EPISODE 1 – Branding Decoded: The Logical Path to Success

00:01 What if I told you branding is like the skeleton that holds your business together? It’s not just about colors and fonts. It’s the logical framework that gives your brand its identity and appeal. In this episode, we’re breaking down the myths and showing you how branding is the key to unlocking your business’s true potential. On this episode of content on the go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, CapCut, and Lemon8. What you learn. While branding is more than just aesthetics and it’s your logical role in your business strategy, how a strong brand persona enhances your SEO efforts and boost your marketing ROI, practical tips on organizing your creative processes for more efficient and impactful branding efforts, and more. Let’s go.
01:29 Like I think in marketing today, especially about branding, we’re talking so much about data and measurable analytics, but you know, we forget at the end of the day, it’s just, you know, human beings telling a lot of stories, right? And, but that also ages sort, because a lot of people would say that it’s just fluff, like it’s not something that we need. especially for the small-medium enterprises in Southeast Asia, they would say, you know, it’s really not something that I would want to invest money into at this moment. Do we really need marketing like with some of the big brands and lovely brands that you like, Darren?

02:05 I like the wholesome brands. I like the brands that… They’re holistically good, meaning that they’re trying to do good in the world. They’re as transparent as they can be. This is one thing that I’ve learned. Derek Sivers said it best. He said, be so good at your business and helping people, your clients or customers, that if they don’t need you anymore, you’re absolutely fine with that. And obviously, it’s like, well, then you don’t have a business, but you actually should be that good. You shouldn’t make them have to keep coming back by making your product fail after a few years. So that’s what I mean by holistic. And some of the brands I’d say, I like Apple, but obviously Apple plays their games, their marketing games. This is a personal thing. I have a whole lot of Apple stuff. I like Apple. I’m kind of trapped in the Apple ecosystem. A cool brand, a small brand, is Atreyu, and they’re a running company. I have a big endurance sport running brand that is called Delay Creates. So I’ve been trying to find the cool brands that are, you know, they’re holistic, they’re good. And again, it’s not like a do-gooder in the sense, it’s not like a NGO, non-profit, not like that in the sense. Obviously, that’s nice, people that are giving back to the world. But again, it’s more the transparency. And they are so damn transparent with what they do. And they came out with a shoe that is rivaling all the big shoes, so, you know, Nikes and all those running shoes are like, the high-end ones are $350, $400, right? They’re ridiculous. You wear them for 400Ks, which for you people that are miles, 250 miles, and it’s $400. It’s like a dollar a kilometer, you know? And it’s absurd. So they came out with a shoe that was $75. And it was a subscription service. And they were the first shoe company to be a subscription service. And they’re an indie startup shoe company. And they do a lot of stuff in-house as much as they can. And it’s like a really small team. And they just keep going, you know, we’re all about integrity. And their shoe names are like words like integrity. I think their audience understands them and respects them and trusts them because they’re just so different and they’re fresh and their designs are just simple. And I’m big and minimal. My brain is complex but I always try to be minimal. And I feel like their marketing is dope because they’re just being them. They’re being authentically them.

04:15 Yeah, it sounds like they’re solving a problem and staying true to their brand mission. It’s really interesting to see what some of these brands are doing and how they stick to their mission. Like, you know, initially Apple, it’s really for the creatives, you know, the designers and the editors and sound engineers will be using like Apple computers. But, you know, they still stick to that mission. But, you know, they continue to evolve to say that we’re also helping fellow people, normal human beings to just get down to things easily and solving that sort of problems. And they have never deviated from that mission. So I think that there is this very logical element to branding. It’s not just all fluff and nothing. They need to know how this brand mission works, right? And then they’re going to tell a lot of different stories that would tie back to the brand mission. And that, to me, it’s just very logical. There’s nothing fluffy about that. But I guess a lot of people would be saying, how do we actually measure that? We have the MPS. And we know that Apple enjoys one of the highest MPS scores in the world. But I mean, at the end of the day, it’s really just telling a story and letting people know that this is what you stand for and that you are solving a problem and you are standing by your brand mission.

05:36 Exactly, exactly. And let’s go to the first point, which is what exactly is a brand persona in branding?

05:43 Yeah, like a brand persona is like so mysterious, right? But you know, typically you have maybe like three or four different personas, you know, different age group, demographics, what they do, is it a housewife? Or is this a working man? Or is it a grandpa, grandma? So I think the brand needs to have these sort of personalities all mapped out, right? Like, you know, because every every persona that you’re speaking to, you need to appeal to them. So the brand mission stays the same. But for every different persona that you’re talking to, you need to appeal to them in their space. And that’s why we need to have like content marketing. We need to have like assets. We need to have videos and podcasts and blogs and different kinds of mediums and stories so that we can then activate the brand mission and, you know, use these stories to appeal to these different personas. So at any given time, all these different people looking at the content and they will be saying like, oh, I know this person, you know, like, I understand, like, he understands me, like the brand becomes some kind of friend, a person, you know, to these different personas in their own respective spaces and their own age brackets. Yeah.

06:59 Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting about the personas. And I think, you know, depending where you are in your marketing cycle with your business, When I first started, that was overwhelming for me. So I’m going to speak to everyone. I don’t know where you are as a listener in your marketing journey with your brand. You’re gonna have all this stuff in the back of your head. You might not have it mapped out in a pretty deck in a document, but it’s always gonna be in the back of your head like, this is the type of person I’m going for. You have a certain person. Or you might have certain customers or clients that constantly come to you or that you really like or that you might want in the future. And that is a brand persona. So I guess I’m just backing it up and identifying and defining what a brand persona is because If you’re new to marketing, it is like a weird thing and it feels like fluff. You know, we’ll go back to the fluff thing. It’s like brand personas, but it is a thing. You know, like, is this piece of content? Is this product? Is this service? Who is it for? All right. You know, when you go to sell it, when you’re constantly talking about it, you need to always cater it because you can’t have everything for everyone. That’s like, you know, that’s in the States. I’m from the States, obviously live in Australia now, but we, you know, that’s Walmart and Walmart’s really bland. Like, well, it’s like the persona of Walmart isn’t great.

08:11 I actually thought they activated their brand pretty well during the pandemic, when COVID first started. And they had a lot of these stories coming out from the ground level, and that’s also something that I learned a lot when I was applying. some of those storytelling techniques to NTUC FairPrize before when I was working. So I think like a lot of brand managers, they think about branding as, you know, like the brand playbook, the colors, the font, and these are just the artifacts, right? Like you need the artifacts to facilitate all the stories that you’ll be telling, but ultimately activating the brand, you need to be really doing the storytelling and mapping them according to the personas, like all these playbooks are just, you know, artifacts, you know, without any activation, it’s useless to me.

09:05 I was hesitant of brand personas and creating them, but then when I did that, I sat down and did a proper marketing plan, And I was like, oh, wow, this is liberating. Now I know exactly who I’m talking to. And all the things like coming up with three or four personalities and new personas and how they appeal to your audience. Sorry, how I need to appeal to my audience. Then all those questions are answered because I’ve done this brand playbook of sorts and these brand personas. Do you agree with that? Disagree?

09:34 Yeah, you know, it’s so different talking to you and say talking to someone like my dad, but you know, it’s the same tool that’s going to help you and my dad to do the same thing, you know, if you’re hopping onto the same bandwagon. So I think like the different ways of telling the stories to a different person, you need to really look at the nuances. and be very refined in that way of storytelling. I mean, even the tone and all that, right? The language, the lingo, and the pace of storytelling. Like, if I’m talking to you, like, I need to be dope as well, I guess.

10:12 Wow, you call me dope. I appreciate that. Thank you.

10:14 I know, but, you know, that’s generally, you know, the basis I feel like what brand personas should be, right? I mean, at the end of the day, when they measure the NPS score, And, you know, they’re going to be asking the same questions to all these different people from different backgrounds and different personalities and different age brackets. And if you’re just using one way to tell the stories, then, you know, all these different people may not react the same way. But if you are catering to each of them, then I guess at the end of the day, you know, across the spectrum, they will feel like it’s the same friend, but, you know, he’s able to talk to them in a unique manner.

10:56 So we’ve got a lot more to cover and you know, this is just the general kind of overview of the next three episodes. So we’ll just quickly go over episode two or the next section, which is how it all connects to actual SEO that you’re paying money for. So tell me more about that, Chris.

11:13 Yeah, I guess, you know, some people might say, like, if I want to invest money, might as well do SEO, you know, rather than branding. But you know, they all come together, right? Like you pay an agency and at the end of the day, your agency will just ask you for the same things over and over again. You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to sell? And then they go try hit the jackpot. And sometimes they don’t, you see. But do you really know what your brand stands for? Or, you know, does any of these SEO optimization elevate anything for your brand? Normally, the answer is no. So it does help you in a tactical way, but it doesn’t really elevate the brand. So there’s a lot more to do in SEO to elevate a brand. And I guess we can talk about it when we come to that episode. And the next one is about creativity, right? Like branding is so much about telling stories and creating all these crazy creative assets. You know, we have huge branding videos that we see from you know, the likes of Apple, and then we have the smaller ones where you do, you know, episodic and thematic stuff. But, you know, it’s just creativity. And I think the management needs to understand how they should let the guys do their thing. Oh, story of our lives. I mean, we are doing the exact same thing. I mean, at MetaG and, you know, this creating business versus art. There’s a lot of logic to even creating art itself. You know, like just editing a video, there’s so much orderliness to that. And I feel like the management or the leaders need to understand how they can let the team run things. And, you know, they don’t have to know exactly what to do, but if they understand the logics behind, you know, the orderliness of creativity, they can then let their hands go and help the team be themselves. So I think we can learn about that in the episode.

