney, but and then sometimes I’ll apply the story concepts. So I actually look to other places to get inspiration and then learn how to be a better marketer or a better storyteller or a better creator.
I think it’s more like frameworks. I guess. I am given the framework right now. Subscribe to two, maybe three in whatever platform you like, your, your content your educational content. So again, I like newsletters. The only marketing podcast I listen to is marketing school because the format is borderline genius. And even though the quality’s not really where I’d like it as far as like the production quality, their actual content quality is good. Those are two different things. It’s just a marketing school by Neil Patel and Eric Sue. And they just in five to seven minutes, they just give you value, like bam, bam. It’s just value on top of value and it’s just like, here’s a bunch of experience that we have in knowledge. Take it for free, run with it. And I’d say that’s probably it. And you know, blogs, blogs are kind of dying. Like no one’s really subscribing. You don’t get, I used to love the RSS feeds and you know, you get the blog, but because of podcast, because of short form concept, cuz of medium, because of LinkedIn, most blogs are now on all of these platforms and publishers. So so yeah, follow, you just need to follow a couple and you’ll start seeing the general trends and watch, you know, you’ll, like, they’re all saying this over here, cool. Implement it. If you love one, stay with that one. You don’t have to listen to every single one.
Genson:
Actually, this is a little subject change in regards to sort of creating content. I think it’s paramount to maybe take an approach like you’re creating content like a comedian, you’re gonna have jokes that are amazing. You’re gonna have jokes that are fucking terrible. So most people get a bit scared about what they put out there that it’s like, it’s not good enough, it’s not polished enough. It needs this and this and this. Someone’s gonna hate it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like with everything, never enter the comments section. Don’t worry about your haters, just put it out there and base it on engagement. Good or bad engagement. As long as you’re getting that exposure and be willing to try new pieces of content. Whether it’s, you know, generating content, using ai, whether it’s generating content that’s polished or unpolished or whatever, or different styles, you know what I mean? Like, throw something out there, try an animation, you know, just see what sticks and don’t be afraid to do it. Cuz that’s the whole approach. It’s experimentation
Natalie:
And it’s hard for everyone. Like I was attending an event where they’re really large brands and you’d think like on the outside, you know, they’re probably just sipping tea all day cuz they don’t have to worry about their audience engagement cuz they’re that big, but they’re like really stressed on the inside. They’re like, we don’t know what content would work. We don’t know like if this engagement’s gonna like be high enough or not. And so like, if you’re an sme, like don’t feel like, oh, like I haven’t figured that out yet. Everyone has the same sort of problem. And even like the big guys, they’re constantly thinking about how do I do this? How do I do that? And, you know, it, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it takes a lot of creativity. It takes a lot of persistence and I, I have a lot of respect for people who constantly push out contact, like on TikTok cuz it’s video and it takes a lot of effort. And so I love, I’m impressed by the amount of engagement there is, like creators that are shipping content. But like, yeah, I think it’s, it’s definitely a hard game. I would be curious to see how that evolves from there. Will TikTok always be a thing? We’ll video, is that like a short term thing that we’re gonna see or what’s next? You know, like this is where it’s like, that’s, that’s where it gets spicy. What’s
Speaker 5:
Next? What’s next? We’re talking about what’s next when it
Daren:
Comes to, oh, hold on, hold on. Before you talk about what’s next, because I wanna stay, I wanna stay on this. It, it’s, it’s kind of a, it is just a random tip that I’ve realized with my brand, how I can scale and automate things. So go back to the whole thesis of all of this, which is, you know, how to use automation tools. What I do because I have long form content and I’m actually good at it, whether it’s a long blog post or a podcast, usually, you know, five, 10 minute, that’s when you get in a long form territory. So YouTube videos are perfect. If you’re sitting on that and you create that, you most likely now have segments in there. And now you have multiple pieces of short form content that can go out in so many different formats. Obviously short video.
So if you recorded a video, you recorded a podcast, you now have multiple short videos. So I think I have my personal podcast. I’ve gotten it down to about 10 to 20 minutes now per episode. Very marketing school style. And within that, if, especially if we do a listical, you know, top eight things to run your best, 5k, blah, blah, blah, that type of stuff. Now I have minimum eight pieces of short form content plus, you know, a little side rant that we do a little story and then there might be an infographic in there. And there also is gonna be obviously quotes. So this is Gary V 68 pieces, you know, content stacking or pillars. It’s, it’s, so just as far as automating, if you’ve recorded once and you’ve already done the pre-production, all you gotta do is edit it and make sure you’re thinking about future content. And you, you technically have scaled. You don’t have to sit there and go, oh, I need to think of a quote and I need to think of, you know, an infographic. So that’s one cool hack that I am very grateful. My super analytical, obsessive compulsive process-driven brain does very well, which is chop things up. But think about it in the beginning, then I’m gonna chop it up later.
