CREATING CONTENT EVERYWHERE

One of the negative comments I often encounter from people who are considering content creation as a part of their business strategy is, “It seems like a lot of time and effort for a Facebook video.” Well, that’s true. If you’re only utilizing your content in a singledelivery style on one platform, you’re missing out! There are huge opportunities for re-purposing content across multiple platforms, and you should be embracing all of them.

It’s important to realize that your audience isn’t on just one platform, and your content isn’t necessarily duplicated if you’re addressing, say, Facebook and Instagram. Your reach is actually expanded, and, if you look at analytics regularly, you’ll find the demographics can even be different. Some people will watch quick, flashy pieces of content designed to capture their interest in 15 to 30 seconds. Some people will watch 20- to 30-minute mini documentaries. The key is being able to deliver a variety of experiences for all your consumers.

Here’s a buildout of a common scenario: the guitar demo video. Video isn’t the only type of content, but it is the most rapidly growing, and studies show consumers are 70 percent more likely to buy something if they’ve watched a video on it.

Social media is full of guitar demos. We’re drowning in them, and still, every day there are more. And they’re getting more and more views. There are a variety of ways to do them. This scenario is meant to be an exploded view of how you can get the most content out of a single shoot and deliver it in as many ways as possible. This requires a little bit of planning and a lot of post-production work, but it gives you a pretty surprising amount of content. If you’re not handy enough to try this all at once, it could be planned out with a videographer or broken up into separate segments. Also, keep in mind this is a high-concept, high-reward idea.

Say you’ve got a new electric guitar in stock, and you’ve decided to make a demo video for it. You set up your camera and run your guitar into an ABY box or an amp switcher. This will allow you to plug the same guitar into multiple amps at once. Those amps are then miked and run into a recording interface or standalone recorder. (I use a Tascam because it has four channels and phantom power.) Your guitarist plays a rock riff, followed by a country riff and some strummed chords. Those are played on both clean and dirty settings. These should be no more than a minute long each. If you used two guitar amps, you have four different tones times three playing styles, or 12 different clips. You can expand this by repeating them on each pickup of the guitar for each riff you play. Assuming it’s a three-position pickup switch, that’s 36 different clips. You can also film a simple talkthrough of the guitar’s features. If you’ve prepped it correctly, you spent about an hour filming this, two if you’re going slow.

Editing is where the real work comes in. You now have a nice intro to the guitar and can line up the clips showing the different sounds, and you have a nice longform in-depth demo of all the sounds of the guitar. Now, you can also take the footage and create a whole second set of videos based on the genre you were playing, meaning three videos showing the different positions and what they sound like through different types of amps. So that’s now four videos total. You can also create a video on comparing the dirty sounds of the guitar through both amps, then another video comparing the clean sounds through both amps. That’s six videos. You can also take each and every one-minute clip you made and overlay some simple text saying which pickup position it’s on and what amp it’s being played through. That’s 42 videos. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to release them all at once, but if you use a social media content scheduler like I do, that content can be spread out over a year. If you did that with one guitar once a month, you’d have 504 videos for the year.

But wait, we’re not done. These are ways to edit multiple videos out of a single shoot. You can also spread them out over a wide variety of platforms. One-minute clips are perfect for Instagram, but can also be scheduled to Facebook. The six longer-form videos are traditionally hosted on YouTube, but would also be great to share via IGTV — Instagram’s newest delivery system. You can also cut 15-second clips cropped in 9x16 or “portrait” format for Instagram stories to advertise your IGTV and YouTube channel. That’s a lot of content. Is it a lot of work? Yes. Is it also worth it to greatly expand your reach to consumers and own a bigger share of the pie when people begin searching for that guitar? Yes. Oh, and don’t forget to embed guitar demos on your website and Reverb listings.

Have questions about content? I’m here to help. Write to me at gabriel@upperhandstudios.com.

By Gabriel O’Brien