13:16 I’ve been, I wouldn’t say struggling with, but it’s just been bouncing around my head for months and years now. And it’s, it’s the organization or the orderliness of your creativity and creativity. Like, you know, a lot of people, it’s free flowing, you know, it’s just, dude, just go with the flow and go with how I’m feeling for the day. And the most creative people that produce consistent content or consistent media whatever it is consistent things art they actually have a structure and you know there’s a lot of resources out there um i think it was julia cameron but she wrote a book um called the artist way and i read that in 2008 2009 and it basically was just like these found fundamental systems and processes that you can use to really like prime your brain and get you ready to be a creative. And it’s like taking dates with yourself, journaling in the morning, all these things. And you just like basically getting yourself ready to put out a lot of crap and then filter through the crap. And that’s more the artist way. But when you think about creativity and art in the business, it’s very similar. And to produce consistent content or whatever you’re doing, whatever your business is, obviously content marketing is It’s a tool that a lot of people can use. Most likely you are using it, and content marketing, again, for just some people that might not know, is basically YouTube, it’s this. It’s video, it’s audio, it’s blogs, newsletters, photos, et cetera. That’s content marketing, where you’re not actually paying for it, necessarily. You’re just putting out stuff and hoping that people start trusting your brand, you’re educating them, you’re giving value. But you need to be organized, because a lot of people, they sit there, I’m going to start an Instagram account. I’m going to start a YouTube account for my business. And then they sit there and they do like, you know, maybe a couple of weeks if they’re lucky, and then they go, I don’t know what to write about. I got anxiety. Oh, things are hard. And you need a schedule. You know, you need a routine. You need ideas. I have idea banks. So I’ve got a lot of these systems and processes that, you know, I’d love to share with you in that episode when we get to it. I’ll stop it there. But do you have any closing remarks to kind of get people excited about the next three episodes? We should be getting excited. There’s so much going on.

15:22 Just giving you a very simple example. So many people are producing TikTok videos these days. And, you know, TikTok is so big about music, right? Like, you know, just pairing images and, you know, the collages with music and the very basic orderliness that you need to do is to understand the rhythm and where the beats are. Right. And you cut according to that. And that’s just something that you cannot escape. And I always parallel that to how All of these brands and the teams are creating all the creative assets and that’s the sort of orderliness that you have to follow.

15:56 All right, so the three areas that we are going to be covering in the next three episodes, what exactly is brand persona, how it connects to SEO that you’ll be paying for, and what or how to organize your creativity and your media and your content of sorts. It’s not all content. So any guests’ closing words, any final thoughts that you have, Chris?

16:20 I guess that’s about it. You know, like it is actually not fluff. There’s so much logic to brand building.

EPISODE 2 – Personify Your Brand: Connecting with Your Audience

00:01 Ever thought of your brand as having multiple personalities? In this episode, we’ll break down the concept of brand personas and show you how to tie them into a compelling company narrative. Get ready to see your brand in a whole new light on this episode of content on the go. Hey, everyone. I’m Darren Lake and welcome to content on the go a podcast by podcast. Each episode we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you’ll learn on this episode with our guest Chris Koo, what exactly a brand persona is and why it’s crucial for your business, the four key brand personalities, and how to appeal to your audience, how to tie brand activation to a compelling company, a very wide story on that, and more. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Kapka, and Lemon8. So what exactly is a brand persona in the context of branding?
01:17 I think it all starts with the brand promise and the brand purpose. You know, who are you as a brand? You know, as a person, who are you? And what’s the problem you’re trying to solve for that overarching mission as a business? I think every business is trying to solve a customer’s problem. So you have to go back to that. And you will have your brand personality as a bedrock supporting all of the above.

01:38 As far as brand personas go in branding, I’m definitely new to this space. I’d say within the probably last year and a half, I’ve started thinking about, what’s my brand persona? Who am I? How do I operate in this world? And as a musician, back 15 years ago, 10-15 years ago, I didn’t really think about that. And it was something that I think was what hindered my progress and my success, which is relative to everyone. But I didn’t get to where I wanted to as a musician because My music and my brand, I didn’t really have this identity. So this is something that I think it takes time. You’re not gonna just come up with it immediately. You could either lead with your product or you could lead with you as a person or your company as a lot of different ways or your first clients or your first customers, et cetera. So let’s just get straight to the next part, the four brand personalities.

02:30 Can you go over those? Yeah, I know, right? It’s like even appealing to your music fans and there will be typically a few personalities that you want to appeal to. like the 18 to 25s and the middle class, the family guy, or the old folks, and typically for an FMCG brand or lots of brands that are trying to activate their campaigns and they’re selling something to particularly any of these age groups and you have these three or four types of personalities. But how do you appeal to your audience that is indeed your brand personality? So that means under every single persona, whether you’re appealing to the Gen Zers, to the family men, or to the old folks, you are supposed to be telling them a story. And you know, the different stories would be tied together. You know, you are trying to communicate a certain message, And the persona getting the message would go, oh, so you’re such and such a person. And you’re not just selling something that’s very tactical or transactional to me, but you’re telling me who you are as a person. And that’s how you get away with this brand appeal, which comes with all the brand activation. It’s not just some kind of playbook that you’re trying to execute from. It’s really telling a story about who you are to all the different groups. And when they come together and talk about you, they are actually talking about the same person, but then the execution of the message is different.

03:55 Yeah, you talked about that in actually a meeting that we had a few weeks ago about messaging. And that’s something that I’ve actually, again, it’s one of those things where if I really wasn’t thinking and putting my marketer hat on and running things through this filter of marketing, I wouldn’t actually think in this way. one type of ad or piece of content, whether it’s organic, I’m just trying to, you know, do awareness, it’s an awareness type of piece of content, or I’m trying to actually do a CTA, it requires a specific message. And as much as I want to, you know, promote three different things and or promote to three different people, you can’t because one people, three seconds, you got three seconds. So you need to appeal to one type of brand persona. You need to tell them about one thing of your product. And maybe down the user journey, maybe if they listen to a 45-minute podcast, you can try two things. But even then, a lot of people, including myself, a lot of small businesses and businesses that just don’t get the game of marketing, they try to shove in too much. It’s either too much information, too many points about the product or service, or too many brand personas they’re trying to talk to. And then it’s just this muddled, average, really like blah message that kind of doesn’t really talk to anyone at the end of the day. Would you agree?

05:07 Yeah. So having that real brand purpose is very important to create these personas that you’re trying to target. and I think in turn how the content and your messaging and everything will work together because when the story is appealing and it’s very focused people will start searching for your brand name or the brand keywords in a more meaningful way and that’s going to help a lot in your SEO and not be competing with other people for the same space but you’re really trying to focus on addressing what their needs are what kinds of solutions they are looking for and using a story to wrap it around and, you know, tying all the way back to your brand purpose. So there is nothing fluffy about that. You know, when people say that branding is so fluffy, how do you even measure that? How do you come up with a strategy? Why do you want to do something like that? We just go with the fonts and, you know, go with the colors and that’s just it. Do the playbook thing. But this is not it. So just tying it all the way back to the brand purpose, focusing on the personas that you’re trying to target, and that will help your SEO very much.

06:13 All right, let’s go to the third and last point, which is tying your brand activation to a real company story. First off, as I am a somewhat new marketer in the, I guess, in this more traditional marketing space, I did a lot of guerrilla hacky marketing over the last 10, 15 years and worked with Medi-G. And just even before Medi-G, I’ve become a better marketer, kind of more refined marketer, I guess. What is exactly a brand activation to some people that either haven’t had the budget, haven’t had the experience? Define a brand activation and then, you know, talk about how you tie it to a company story.

06:45 Well, I think activations, like the campaigns can be big, can be small. And if you don’t really have a big budget, there is still something that you want to focus on, right? Like there is this grand brand purpose and below the grand brand purpose and you will have to cascade down to something that you want to focus on maybe every quarter, maybe the first half of the year and you know really trying to find out how this big grand brand purpose is going to help a certain unique group of people that you are trying to help like you know the personas that we have talked about And it doesn’t need to be like a huge campaign. It could be something small. I mean, even the execution, maybe say you’re going to write 10 blogs, for example, to actually address, you know, this part of the brand purpose that you’re trying to serve your audience, or you want to do 10 podcasts, or that you want to come up with a really big story for the first half of the year, and you have this big TVC. but everything will have to tie it back to this brand purpose and the sub-content buckets that you want to create and address the problems that the personas are facing.

EPISODE 3 – SEO Simplified: The Power of Branding

00:01 Imagine if your brand’s personality could talk to search engines directly. In this episode, we explore the wild connection between branding and SEO, showing you how to make your brand’s voice heard in the digital chaos, the digital jungle. Get ready to transform your SEO game by simply being you on this episode of content on the go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you will learn on this episode with our guest Christopher Koo, how to use your brand’s identity to naturally boost your SEO, the pitfalls of relying solely on SEO agencies, and how to take control of your keywords, strategies to guide your SEO agency with a clear vision of your brand’s future. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Kapka, and Lemon8. All right, let’s just jump right into it, Mr. Chris. All right. And get on point number one, which is keywords. Tell me more about keywords and how that naturally can help the branding and your SEO.
01:29 I mean, keywords are so important. You keep hearing that all the time, right? But do you actually want to pay an agency for what you are already doing? and do you really want to pay an agency and get a bunch of words only? So, I mean, you can spend a fortune, and I have experienced that in one of the companies that I worked with, and maybe you don’t have that big of a war chest, but you’ll still be paying the agency 20% of the management fee, and, you know, not that the agency is the visionary of your business, although I have a problem with the word visionary, especially when CEOs call themselves visionaries. But, you know, you own that vision, right? You own that… brand purpose. And the SEO or the SEM agency, they don’t own that. I mean, they get your brief, and that’s about it, right? And it’s how detailed your brief can be, and you can send them your whole brand playbook. But they’re not the one who will feel this thing, right? They are just receiving the brief. And so they come back and say, OK, tell me a bunch of keywords that you would like to target. And, you know, oh, this is what my customers buy. This is what they are. That is where they are. And I want to have more of a type of this customer from here and there. And then it really is sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, right? And they come back with a bunch of keywords and, you know, they do their due diligence, but, you know, it does hit the jackpot at some times. And sometimes it just won’t because they are not feeling the brand. They don’t own the vision and they are not able to tie stories together with the keywords. So that’s what I’m trying to say.

03:05 And the next point, it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn’t. So that’s that’s always the fun part. What is that saying? And I think it’s advertising. It’s, you know, advertising works 50 percent of the time. You just don’t know what 50 percent it is. And, you know, the same can go for marketing. So, yeah, let me know about this. Like sometimes it works and it sometimes doesn’t.