Natalie:
I think this is, that’s, i, I I would love to read a, a blog article like how you do that. I mean like, how much time does this take up during like, you know, how, how long does it take you to do all of this? Because like, let’s say you are a, you know, you’re selling candles or like you’re, you’re, you’re a plumber, you know, like how, how do you then adjust like this sort of you know, chopping different sort of content and and and adjusting it to what you need and how much time you can dedicate. Cuz obviously it takes a lot of time to even think about the stages. Like do you have a particular sort of like, you know, I don’t know, tips on how one can be consistent and, and, and continue building up on those habits.
Daren:
Yeah I’ll do a quick version cuz this is a episode in its own self and I will definitely put this out. It seems like there’s interest in it, the pre-production or the ideation and like basically how long I spent figuring out the, you know, doing the brief for this panel discussion. That’s where if you’re gonna spend the most amount of time, do it there and you’ll have an idea of what it needs to be chopped up into you probably, or whoever was there helping you do that should be doing the editing of the content. So not saying like, if you’re not an audio editor or video editor, give that to an editor to do like the actual editing of it. I’m talking about like the editorial creative editing where you go through it, maybe go through the show notes of your podcast, you’re trying to figure out what’s the points of this blog post or the video, you know YouTube now has the, the segments of where you can click through, which is great cuz it breaks up in the little pieces.
Then you’ve already done that list in the beginning in the pre-production phase. You then are just looking for that at the end and it gets faster. The iterations, you know, it’s like anything you, I I’m, I’ve gotten so much faster. And then you can, once you figure out, you know, you, you do it well once, then you can five 10 x that up by bringing in again, a video editor. You can bring in someone to do that content editorial edit, obviously podcast editing, you can have someone do the infographics. So I timed it all from beginning to end and I think a podcast episode takes me anywhere from like seven to nine hours if I do everything myself plus all the promotional materials plus all the, you know, the email newsletters and all that stuff. And now I’ve got it down to about two to three hours and that’s me actually hitting record and recording it. I edit it myself because I’m an audio editor, so I’m producer. I, I’m really quick with that tool, but I give the video editor all the video stuff. I have all these other people in on my team helping me out with, with all the other itty bitty stuff that took the other five, six hours. So that’s, that’s a quick one. Sorry to, to derail. I know you wanted to talk about the future. Do you wanna talk about the future? Let’s talk about the future.
Genson:
All right. Actually back to that, like if you are sort of like a plumber or anot, generally speaking, content around education of tips is gonna be your best friend. So like you’re a hairdresser, this is how I do this style showcasing, you know, if you do like cosmetic tattoos, okay, this is my particular technique a plumber, you know, this is me on a job site, this is the job that we’re doing today. Even just sort of like ad hoc content like that is perfect. You don’t always have to over plan it. It’s great to plan it if you have the time, but if you have limited resources, ad hoc is just on point. You know what I mean? You gotta think like, what’s the best I can do with what I’ve got?
Daren:
And you know, that’s the exact opposite of what I’m doing. I really like the pre-production phase. So I love the researching and I love the planning. Some people hate it. Some people are the just like, you know, some, a guy that I know he wakes up and he just posts whatever he can and that works for him. So, you know, my way is a certain way. It allows me to have more content later though. And then there’s no stress later. I’ve got 60 pieces of content that I’m sitting on that I’ll spread out over the course of three to six months. And also I’m not rehashing stuff, you know, oh, I ran outta stuff for this month. Let me rehash from last month. I think I rehashed my, my content, which is repost maybe every nine to 12 months. So I’ve got that much of a, of a back catalog and I’m being as comprehensive as possible. So it’s like, yeah, it’s anxiety and stress and work now for less anxiety and stress later. Whereas, you know, maybe if you’re a hairdresser or whatever you’re just posting, you might have that like stress but might like that. I don’t like that. So everyone’s different and yeah,
Natalie:
It’s so interesting cuz I, you know, it’s kind of like a Venn diagram in terms of like coming up with ideas. You’ve got like the why we do it, how we do it and, and who we are. And if you sort of like take these three sort of angles and, and map out different sort of ideas around each sort of bracket, you can up with so many ideas around what we can do. Like if you’re a plumber, like why we’re doing it. It could be like talking about, you know, the story or like, you know, the motivation or like, you know, the, the, the story of how plumbing even started, like I’m pretty sure many people would, would, would tune into that. But if it’s sort of like, you know, how, you know, how do we do it? It’s sort of like, you know, about tips and educational process. I think like one of the frameworks that I like to go by is like, you know, the how, the what and the and and the who. And you know, that sort of like gets my brain just flowing with ideas around what we can do.
Daren:
All right, thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate it. You know the drill. Make sure that you like, follow, subscribe depending on wherever app you’re on. Whether you’re listening to this is podcast or you’re watching it on YouTube, LinkedIn, wherever you, you get this, it really helps us get the word out. And if you’re feeling this and you’ve got some value, please make sure you share this with someone that you know. And we’ll see you on the next episode.
