Tega Media

Video Content Strategy

Create Content That Influences and Converts.

16 Minutes on

Content strategy

THE SALES FUNNEL

The sales funnel takes customers through a buying journey with 3 stages. Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. We build through this framework because it builds equity into a system that sorts through cold audience and helps you identify the right buyers at the right time.

Our content strategy starts with understanding the sales funnel. And it starts with “why,”

WHY videos are about personal stories of you or your brand that people identify with. The stories of how it all started, your mission, your values. It’s more about personality than about trying to teach or sell.

Once that is established, you can go into the “how.” How videos demonstrate your expertise. Informative and educational content. How to be fit, how to get a better night’s sleep or about how to organize their house around things related to their lifestyle. 

Once expertise is established, you go into the “what.” What ever product or service you sell. It’s important to understand that if your marketing is too much about the “what,” you won’t have the context of how it fits into your potential customer’s lives. Are they trendy? Frugal? Are they trying to please their wife or husband? In other words, people won’t buy your “what” until they are aligned with your “why” and they trust your “how.”

THE 3X3 METHOD

In order to send customers through the funnel, we organize your content using video grids like we teach in Video Content Marketing with the 3×3 method.

We start by taking or making 3 one minute videos for each stage of the funnel (9 videos total) and then we boost them on social media channels using the Dollar A Day Method. Based on actions and behaviors and if-then logic, we test videos to discover high performing sequences that lead people down the sales funnel and generate sales.

Remember, people buy because of “why.” When people believe in your values or your mission, then they’ll buy whatever it is you have to sell. But in order to bridge from “why” to “what” (awareness to conversion) you need to have the “how.” And this is why the majority of your touches will come from “how” content.

Create A Topic Wheel

The Topic Wheel helps you map out topics and video sequences. Start with all of your products/services/brand in the center (“what” videos). Then surround it with 6 relevant topics and create informative and entertaining videos that establish your expertise and authority in their related topics.

“Why” Videos

The “WHY” videos surrounding your topics create awareness and feed warm audience inwards towards the sale. “WHY” videos create emotion, influence and authority. They could be personal stories of yourself, other people singing your praise, or being seen with other authoritative figures. Some of the best performing “WHY” videos are made by others who are sharing positive testimonials about you.

So when you understand the framework of what, how and why, and how the three by three grid expands into this topic wheel, you have an evergreen content sequence. Everything is reusable. It’s all trigger driven because if someone is listening to, say “Mary and Tom” and they are college students and they just graduated and if they come in on a particular topic say SEO, then you know that they probably will care about all the other articles/content that are inside that topic And because they demonstrated interest in one topic  you can then sequence them to see the content in the next layer of the wheel closer towards the middle ultimately leading to the close.

So once they come in, you can then figure out what the next piece of content to send them to and identify what the most successful pathways are and start putting more ad money behind those pieces of content.

After a while, you will fill in this wheel with so many lines it will look like a spider web and eventually become solid. And that’s when you’ve got a really powerful evergreen content funnel.

Do You Really Have A Funnel?

Three Ways Of Creating Content

Most people say funnel, but they don’t have a funnel. Here’s why. There are three ways of creating content.

CALENDAR DRIVEN CONTENT

Very typical content strategy. People make a content calendar and plan content around dates, holidays and seasonal periods. “Winter Coat Sale” or “4th of July Sale.” 

Sequence Driven Content

Sequence driven content is created based on actions and behaviors. Where the audience is taken through a sequence of videos that drives warm traffic through a sales funnel. With this type of content you can identify high performing video sequences that become evergreen content. You can then repurpose that content (new titles, video to blog post, blog post to infographic) and cross post to other social channels to amplify your results.

Ad-Hoc Content

Most common type of content. It is content created in reaction to news and events. And so it’s ad hoc because it is usually controlled by external factors. But because business owners are too busy to learn the right way to execute video marketing, most of them spend their time here or in the calendar driven content.

They urgently make content calendars and have their social media teams post based on dates, events, news or holidays. They don’t understand that content created for sequencing is what ties this entire thing together.

So when you have content that performs well,  you can move it into a sequence and it could live there for as long as it performs well for you and makes you money. You can take that piece of content and repurpose it by giving it a different headline, by putting a different picture against it, by creating a video, or by taking a video and transcribing it into an article.

But if you don’t create content for sequencing and you are just creating based on the calendar or ad-hoc, you may have a video that performed well and never go back to it. You’ll have content that drove sales a year ago that you’ll never get around to amplifying or posting cross channel.

Sequencing is all about reusing, repurposing and amplifying. So the topic wheel is a much stronger power structure than a content calendar, which is just linear, random content. You never get acceleration or momentum. So you want to use all three ways of creating content. Not just calendar based and ad-hoc content. Each piece of content is like a shot on goal and some of them will score which weill deserve to live in a sequence.

THE CONTENT LIBRARY

We create a content library that’s basically an Excel spreadsheet and we have one row per piece of content. It could be a tweet. It could be an article that you had, it could be a Facebook post. It could be someone talking about you. It could be a YouTube video of somebody unboxing their mattress. It could be someone writing up about it. Whatever it is,  we want to make sure we have the columns that allow us to sort, and then be able to organize them.

We start with the URL, which is where the asset lives. We have the topic, so we know which topic it lives in. We want to know who said it, because that might also tie with the story. It could be a founder’s story that leads to another relevant video. Any piece of content, because there are multiple attributes that are associated with it can live in a topic, can be associated with a person. There’s also where the content occurred. Did it originally occur on your blog? Or on someone else’s site? And then we have the owner. The owner is whoever’s in charge of that piece of content to nurture and edit the video to make sure it’s being used.

Oh, we also have the statistics. We have the, you know, the performance that you have, the different performance sessions, click sales leads, cost per actions. So any kind of content is going to be able to live here, whether it’s video or articles or what have you, and we can continue to add to it.

And so when you flag the ones that you want us to promote, like we talked about at lunch, We’ll just take these things. We’ll trigger it. 

And trigger is just saying if X happens then do Y. Which is basically saying show people this under this condition. If people come in through this piece of content, show them this one next.

CONTENT AND TARGETING

A successful action or goal is when you have the right content with the right target audience. You have to know who you’re targeting, what you’re going to show them. 

So if you have a list of all of your targets and an inventory of all your content, you can start mixing and matching whatever particular combinations that perform the best. Targets are determined by their triggers. The actions they took.  Who they are statistically, based on what they’ve done with us. What they’ve clicked on and which piece of content.  This behavioral data is also how we identify custom audiences which is one way that we “amplify” successful results.

Most people don’t target correctly. They just target anybody based on an interest or age range or geographic area.  We call that a static target. It’s not a precise target. It’s not dynamic, meaning it’s not being based on triggers (actions/behaviors). So you end up with only a limited number of content combinations that will work. And if you’re designing against a static target, this content that may work for them may also have worked for a number of other targets, but you were never able to realize it.