03:23 Yeah. I mean, you pay the management fee, right? And covering that grand scheme of things and the entire suite of keywords and, you know, just finding out what is relevant, trending and, you know, boom maybe you get a kind of short ramp you know like for a quarter or maybe a few months and you get that sort of awareness and some sales but how does it work in the long run? Most times, I think it does not work that way. So unless you are really working on your brand purpose and the stories and that sort of paying the agency to come up with a bunch of keywords to tie with some sort of brand activation or campaign would only give you a very short ramp up and it doesn’t really build out in the long term.

04:06 And the third point is you get to own your brand when you you use SEO, or sorry, when you naturally use branding to help your SEO. So can you tell me a bit more on that?

04:20 Yeah, it’s kind of like playing your own music. Like, you own it, right? You write your own music. You write your own songs. And, you know, businesses should… No covers.

04:28 No covers.

04:29 All the businesses should be very cognizant of its brand personality and appeal, you know, like the brand, what the brand stands for, how you want to position it, and the other categories that you want to play in. And this is the part where marketers have to own and be able to articulate and to tell the stories. I think, you know, we are marketers and, you know, we are supposed to be expert communicators and we must be able to own that. And if you cannot own your story, it’s just so difficult. I mean, just moving into a new place and, you know, bump into your neighbor and they will ask you, hey, what are you doing here? I mean, if you cannot even tell your own story, who’s going to tell that story for you, right? Because you get to own that story, you are who you are and as we said in the previous episode, when people look at the messaging, they’re not just looking at a message, they are getting a glimpse of who you are in multi-dimensions as you activate different kinds of campaigns throughout the year, telling the story of your life, of your brand’s history and etc.

05:29 This is interesting because I’m starting to see that when you’re starting off on your marketing journey as a small business or even medium business, and you almost can’t, you can’t leverage it, you can’t delegate off this type of task. And it’s true for a lot of things. It’s like if you wanna scale, you actually have to do things that don’t scale really well first. So if you wanna 10x something, you gotta 1x something perfectly and you have to manually do it yourself. And I’m not saying yourself, but most small businesses that we’re talking to are one, two, five employees. So you’re going to really have to own it. And then just going, hey, agency, do this thing. I’ve seen so many people just get really average results or really flat results by going, hey, blow up my Instagram account or do this thing. And it’s like, all they’ll do is just really generic stuff. So it really sounds like this is you figuring everything out And then once you do that, you can then get to our fourth point, which is now you can tell the agency what you want because you’ve kind of done that research and development.

06:31 Yeah, exactly. Yes, it is totally true. And I think a lot of the businesses might be struggling. And this is no offense to the age group of business owners. And because a lot of the older folks or, you know, people from the previous generation, they have this struggle of telling their own story because they’re not used to it, right? But at Gen Zers and people today, we have access to so many different social media platforms and it has allowed a lot of people to just tell their own stories, you know, to say who they are as a person and it’s becoming so accessible and that you get this natural training just even by watching other people telling about themselves. and it’s also affecting newsmakers, right? Like people are not reading newspapers anymore, they are not the go-to platforms for breaking stories, and it is people on the ground who are breaking stories, and at the same time telling people who they are as a newsbreaker, like I’m not just breaking this news to you because it’s worthy, but I’m telling this to you because I’m endorsing it, and I want you to know this is what I believe in, and there is a lot of training just watching all these different videos and different content, you know, churned out by people from all kinds of, from all walks of life and on different social media platforms.

07:50 All right, well, we’ve covered a bit on this and, you know, we’ve gone from keywords, you don’t need to pay an agency, to it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn’t. You get to own your brand and all the way to now, once you figure all that out, you can tell the agency what you want. Is there anything else you want to add to that?

08:06 No, I think that’s about it.

EPISODE 4 – Creative Harmony: Organize Your Marketing Genius

00:01 What if I told you creativity in business isn’t the same as creating art? Today, we’re diving into the art and science of organizing creativity within your own marketing strategy. Learn how to harmonize chaos and order to tell super compelling brand stories on this episode of content on the go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you’ll learn with our guest, Christopher Koo, the difference between creating in business and creating art, challenges of harmonizing creativity and marketing and how to overcome them, balancing traditional and modern brand marketing to tell compelling stories and more. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Kapka, and Lemon8. What’s cool about this is that we actually, because we’re doing a video podcast here, we actually have to clap sync every episode. And it’s a bit redundant. But what it does is it helps the video editor to then sync up the audio and the video. And if you don’t do this, you just create a headache for later because people have to do that. And that actually ties perfectly into this episode, which is organizing your creativity. And it sounds like a boring thing, you know, organizing. It almost sounds like an oxymoron, you know, it’s two things that shouldn’t belong. But, you know, the more you organize your creativity, the better it is. I’m sure I talked about that in the intro. Let’s just jump right into point number one. Creating in business isn’t the same as creating in art.
01:53 What does that mean? Of course it’s different, right? You have so many people to convince in the business. So I think creativity is supposedly organic, free flow, but in the business there is always tension between the different layers of management and the different groups of stakeholders who all have a stake in the piece of content that you’re trying to create. And you need that sort of orderliness to get everyone on the same page and to help them understand. And I think as marketers, you’re not exactly creating the stuff yourself and you’re going to work with the creative team. But then your job is to bring these guys together. And it’s a whole lot of harmony work for a marketer to really execute like more or less trying to be this peacemaker between the stakeholders. You really need that. Yeah.

02:40 If you watch Mad Men, it was really fun watching the creatives. There were these 25-year-old artsy smoking weed and just being like, oh yeah, I’m super progressive and liberal. And they were always fighting against the board members and CEOs. And Don Draper was this middle ground between creative and the clients and all that. So that was really fun. And I think that’s a good example. So go watch Mad Men. Put that in the show notes for you, whatever. whatever streaming service you have.

03:08 And you know what’s interesting about Don Draper? That he is a creative person himself, right? Extremely, yeah. He leverages off that creativity. And if it’s just purely a marketing or an accounts person, I think he would have a hard time, you know, trying to gather all these guys in the agency back in the 60s who don’t really know exactly what’s going on out there. But, you know, today is so different. Everybody has access to social media and to all these different kinds of things that we’re seeing on our screens and more or less people have an idea of what it means but it requires the marketer to really articulate the stories that they’re trying to create and you know just get everyone together you know like we have to do it in this certain way and then it has to be done in this order and you get a comment at this stage not at that stage and once it’s finalized you there’s no man’s land you cannot come in anymore so it’s the marketer’s job yeah

04:00 All right, you touched on something that actually was point number four, and we’ll just jump right into it, which is telling stories with your brand. And we should have ended it with that, but let’s just jump right in and talk about telling the stories with your brand via organized creativity.

04:15 So I think everybody has to get on that page first. What are we trying to say? What are we trying to tell our audience? And different stakeholders might have an opinion about how the messaging might work. Say, maybe the product guys would just want to focus on how this product works for the customer. They don’t really care about the fluffy thing, the quote-unquote fluffy thing that you’re going to create, but you have to actually convince them, right? To say that because of this story, it is going to highlight this particular feature that you have iterated or that you have introduced. And without this backstory, it is going to be difficult to integrate the feature and convince people that it will help them solve a problem in a greater context. And then the management might just look at the big picture and say, oh, I need to have this influencer. I want to have this celebrity in the video. And then it’s your job again to say that I don’t think we need this person in this story because so-and-so and how he or she is going to convince the audience and how do they relate to this person. And that’s your job about harmonizing everyone and telling brand stories even just internally to all these different stakeholders first, before we all can say, yes, this is finally the story that we want to tell our audience. So there’s a lot of brand storytelling internally versus externally as well.

05:42 Good point. Let’s jump right into the second point. We’re kind of going back and forth here, which is the marketing challenges of syncing up creativity and the harmony between that. And can you expand a bit more on that? Because that is really, really challenging. It’s this whole suits versus the creatives. And also syncing up the storytelling and syncing up when certain things are going to go in place in the marketing calendar and the content calendar. So jump in on that.

06:10 Yeah, I think it’s a lot about, like, marketing is just science versus art. It’s just both, right? And for a lot of companies or even small, medium businesses, they have challenges harmonizing the creativity in this area. And, you know, let’s just say a simple thing like blogging, and you need to convince the management or the C-suite why this medium is effective. You have to show them that. And then there’s the orderliness of churning out X number of blogs that will bring about X number of revenues or projected revenue or projected engagements. But you need to tell the management to say, you know, we need to let the creative guys wrap these things, you know, with the aesthetics and basically to find a nice rapper because we’re not the ones who is going to come up with the, you know, present rapper, right? We can do the math and we can try to project as much as we can and we should do that because as marketers you need to look at a marketing funnel and you need to have measurable results and that’s how you try to convince the management of how why you want to come up with a certain you know piece of format in a certain medium but when that is decided just let the creative guys do their own thing and just don’t meddle with them like this is really no man’s land like just let them do their shit you know

07:26 Yeah, and that’s, you know, we talked about kind of Mad Men, which was the beginning of advertising, which was the 60s. Advertising wasn’t a thing back then, as far as the modern advertising as we know it. And it’s funny because back in the day, a bit of a history lesson, you know, in the 20s and 30s, it was literally, the advertising back then was You need this soap to clean your kitchen. You need this cleaner to clean your kitchen. Okay, I’ll buy that. That was advertising back then in the 20s and 30s. And then, you know, I’m going to hack this up. I won’t even say who invented advertising and all that stuff. But in the 60s, there was a shift. And that’s how ad agencies started getting a thing. Mad Men is the Madison Men. They actually came up with that because they were Madison Avenue in New York. They came up with that phrase themselves. It’s hilarious that they kind of coined their own phrase of themselves, the madmen. And that’s when it really became more about the psychology and the wants and needs and you working backwards with the problem solving. That’s advertising. Advertising sits under marketing. So they kind of are one in the same. Marketers are really Marketers are really quick to say, I’m not in advertising, you know, because they’re like, I don’t do that advertising thing. I’m a marketer, you know, I’ve got a bit more clout and a bit more.

08:38 But you know, back in the 60s, when it’s not pervasive, people are working harder to think about stories and not just following trends and formats and templates like we do today. So I feel like there’s a lot of authenticity and originality from the agencies back then when, you know, obviously a lot of ideas were not used up yet, but, you know, they worked really, really hard to try to get your attention and then that’s how it became pervasive. Why? Because people love stories. They know they don’t love advertising. They love the stories that the agencies are churning out, the brands that are churning out, the creativity, the immersiveness. And now we’re going back to the village days, you know, it’s just back in the village days again.

09:24 Yeah, especially with social media. And again, this is to our last point, which is traditional versus modern brand marketing. And again, we talked about a bit of the history of it. So back in the day, they were trying to think forward. Now we’re going backwards to pre-advertising of word of mouth. And if your product is so good, and I love Elon Musk, He’s like, I don’t, you know, he doesn’t pay any money in advertising. He’s got great marketing campaigns, but he doesn’t pay for advertising. You won’t be scrolling through Instagram and find a Tesla ad because one, the product is so damn good that everyone’s talking about it. You know, like everyone’s going, yo, this car is dope, you know, and every, you know, and then there was the, they couldn’t make them fast enough. So there was actually a scarcity. So they were becoming rare, you know, they were rare at a point. And it’s like, I want that Tesla. And then the model three came out. So tell me a bit more about your opinion on traditional versus modern brand marketing, because you say that there is tension between the two, right?

10:16 Yeah, there’s tension between the two, definitely. I think for a lot of businesses today, whether you’re a big or a small medium business, and the problem is a lot of traditional marketers just want to focus purely on the brand artifacts. Like they go to an agency and they would pay for the playbook. And I’m always wondering, like, shouldn’t this be done by the brand themselves? You know, hiring an art director, which is like the most basic thing today. If you are a bigger brand, or even as a small medium brand, you want to hire someone who believes in your story, right? And, you know, a lot of traditional marketers, they are focusing on these brand artifacts, like the tone of voice, the language, the playbook, the whole brand, labeling, And there’s this overemphasis on artifacts until they kind of lose sight of the forest for the trees. And the brand artifacts, they don’t exist for the sake of the brand artifacts. It exists for the sake of framing a brand, like when you’re trying to activate a brand story, a brand appeal, a campaign. Sure, we can use these artifacts to frame it. It has to be within that sort of color schemes and we want to you know, retain the usage of these fonts and the size of the captions and stuff like that, but they’re not the one thing that rules the brand department. So that’s what I meant by the traditional guys versus the modern brand marketer, where, you know, the latter would be focusing more on the stories and about the appeal of the brand more so than the artifacts.

11:46 All right. So we have talked about a lot. We covered a lot here. This is always a fun one. I love when art and business play together and, you know, fight and or, you know, make love, whatever you want to call it. We talked about, you know, again, creating in business versus art, marketing challenges of syncing up creativity and business, traditional versus modern brand marketing and telling stories with your brand. I’m going to end it with something. And I’ll give you the microphone. I’ll give you the stage right when we end if you have anything else to say. But what’s really fun is business is the most artistic thing I’ve ever done. And I’m an artist. So I can actually say that I’m artist. You know, I don’t have the mustache and I don’t have the artist hat, but I am definitely like bro chill out man let the art shine do weird things like i am very much i always say i’m like 55 60 artists 40 analytical business science however you want to view it but as i’ve ran a business as i’ve worked with medici a bunch of startups i’ve worked with corporates it is quite possibly one of the artsiest creative things I’ve ever done is running a business. You’re dealing with people, and artists are weird, and you gotta deal with personalities, and you gotta deal with timings, and you gotta deal with things that you didn’t think would work, throwing a lot of stuff at the wall. So you’re kind of like half mad scientist, which scientists are super creative, and half super artist and letting everything flow. So it’s one of those things where don’t discount the art side. And I find it, another thing I find interesting is that the craziest, Sorry, the best business people are usually the craziest artists, at heart. They actually are really artists. I look at Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, they’re eccentrics. Even Jeff Bezos, he feels like a robot, but he is slightly eccentric. I’m reading Phil Knight’s book, Finally, Shoe Dog, the guy that founded and ran Nike for many, many years. super super creative and just everything the sky was always falling constantly and he had to constantly figure this out and figure that out and you know deal with his family and he was always you know second every artist second-guess themselves they love doing this they’re like is my stuff good i think it’s the worst thing i’ve ever done he’s constantly going like are we gonna go am i gonna even have a company next year So again, that’s my long-winded rant of business is art, and it is one of the wackiest things. So as small business owners, think of yourself more as an artist, because you’re constantly problem-solving, and that’s really what art is. It’s micro-problem-solving. When you’re making a song, you’re trying to figure out how to go from this point to that point, and how to get the chorus and the verse, and then that instrument, the guitar, to sync up with the vocal. It’s just micro-problem-solving. That’s all creating is, and that’s business. Do you have anything more to add to that? Here’s to the crazy ones. 

EPISODE 5 – 60-Second Magic: Short Videos that Captivate

00:02 Ever wondered why short videos are taking over your feed and whatever social media app you’re using? Today, we dive into the rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts, and more, and how they can revolutionize your marketing strategy. Discover how to create impactful short videos that resonate with your audience on this episode of Content On The Go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you’ll learn with Christopher Koo, our guest, the history of short videos rise in social media and why it matters, what creating short video means for your business and how to get started a real life success story, a real life success story of leveraging short videos to boost brand and podcast growth. and more. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, CapCut, and Lemon8. So let’s just jump right into the history of short videos rise in social media. And this is going to play like you’re fast forwarding through a Netflix documentary really quick.
01:29 So Chris, give it to me real quick. I think in a nutshell, you know, it’s like how video killed the radio star and now short videos is killing TV stars. So I feel like TikTok now, you know, it has become one of the most popular social media platforms in recent years. there are 800 million active monthly users and that’s a whole lot of people and its users are primarily Gen Zers which is like becoming the key demographic for many businesses. I mean it’s inevitable right like young people are growing up and this is the only medium that they want to be most engaged with and you have to be on it and you know like Instagram Reels on the other hand relatively new that’s trying to catch up to TikTok. It currently has, IG has 200 million active monthly users, and it’s also very popular with the younger generation. And there’s YouTube Shorts, YT, and it has followed this trend as well because, you know, like, it is one of the biggest platforms for creators, and it makes sense. And they are trying to play catch up. And even in recent weeks, we have heard like Facebook redesigning its entire layout, which is going to come up in I think in the next month or so, you know, trying to become more like TikTok and they’re also working on the revenue system for the creators on FB. So that is really, really trying to combat TikTok’s rise. And that’s, I think that encapsulates the whole thing about this rise of short videos and how important it is for brands.

02:56 Yeah, that’s that’s really interesting. And it’s funny because YouTube, sorry, Instagram is sending me I was like scrolling on Instagram. And it was like, and I was like, Oh, this is a dope video. And then I was like, I don’t follow this person. And then I was like, and I saw the thing. It says because you’ve liked something like this, we thought you might like this. And I was like, this is the for you page on TikTok. I was like, this is the YouTube algorithm. And I’m like, Oh God, Instagram is fine. I mean, I’ve known maybe everyone knows they’ve been copying TikTok, but this is like literally, you know, like they’re just inserting as much as they can and just playing catch up. It’s really interesting. But anyway, we’ll get to the second part of this is what does creating short video actually mean for your small business? Like, why is it something that you need to be thinking about if you’re not already?

03:42 Yeah, I mean, what does it mean, right? And creating these short videos on the platforms can help you reach a wider audience. Definitely, you know, connect with potential customers, boost your brand awareness, and most importantly, the Gen Zers, this is their go-to search platform, so it has changed if you are not really You know, noticing this huge paradigm shift of the Gen Zers not using Google search and they’re actually searching for solutions on TikTok. So this is like Google is not their first go-to place for a solution. They are actually trying to find other people on TikTok which are helping them in an authentic way. So it definitely is a platform and a short video can be this medium to show off your authenticity as a brand. And who is going to be in the video? Well, that’s something for the next story. And it’s something for you to decide, right? I mean, there’s a whole, you know, basket of, there’s a whole can of worms. But let’s just say that this short video is going to show off who you are as a brand. And definitely it is the right thing today to do.

04:51 All right, so I’ve got a cool story. I’m full of stories. I love telling stories. But this is a cool story of how me personally and my brand ended up using short video and how it became the main thing I’m doing. And I didn’t even mean for that to happen. So I approach short video and I encapsulate all of this. TikToks, they’re not TikTok videos, they’re called TikTok. for you millennials, senior millennials, and you even, you know, boomers or whatever you are, Gen Xers, do not say TikTok videos. You’re making TikToks. That’s one thing, like, that will, if the minute you say, I’m making a TikTok video, it’s like, oh, who are you, bro? You’re making a TikTok. All right, reels and short, waxy shorts, those are all just short videos. I’m just lumping them in, because you can even throw them on Instagram, sorry, you can even throw them on, obviously, Facebook, Twitter, you can throw them on, LinkedIn, I think that’s that’s about it. So they’re just short videos. And again, I define them as less than a minute. Yes, you can do 90 seconds on Instagram reels now as of the time of this recording. Yes, you can do up to 10 minutes on TikTok. You know, I think most accounts can do 10 minutes. Everyone can do three minutes. So is it even a short video at that point? But I think one minute to 90 seconds is a short video, some would even say 7 to 12 seconds is pretty much the limit that you should do, but we’ll get into that another time. So I was trying to grow my brand, and in particular my podcast and newsletter, and this was like the end of 2020. And I was like, I got this huge strategy, and I put together a marketing plan, and I was like, okay, I’m going to do this with the podcast, I’m going to do that. And I just kept looking at Instagram like it was 2016, and I was like, you know, I’m gonna have this image, and I’m gonna have this quote, and it was just all photos, and I was gonna focus on Instagram because I do have a running brand, you know, Endurance Sports, so all that stuff is very visual, and I had a lot of photos of myself doing it. I wasn’t taking videos at that point because I was like, ew, video, I’m an audio guy, why would I do video? And video, you know, you have to have a camera set up and good lights and all, and I was like, eh, I don’t wanna do all that. So again, my old strategy was nice photos and a pretty feed, inspirational quotes, et cetera. But it was not working. And I was like, why is this not working? It was just like, it was average. It wasn’t like bombing or anything, but it was really average. And I’m like, I’m not seeing the growth. And I started realizing, that I’m not a model, you know, I don’t have blonde hair, you know, male or female, and blue eyes, and I don’t do, you know, on the flip side, I don’t do comedy, I don’t do backflips off of buildings, you know, parkour stuff, I don’t have all that happening, you know, like all the adventure sports, skydiving and all that, like, if you do that type of stuff, you will win the internet. So I had to get creative and I sat back and I was like, let me use my skills of performing you know, because I was a musician, I still am a musician, but performing on stage, voiceover, I’m a podcaster, I do a lot of voiceover work, presenting, teaching people how to do things, et cetera, with indoor and sports, like I have a lot of knowledge, a lot of weird ways of thinking about things in different ways, and I was like, okay, let me figure out how to do that, and do that with video, because it works really well, like, you know, some businesses, it’s kind of hard to show with video, but I was like, I got running stuff, like, I can show video all day, this is great, like, my type of content works really well for video, short videos. So these worked really well. I started incorporating them into my podcast promotional content and using the video from the podcast episode. So just like we’re recording right now, I ended up editing them together and making 30 to 60 second grabs that are valuable on their own. So if people want to learn more about that said topic, like how to run a faster 5K park and run race, You know, six tips to run a faster 5k park run race. I might actually have one tip in there and cut it up to be one minute, like do this one thing, boom, boom, boom. And that’s valuable. So that’s value right there. You’re scrolling and it’s going to be like, oh, that’s cool. You know, someone will save it. And then it’s like, hey, want to learn more? Click link in bio or go to this link or search, blah, blah, blah. And I’ll put that as a CTA in the caption or maybe even the text. I need to start doing that. Actually, more is putting in the text at the end. And I’m actually converting slowly, it’s a grind, but I’m converting people over to the podcast. And I, you know, pulled my audience about a year ago and it was like 20% of them listened to the podcast. I re-pulled them, I think like 50 to 60% of my audience. It’s like a BS pull, the data, I don’t really trust it. But it was this interesting phenomenon of a lot of people listening to my podcast now because I’m constantly promoting it, but I’m not just saying, listen to my podcast. It’s like if you sell sneakers, buy the sneakers, buy the sneakers. It’s like, no, tell a story with the sneakers. Give me something about how, you know, why shoelaces are so important. You know, like, give me that, like, that’s the TikTok, I call it short video stuff, the TikTok-y, the TikTok-y style where Go in depth, give people value. You don’t have to be the blonde, you don’t have to do the blonde model, you don’t have to do the back flips, you don’t have to be that type of brand. You just gotta give people value. And I know one brand in particular, it’s Flexi, I forgot, it’s a movement by David. Check out his Instagram. Oh my goodness, the dude looks normal. He films him in his kitchen with normal light and I think an Android phone. He has like 600,000 followers and every single post, he posts every day, probably multiple times a day, it’s just value on top of value. And obviously the dude looks dope, he can do really cool, but he’s constantly educating people on why they should do this, how they can do that, how they can do that. So I’m sure if you’re selling, he’s not even selling anything, he’s like selling merch now and I think he might have some courses. But he just wanted to do it because he’s creative. If you’re selling something, reverse engineer it. Like, really think about, like, where’s the value in this? How can I educate people? So I’ll just end that off, you know, because we can keep going on tangents. We got to finish this. But this worked really well. And now short video is actually my main focus to the point where I’m getting 5 or 10 takeaways from every podcast episode and making them into literally 5 or 10 videos from every episode and just shooting those out now because they work so damn well and it’s just part of my whole plan, my strategy now with all of my content, my long-form content, my newsletter, my podcast, my long-form blogs, et cetera. And it’s just this eye-opening thing. And if I wasn’t forced to do this, I wouldn’t have been like, oh, I’m actually a good video creator. And I know a lot of small businesses can and they should be thinking more about that. So let’s get away from my story and go a bit more into the last point of why this is important and what to do moving forward, if you have anything. I know I spoke a bit about that with my brand being the case study example. But yeah, let me know a bit more about how TikTok replaced Google as the Internet’s most popular domain in 2021.

11:20 So people are looking for values, as you say, and that ties back to the brand mission, because the brand mission is to provide a certain value to the customers that they are targeting. And what is this value? And this value should come with authenticity, right? The value shouldn’t be coming from a place where If you buy something from me now, then I’ll give you this. It is free for all. And I think that’s how TikTok has replaced Google as the internet’s most popular domain last year. And that effectively ended Google’s 15-year reign as the world’s most popular internet domain. And this is how TikTok’s whole ecosystem and its bunch of users have, you know, slowly rising to be these authentic brand storytellers, right? They are telling their own brand stories, or they’re helping the brands to tell authentic brand stories. So, you know, on Google Search, like brands on Google Search is brands that can afford to pay Google to show up first, or the brands who you know, that mastered SEO and follow the rules of the Google algorithm and affiliates that make up their rankings and charge for visibilities and clicks. So that might not be the optimum solution for the customer. You know, the crux of the issue is that there is no true validation of quality on Google search. But on TikTok, All these TikToks that people are creating, they are engaging and they’re providing a real value. And then the collaborative artificial intelligence recommendation engine ensures that you’re not just getting the videos that you really want, you are also connecting with other people of the same interest. And then there are all these different layers of moderators in TikTok that will ensure that the taggings are correct. and that it’s placed in the right geography. And that sort of, I think that sort of credibility and authentic results is just very difficult for other social media platforms to match at this point of time. And then there’s this evidence that to back up this claim, right, a recent study by Credit Karma shows that more than half, more than 52% of Gen Zers respondents, they’re actually seeking financial advice and personal finances and stuff like that on TikTok. So TikTok’s results are very viral, very useful, granted when created correctly, and you know, it’s really trending and contextualized, obviously. So that degree of authenticity achieved in a short video is very, very important for brands today. And that’s not to say that it’s very easy. They also need some kind of thinking behind that. And I think in future episodes, we’re going to tell you and show you how to make the short videos work and, you know, what these platforms are trying to do with these videos and how they decide to distribute to their users.

14:19 Yeah, short videos are here to stay. I think video is kind of the final, I wouldn’t say final, but probably VR will be next, or augmented reality or something. But that all is still video in some way. So video, we experience the world with our eyes. And it was photos before, because obviously the photos were there. But now we can handle video. Our cameras now are good enough to capture good enough. Anyone, most people can capture good enough video. So for short video to be the main way you get stuff out, you know, versus photos, it just makes sense. Like that why every platform is pivoting into short video and playing this catch up. And it’s funny because YouTube has literally been, they should have come up with TikTok. Like YouTube should have come up with YT shorts, you know, like it was just like, it’s like ironic. But YouTube ain’t dying anytime soon. YouTube is really strong. I call it like, you know, it’s like an older sibling to podcast where, yeah, there’s 31 million people on YouTube, 31 million YouTube accounts. There’s 3 to 4 million podcasts. There’s 800 million TikToks, whether they’re business accounts or not, you know, it’s a bit muddled, but there’s, you know, There’s, I think, 200 Instagram business accounts. So you can see, like, based on all of that, I know it’s a lot of numbers and this is a podcast, but there’s still a lot of weight in podcasting and proper YouTube videos, but they take a lot of work, whereas a short video I’m not gonna say it’s easy, but you can crank out more of them. You can chop up more things. You can chop out more short videos from, again, a long-form piece of content. I’ll end it there because I wanna talk about repurposing content and content stacking. This is a strategy that we use here at Medellin. I use my brand where you do one piece of long-form content, like this podcast, this 10 to 15 minute long podcast, and now you have 10 pieces of short-form content, if not more, out of it. But we’ve talked about a lot today. The history of short videos rise in social media. when, sorry, what creating short video means for your business, my beautiful story about how short videos became my main business plan when it was actually, I was supposed to be promoting a podcast and newsletters, and I shifted to using short videos to promote those, and why this is important, what to do moving forward. Thank you all for listening. This was a fun one, and hopefully over the next episodes, few episodes, you can learn how to actually create short videos and what to do with them.

EPISODE 6 – The Secret Sauce: Boosting Content with Trends and Tunes

00:01 What if the tiniest details could make your content explode online? This episode uncovers the weird and wonderful world of the 1% intangibles that skyrocket content performance. Find out if there is really power to hashtags, trending music, and dance crazes, and if they can really boost your brand’s visibility on this episode of content on the go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you’ll learn with our guest Christopher Koo, the importance of hashtags in boosting content visibility and engagement, how to choose the right music to elevate your brand’s content, the impact of following or adapting trending dances and activities to fit your brand, and more. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Capka, and Lemon8. So let’s start off with the first one, which is, are hashtags important? All right, so I’ve got my opinion and my thoughts on this, because I’m a bit of a contrarian at times. And let me know what you think. Are hashtags important? Yes or no?
01:31 I think hashtags allow people to quickly look for topics of interest and you know you want to hop into a community very quickly and all trending conversations and be part of this whole global movement if you would like to put it that way so I mean look at the recent TikTok travel hack where the student pretended to be handicapped in a wheelchair skipping queue at a Heathrow airport and now it’s causing a lot of troubles in all other airports and you know people are following the hack very quickly and it’s not the right thing to follow but it’s just how you extrapolate from this example of people you know hashtagging you know the challenges and the hacks and you want to get into it and then I think a few weeks ago I was trying to defrost my fridge and I didn’t want to trouble my dad and I was learning from the Gen Zers and I got onto TikTok and I was looking for solutions on how to defrost the fridge and voila, there’s so many different kinds of TikToks that you can look at and different people teaching you the different methods and it’s like, you know, real demo, right? It’s as if my dad was in TikTok, you know, I didn’t really have to get him to come over to my apartment. So I think When you want to get into a certain topic of interest, then that’s where the hashtags, they work really well. And I do know that there are different layers of moderators to make sure that the hashtags are correct. So they do moderate humanly how the content actually matches the hashtag. So that’s my thought on that.

03:04 All right, look, I’m going to say this. Hashtags work differently on different apps. So Instagram, it was more creating communities with hashtags. And I think that was the same with Twitter. So Instagram, they just followed the hashtag Twitter. Twitter actually is the first one to do the hashtags. And I don’t know if you remember the SNL, it was like hashtag. And they were doing that, the SNL. I can’t remember because I was with Justin Timberlake and I forgot the other guy from Adam Sandberg. But yeah, that was like, you know, Twitter, the hashtags, everyone hashtag stuff in real life. But Instagram followed it and they didn’t really incorporate into their algorithm. TikTok actually did it differently. And the hashtags weren’t like people, you know, they shove in 30 hashtags, 40 hashtags in a post, and they’re just trying to figure out, you know, the hashtag algorithm and trying to figure out what’s the recipe to get the hashtag to make your content go viral. And I think I think it’s a lot of stomping and you’re getting not a lot of juice with it because They don’t hurt you, but they rarely help you. And what Instagram came out to say last year was hashtags are now to actually help categorize what your content is. So if you have a running post, probably don’t want to do, you know, um, it’s the hot, probably don’t want to do that. I mean, maybe you do, or you don’t want to put cooking. If you have a running post hashtag cooking, if you have a running post, if you’re obviously making cooking food for running, that’s fine. But if you’re running, you want to do all running hashtags or things around running. And that’s how you get the algorithm to start categorizing because Instagram sucks for search. Absolutely sucks for search. Like for, if you haven’t, once the post is gone and you haven’t saved it, how do you find it again? If you didn’t, if you don’t know the account, how do you find it? It’s like you can’t go in there and search it like Google or YouTube or anything. And this is where TikTok wins because TikTok is categorizing everything based on hashtags, but also based on the algorithm machine learning. It’s like, oh, there’s a picture of a runner. So this is running. You put a hashtag running. Now I know that it’s running and that’s what they’re doing. So you’re helping your content be categorized and you can find your niche in your industries. And this is why being very specific when you’re on these platforms is crucial. Do not be general, do not be broad on any platform. Be specific to exactly who your end client user or customer is, and make sure that you’re constantly making content around that. And try not to do the broad stuff, the inspirational quotes, and the here’s me day in my life. That stuff’s okay if you’re really big, and you’re maybe a personal brand, but if you’re a brand on Instagram or any of these platforms, and you’re not doing specific type content, The hashtags end up really not working in your favor. Again, I wouldn’t stress them as much as a lot of people stress them. They hashtag stuff. It’s like keyword stuffing with SEO. I just think that it’s like you put a lot of energy into finding the right hashtag when you probably could have put that energy into making better content and it would have done better.

05:50 Yeah, of course, of course. And I think one of the ways to really try to ensure that you are having the a fairly right bunch of hashtags is to yeah go back to traditional marketing and do focus groups and you know get a bunch of people and just give them this question if you are looking for information about real estate here what are you going to type and you’ll be surprised by what a bunch of keywords all the hashtags that they are trying to you know key into their phones or yeah so that’s something that a lot of brand marketers can try to do even just a dipstick survey with their friends like oh if you’re looking for an ice cream of this flavor what are you going to look for like what are you going to type in you know the hashtags and then and you’ll be surprised by the results because everyone is thinking differently and then that’s how you try to combine all these different perspectives and then come up with something more accurate. I think the gist of it is people are getting smarter and smarter in terms of how they are searching for things, not like in the past. So you’ve got to be good with the hashtags as well and not just putting a bunch of 30 hashtags and hoping that it will hit the jackpot.

07:01 Yeah, yeah. And sorry, and to one last point, hashtags on Twitter worked with trending. So it would find out things that were trending because people with the hashtags. And again, Instagram followed suit on that. LinkedIn kind of is trying to do it. But I think where TikTok just said, you know what, we don’t care about trending because the algorithm is sorted out because your For You page is going to be for you. Not just what, oh, this is what everyone’s talking about. Like, I personally don’t care what the mass is talking about, because the mass usually isn’t for me. The average person isn’t actually the average person, because it’s a calculation of everyone, people to the left and people to the right. It gets this little goopy, very vanilla gray thing in the middle. and it’s like i don’t care about that and most people actually aren’t that they’re around the average anyway so i want stuff to be for me to give me value and tiktok figured that out and youtube figured that out you know like youtube that algorithm on the side was early tiktok basically when you keep watching stuff and you keep liking stuff and commenting That thing on the side, that suggest thing on the side is so good. And it will give you a video with 500 views if it knows that it’s something that you need to watch or you want to watch. It doesn’t give you a video with 10 million views and 10 billion whatever. It’s learned that and they shifted that, I think it was like 2015, I forgot what it was, I won’t go into the history of that. Yeah, it was… It was Gangnam Style. It was Gangnam Style because, fun story, fun story, I’ll say this anyway. Basically what happened was, if you put any YouTube video on, if you started playing in like, I think it was a couple hours or maybe like, yeah, in a few hours, if you just let YouTube autoplay, everyone would end up at Gangnam Style because it was the most popular video at that time, 2014, 2015, maybe 2013. I’m getting my years mixed up. And they realized they were like, the algorithm is just making the most popular stuff come to everyone. So they said, let’s make it prioritized and make it specific for every user. And I think they called it a billion minutes or something. And they wanted to have everyone’s eyeballs glued to the screen. So they wanted to give them stuff that they really wanted to. And ironically enough, they made a lot of hate groups because of this algorithm. Because people were finding more videos like, oh, I found my clan. I found my community. And then, you know, they’d see this video about this weird thing that they were searching and all these different things. And, you know, you got to have the good with the bad, yin yang. So. That thing got picked up by TikTok and I just feel like Instagram never came around. They really never came around to it because they were just following the Facebook algorithm, which was just based on friends. And I have never made an algorithm, I’ve never made a social app, so I’m probably talking out of my butt right now as far as like why they did what they did. But the fact that Instagram and Facebook are literally following TikTok is, you know, I’d say there’s probably some truth in what I’m saying here as far as TikTok is giving you, your feed is so specific to you and it’ll never change. Whereas Instagram is trying to come around to that. But I digress, let’s jump into music. So should you, let me. I digress. Let’s jump into music. So, what music should you choose and why?

10:09 I don’t know, man. That’s really up your alley, right, Darren? But I think it’s so tricky to say what should you use and what you should not. Sometimes it’s very clear. Like if you are a brand that’s selling luxury, you don’t want to use techno dance music all the time. It doesn’t make sense, right? So I think every creator have a personal style and their own taste. At the end of the day, you have to check back how the brand is being positioned. And what’s great music to you may not be great music for the management and you have to convince them how to accept that sort of thing. And I think the trickiest thing to do is to help people understand where their taste level is. You don’t want to come across as very offensive but uh that’s just something that sometimes you need to do as a marketer and but you know like i think on the whole level music is important because it’s not just a music bed like if it elevates everything else very subtly in a very impactful way if you are rhythmic You know how to, you know, you have this innate sense for editing and you are cutting according to the beat, according, you choose the right transitions according to the different beats. And that all makes sense, you know, to elevate the whole production. That’s what I feel why music is important to a video.

11:28 Yeah, music is, me being a musician, I’m gonna say, you know, music is, audio and music have always been this undervalued in society type of thing, but if you have bad audio in a movie, it’s, the movie sucks. It’s emotion, right? It’s also emotion. Yeah, imagine like there’s a big scene in, you know, a Marvel movie in Avengers, and then the volume dips at one point, it doesn’t like, the sound effect doesn’t hit, you’d be like, eh. Even though all the money goes into the visuals, and you have your 8K screen TV and all that, but if that didn’t hit at that time, and it was slightly off with timing, or it was just a bit too low, you’d be like, what? And it wouldn’t hit you, and editing to the beat and all that. So music is crucial, but you have to know and understand your brand, and a lot of brands don’t have Sonic branding. This is actually something I want to specialize more in. with my company, my podcast, audio production company, Podpaste, is Sonic branding for brands. And I actually have done a lot of that with Medi-G early on, which is, what does Medi-G sound like? A lot of people are like, oh, we got this font, and we got this color, and this doesn’t have that, and you got to make sure this person… Everyone does all that type of stuff, but it’s like, How about the sound? And you know, a lot of people, especially car brands, they actually don’t even think about sound. It’s like, they go, oh, let’s get this muffler and this exhaust sound and this car tire sound. It’s like, but then they’ll use a different sound across five different commercials as far as they’re like stinging. It’s like, what? Why is that not consistent all the way around? Like people hear that sound, it needs to be like McDonald’s. Boom, you know, you get that. And if you’re, especially a lot of these brands that actually should lean into sound, again, like, a really expensive drink company, champagne, or expensive car company, they should have Sonic branding. So, again, this goes back to your music choice, think about what your brand stands for, what type of music would you listen to, would you want your customers and clients to listen to, use that music. Try to stay away from, and this is a contrarian opinion, try to stay away from trending music. It looks like, you know what you look like, and this is my opinion, when you use trending music that is not on brand with your brand, you look like the old 50 year old mom or dad that is trying to wear the clothes and the hairstyle and the sneakers like the kids. It’s like, ooh, ooh, you trying real hard now. Like, don’t, mm-mm, don’t do that. Like, don’t do that. So it just comes off as whack and just really inauthentic. And I think you dilute your brand, which is something we’ll talk about in a future episode. But again, if you’re a brand that can rock the latest Drake track or whatever cool new music, house music, EDM, whatever it is, trap, country, whatever, whatever you want to do, whatever the trending music is on TikTok, if you can do that, that’s fine. Me personally, I don’t do that. I’ve tried it. It comes off as weird. So I try to have all my music fit a certain vibe. It’s not even a genre. It’s a vibe. and it’s like chill but cool. I can use house music, I can use hip hop, I can use rock music, I can use electronic music, because that’s all still me and it all fits within my brand. But it’s not, I wouldn’t just say, oh, you’re just a hip hop brand. You can’t do that, because hip hop music has different dynamics. But again, I’ll digress on that. I could talk about that for days. Let’s get into the last one, which is, should you follow the latest dance or activity trend?

14:50 What do you think? Yeah, and I think that you have just summarized it very, you know, in a very succinct way, right, which is like you will look like an Older grandpa trying to wear sneakers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, we’re not saying that.

15:04 There’s nothing wrong with it. If that’s who you are, if that’s who you are. But if out of the blue, you do it, you do it and you’ve never done it before. It’s just like, what? You know, like I know 50 year olds that wear, you know, straight brim hats and they got Jordans and they wear skinny jeans or whatever, you know, loose cut baggy jeans, whatever cool fit it is. Like I know 50 year olds that do that because that’s what they’ve been doing. That’s who they are. Like, don’t do this swap and you’re just trying to be cool. That’s just,

15:28 It doesn’t make any cow sense for a hip-hop dance studio to suddenly post a video of a Chinese dance on their TikTok or IG. Even if Chinese dance was trending, what they would most definitely do is to incorporate some interesting elements from Chinese dance into their hip-hop choreography. So that’s what marketers need to learn and How do you blend these things together without looking like you’re trying to do it for the sake of looking cool, right? That’s really what a lot of the businesses are struggling with. Like, let’s hop onto the trending bandwagon. Like, what do you mean? You know, like, but that’s not, that’s not me. So, uh, how do you make it like you, and sometimes you may not need to hop onto the, uh, the trending bandwagon, you know? Yeah.

16:17 yeah that i i’d say it’s just the same thing as i said with hashtags the same thing i said with music is if that’s your brand cool do it uh i i try not to just my i have a personal brand and i go would i do that no i don’t hop on any of the trends i think i tried it i actually filmed there’s this dude there was this dance that was out i forgot I forgot what the dance was called, but it was the, hey, hey baby, hey baby. I forgot what the song was, it was Jersey club track. And there was this like dance and it was really hard dance. Like no one could do the dance. It was really hard. Only a few people can do it. And then I was looking at it and I’m like, that looks like a running drill. That’s a running form drill. And finally I saw someone comment on it and you know it again this is like this this was a dance trend um and I saw someone comment on it and I was like they said yo all y’all doing is just a modified version of a skips which is a running and I was like that’s what so I actually was going to do a parody of that I want to do parodies of trends and I filmed it and I was like I was going to have that film and then be like, wait, that’s actually an A-skip. And I actually filmed it and I never got to editing it. And then that trend ended and I was like, I’m not doing it. So I almost did it, but I was going to do it in a parody fashion. And I was like, nah, that’s not really on brand for me. I also don’t want to hate on it because I actually really did like the dance. you know if you just want to do that you can also here’s a fun tip you can also hire influencers that are on brand with your brand to then do maybe some of those trends so if you personally don’t do it or the people that are the face of your brand that usually do the videos don’t do that stuff maybe get someone else that can do it and make sure that that trend works with your product, service at the time, or your brand. So you gotta think about this stuff. This is where, it’s not easy to do this stuff. You can easily just punch out and record a whole bunch of crap and put it out, but it might not hit because it’s not the right time, it’s not the right thing for the audience. But we’ll end it there. We’ve talked about hashtags, we’ve talked about music, and we’ve talked about latest dance trends and activities on short video platforms, mainly TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Is there anything else you want to add?

18:21 All we’re trying to say is not everyone can be like Vera Wang wearing sneakers and skinny jeans in her 70s. It’s not easy. So you got to figure out who you are.

EPISODE 7 – Effective Messaging: The 60-Second Rule

00:00 foot pace.
00:01 Can you capture hearts and minds in under a minute? Well, this episode reveals how to distill your message into extremely potent 60 second bursts, uncover the magic of concise content, and why it’s the key to dominating the digital landscape on this episode of content on the go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. What you’ll learn with our guest Christopher Koo, why keeping things short is crucial and the importance of the one second theory. Yes, you only have one second. The significance of creating effective thumbnails to boost click rates, how to edit and refine your content to ensure clarity and impact any short format. and more. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Kapka, and Lemon8. kind of, you know, it depends on a lot of things, but if you’re on social media, you most likely want to grab attention of people, especially Gen Z-ers or, you know, junior millennials. I’m a senior millennial. I don’t know, Chris, your age, but you might be… I’m ancient. You’re ancient. Yeah, you might be a senior millennial like me, but you want to get their attention because there’s a lot of fun stuff happening on the social medias. There’s a lot of very attractive blonde-haired blue-eyed models or whatever you’re into you know whether you know you might dark dark-skinned dark-haired models if you’re into that uh… and a lot of people doing backflips and skydiving off buildings and it was a lot of comedy there’s a lot of stuff you can be doing if you’re a small business you you probably don’t do any of these things So you got to cut through it. And you literally, you literally have one second. So we’ll start off with the first point, which is why keeping things short is the first and only rule. And I’ll just jump in really quick. I thought, you know, it used to be seven to 12 seconds. And then I heard three seconds and then I heard one second. And it actually makes a lot of sense. Obviously, catching them in one second is really difficult. And this is where, you know, if you go back to a few episodes ago, we actually talked about how making short content is actually hard. It feels easy because it’s easy to consume. It’s quick. And it can be easier to produce than a longer form piece of content, or maybe you can cut up a long form piece of content like a podcast, like a 20-30 minute podcast into multiple short form pieces, but it still took a lot of work to make that one long form piece of content and you know shortening it and going okay is that a take you have to think about this stuff like there’s i call it mental effort and you know like you gotta go like should i be doing this you’re not just like filming yourself going cool idea and then posting it the good stuff always takes a bit and especially with that one to three second rule there’s there’s the basically you want videos on a lot of these mediums um sorry a lot of these platforms to be 7 to 12 seconds I know that’s real hard. I struggle with that. Most of my videos are 30 to 50 seconds. I’m trying to find that really tight one-liner from a podcast that’s 7 to 12 seconds. About running, I have a running podcast where it’s just like bam, bam, bam, but sometimes it takes 30. And they do well. The 30 to 50 seconds ones do well. But again, making something a big idea one minute is tough. Tell me about how you do that.

03:34 I mean it’s so difficult and sometimes you don’t really want to subscribe to that rule because it just really ruins the whole video and I can you know immediately hear a lot of management saying that people are just going to drop off at one second so then what does that leave you? You cannot tell anything in one second, right? But yet also, you also want to be very impactful on the first second and not just waste it on some kind of brand, you know, logo or the animation of the logo. Then, you know, let’s not do that, you know, find a real establishing shot with the producer. And why do we want to use this first establishing shot? And even before the first second has begun, the insignificant thumbnail is already a challenge for some marketers. You know, sometimes we do it from scratch, right? And you may not want to rely on the automation from the platform to choose a thumbnail for you. You want to create your own. And there’s only so much real estate on the screen as people are viewing videos more and more on their mobile phones and not on the desktop and not on TV. So you’ve got to really think about the space and what kind of caption do you want to put in, how succinctly you can tell something even before they start clicking on the video for that first second. So do not be wordy. There’s only so much space and you have to take that into account and not too many logos and I mean you can only put one logo but not the biggest logo on the thumbnail. So that’s a lot to think about in just that very short time frame whether it’s one second or just before the one second is beginning.

05:13 I’ve got a cool hack that you’ll see this a lot so it’s not a hack but it was more like me refining my short video production. Because the thumbnail does matter. TikTok the thumbnail kind of doesn’t matter because a lot of people they won’t see the thumbnail. A lot of people don’t really go to your, especially if you’re new, they don’t go to your profile and check out your old stuff. You need to rely on the algorithm to show it to them in the, for you, because it actually shows on Tik TOK, just like YouTube, it shows stuff for S for three to six months. If your stuff is doing well, I’ve got a post that every week, you know, not even every few days, I get a foul, a few thousand more, uh, views on it. And YouTube’s the same. Something will slowly grow and you can get millions of views on it over the course of five years because it keeps showing that. Whereas Instagram and Facebook, they have like a 36 hour, 48 hour, not policy, but kind of like if it doesn’t really hit after 36 hours, it doesn’t show anymore. You might see a video after about a week. I’ve seen two weeks where something that’s gotten millions of views. But again, let me kind of go back to the thumbnail hack, which is they’re going to show you the video so you won’t see the thumbnail. The thumbnail is important. But what you need to do is sum up the title of your video, what it is that they’re going to learn, how to do this, why you should do that, do this to do that. You need to do this and put that as text that’s kind of at the top of the screen. Make sure it’s within the viewable box area, though. You don’t want to be outside of it. And have that show for three to five seconds. So, you know, I have it show for as long as five seconds. And then I even have, because I’m doing a podcast, I even have the words underneath. Yes, it’s a lot of words, but when people are scrolling, their eyes are going to catch, I’ve got it in bright pink, how to run a faster 5K. So they actually see that and they’re going to stay on that. And that’s actually my, that’s my one second grab. how to run a fast 5k or you’re doing this all wrong, you know, a little bit of clickbaity stuff. I try to stay away from that, but you know, you got to, you got to catch people. And that has worked really, really well. Whereas before I didn’t have anything and you just rely on them getting to the 10 second mark to understand that this is about the 5k stuff. So that, that can work if again, you’re not, you know, an attractive person or you’re not, you know, doing backflips and whatnot. Let’s go to point number two. Remember that social media is the top of the funnel. And what I’ll do is kind of asterisk that with, while it’s a standalone piece of content, your short form video on social media, it should still lead to something else. So what you need to do is think Think about it as if you’re promoting a product, it needs to still not just be a promo. It can’t just be a, uh, go do this, you know, like it needs to actually be its own thing. And then if you want to learn more, you can go and do that. So think of top of the funnel and you’re trying to get them down to the bottle of funnel.

07:56 Yeah, and this is about creating shareable content, right? You don’t just want to earn vanity metrics like likes. Sure, you want people to like it, but you want them to like as well as sharing it with other people because that’s not the best indication when they like a video that you have created something of value to them, right? What you want is generate conversations, you want people commenting, you want people to really share with other guys, you know, with their friends that this is a perspective that’s worth owning because sharing means that you are likely endorsing that view from the video even without saying anything, right? Some people are implicated by the laws today if you are sharing something that you’re not supposed to share. And they are saying like, if you shared it, that means you are endorsing the view. So sharing that sort of content that is of value really helps your brand, you know, that you are providing a solution and that you got people to also share and own that perspective. But I think that’s about it. You know, that’s a lot that we’re covering for the top of the funnel. Maybe we should just move on to how do you cut and cut and cut and cut your video to be a short video. Yeah.

09:13 Yeah, moving on to the third point, which is, I call it edit, rewrite, and edit again for clarity. It’s not easy making something short and snappy. So a good example is, a good friend of mine brought this up. I have worked in advertising. I’m more in general marketing now, and advertising is, it’s a pillar underneath marketing. So, really cool thing is, you watch a 30 second ad that really is impactful, and it really makes you move to do something, And a lot of people like, oh, it only took 30 seconds. It wasn’t a two-hour movie, so it only took 30 seconds, so it can’t be that hard. And it’s like, it probably takes the same amount of energy to make a 30-second ad as it would like a 40, 30-minute, 40-minute. Because you’ve got to do the setup, you’ve got to write it, you’ve got to get the message across in 30 seconds. You’ve got to tell people what it is, what the problem you’re solving, and then also the CTA of why they should get it, like the CTA’s call to action. And it’s just like, that’s a lot of work to do. And that requires a lot of editing, rewriting, editing again for clarity. Tell me a bit more about that.

10:10 Yeah, I think editing is such a painful experience for a lot of creators, especially when you’re dealing with the management and different layers of stakeholders. They all have a say in what’s supposed to be in there and what’s not supposed to be in there. And then sometimes you are very emotionally invested in the creativity process. you end up getting hurt. It’s like, no, why are you cutting up my stuff? But it is important because I think, and this is an advice that I’ve gotten from a friend who is a writer and he’s very established now in the advertising industry. So he told me about how he was being advised by a mentor on what’s being clear, right? Because I think the first step of being clear is so fraught with difficulty. And clarity comes from knowing what you want, knowing why you want it, and whom you are doing this for. But from my experience, this questioning and answering process can be very, very painful. And there’s this one thing that has helped him, which is right. Right is that which comes from a drive to help and care. right in that which benefits all than oneself. Right is that which makes me act without shame or regret. And I think these three things can be applied to a brand. When you want to think about what is being clear and what is being that sort of level of clarity in your video. And if you can get these things right, then you can start editing and you can be ruthless with your editing without being too emotional. Because a lot of creators are saying that I got to leave this shot in, you know, this is a B-roll that I love, but Is it right? Is it clear? Is this what people want? So I think one of the first things that I’ve learned in some of the brands that I’ve worked with, they actually form different kinds of focus groups, like internally we have one, and externally we get friends or different professionals from the industry. And you might say, we don’t want people to decide what we are doing, but it’s good to get a different kind of perspective because then you ground yourself in the reality, right? Like you can have all these blind spots as you are creating content, you know, you’re so emotionally invested that you have lost sight of what the customer wants instead of what you want. So I think that’s the lesson that the marketers have to learn. Yeah.

12:33 We covered a lot on being short. We went long on being short. And one was why keeping things short is the first and only rule, which is the one to three second theory. You got to catch their attention. Two, remember that social media is the top of the funnel, but you also want to have your piece of content be a standalone piece of content that still can give value and not just be like, buy this thing. And then three, edit, rewrite and edit again for clarity. Thank you so much for listening. 

EPISODE 8 – Creating Shareable Content: From Thumbnails to Trends

00:01 If your content isn’t being shared, you are failing. Yes, creating content that gets shared is the ultimate goal. Well, it should be. And today, we’ll show you how to do just that. From eye-catching thumbnails to leveraging the latest trends, discover the secrets to making your content irresistible, learn why shareability matters, and how to design content that people can’t wait to pass along, all on this episode of Content On The Go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. With over 20 years of bilingual content and communications experience, Chris excels in creating and managing impactful content across various platforms. At the time of this publication, Chris is the global content marketing lead at BytePlus, who is known for apps like TikTok, Pico, Kapka, and Lemon8. All right, brand dilution is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, so we’ll just jump right into the first point because I’ve got a strong opinion about this. And the first one is why thinking like brand collaboration is a salad instead of a melting pot. And the definition, this is kind of a framework to think about. So this is like a mental model. A salad is, it retains distinct flavors that complement each other. The tomato and the olive, you can taste that they’re two different things, but they complement each other really well. Whereas a melting pot is like everything blends together like pasta, bolognese, where it’s just like, huh? I can’t taste that because now the tomato sauce is doing that with the cheese and all that. So you want a collaboration, usually, unless it’s a long-term type of relationship you want the collaboration to be where the two parts the two entities can stand alone their own and and and their their their own thing cool example is drake doing his 2022 summer house release and it actually Drake is still doing his thing, but he’s also going in with the house and electronic dance scene. I personally like it. I know a lot of people hate it, but I think he did the two genres justice, and he didn’t melt them together to be this kind of super generic poppy blah thing, which has happened. Dance music and pop music have always come together, but this one felt a bit more like the two genres still stood on their own. That’s a personal opinion and a personal example. Do you have any examples, Chris?
02:44 I love listening to Joe Kaye’s selection on Apple Music and I think he has been doing that for the last 10 years underground and moving into mainstream, having his own show on Apple Music and he mixes so many different genres of music together, whether it’s breakbeats, hip-hop or house music and he does it so well. And I think that’s one of the examples of how you want to blend things together. And again, you know, who are you? So Joe Kay is like, I’m just trying to introduce good music to you. And I think what really appeals to me, sonically pleasing, and it’s really rhythmic, and that’s who he is, right? And looking out for underground artists, that’s what he’s good at, you know, curating these people who are not heard, and trying to bring them up to the ground. I think that ties back to his own brand persona and his own brand story. And then melding all these different genres of music, doesn’t matter if they’re underground or coming to mainstream, but you know, it all sounds good together. And then there’s this other brand, which I think most guys are familiar with, which is the Japanese sex toy, Tinga. And, you know, for a company like that, it is so difficult to do advertising, right? And it’s so difficult to create content because you cannot show the real thing. So I think what they did in the end was to have all these different collaborations with athletes. and the dancers, you know, the skateboarders, and it’s just saying and telling a story whereby, you know, this is for everyone, this is for every kind of guy, or this is also for the trendy guys. And you start to make that a sort of emotional association with these images of the athletes, of the hip-hop dancer, of the baseball player, and, you know, of all these different profiles. From there, you know, they tell the story of how their lives are just as it is, you know, I’m an athlete, this is what I do. And this is why I’m athletic, I’m energetic. And those are very emotional connotations, you know, to the toy that they’re trying to sell. And that sort of collaboration, I feel like is intriguing for a company like that. And I think that’s the lesson that I learned from that campaign. Yeah.

04:57 That’s a fun one. That sounds like a fun one. It’s like when Tinder, they did a really fun podcast. They did two seasons. Gimlet produced it. Narrative storytelling podcast where it’s like it’s a dating, how do we, you know, and they basically just jumped right into, you know, I think there was a second episode and it was about penis pictures, you know, that’s a big thing at Tinder. And they just jump right into it. And it’s like, you know, they, they obviously, you know, this isn’t really with brand dilution, but it’s like, this is just more and how do you tell something without being graphic, but they just went right into and I thought that was really cool of the brand to do that. And they talked to, you know, scientists about why males do that. You know, why do females not like it, but males keep doing that and all that stuff. But again, I digress. Let’s go into point number two. Be careful with too much stock b-roll photos and video on your brand. If this is something that kind of just irks me whenever, especially personal brands. Personal brands, they usually don’t do it, but I think just brands in general, it’s just kind of like, I could just tell these all stock videos and photos, and it’s just like, if you do it too much, people are like, who are you? You’re just a whole bunch of stock videos and photos. So give me an example that you have. You have an example about house decor?

06:13 And yeah, I think it is not an example from the industry. It’s just something that I learned from TV shows, you know, like recently I’m watching Dream Design Home Makeover that’s done by Shay and Syd McGee in Utah. And, you know, there’s three seasons of that on Netflix and I watched all of it. And I think in one episode, they were trying to decorate this huge wall for their client and you want to put up pictures and stuff right and usually there’ll be like photographs and you know family photos and that’s what they get from the clients and they blow it up and fine you know that’s very authentic because that’s what the family is about but how do you create from scratch you know if it’s nothing right so there’s this episode where this couple lost their son to a heart defect at about four or five months old But, you know, within that time frame, they took their son to the mountains every other day. And so the McGee’s, they went to the mountains and they asked their designer and photographers to take pictures of the mountains and they blew it up. And then they put it up onto the wall. So I feel like, hey, they could have just gone for a stock image of that mountain, right? But they didn’t. So they took the time to go to the mountains to find an angle that is really beautiful to the tracks that they have walked and then gather elements from that journey and incorporate into the design of the home as well. So everything came together. But I was so intrigued by those few photographs that the McGee’s asked their designers and the photographers to take. And I thought like, This is what brands should do. Put your heart into it and not use B-rolls and stock images too excessively. But even for things like that, you can create from scratch and it might be a subtle detail that would just be bypassed and you think like, why should we invest so much in that? But over time, when you’re creating pieces and pieces of content coming together and they will get a sense of who you are finally.

08:16 Yeah, it’s a great point about, you know, it just takes a bit of time. And if you have people going through a customer journey, and they’re following you on social media, or whatever it is, you know, it’s the seven rule, I think it’s 15 rule or 21. So people now need to see your stuff 21 times for them to actually take an action and click or do something on it. But if they’re constantly seeing this consistency, with your content and the certain photos and videos that you use and all that. It’s just like your fonts. You can’t just have this disjointed amount of fonts and colors. Most brands, they have the same logo and the same font and the same colors, at least for a while, and then they slowly change them up. You wanna be the same with your photos and videos. This is kind of a bit of a hard left turn, but this falls under brand dilution, and this is actually spreading yourself too thin on too many platforms. This actually is a recipe for one burnout and two you literally just it’s like you can’t focus on one thing and there’s a good analogy and uh hopefully we’ll have someone put this visual but if you think this is from taken from uh… you win sorry you and uh… greg greg mccuin he wrote the book essentialism and uh… then he brought the but the next book he wrote was effortless effortless yet effortless and uh… the beauty is that or the beauty of this diagram or the whole reason is is essentialism is basically if you think of a circle and you think of arrows which would be energy If you’re on a bunch of different platforms, you’re just a whole bunch of arrows all over the circle. So the circle’s just gonna spin or not go anywhere, you know? But if you actually focus on one, then you stack up the arrows in one line and then you can actually go forward as fast and, you know, as quickly as possible with the most amount of power. So… It’s tempting to jump on every platform when you first get onto social media. I think if you have a team, maybe you can do that, but you’re still like, how about you just figure one out? The platforms aren’t going anywhere. If they’re here today and gone tomorrow, then they weren’t worth it. So like TikTok, it took me two years to get on TikTok. I just got on TikTok last week proper. I’ve been on it. I got my name and everything. I sat on it for a bit. And I was like, how do I work TikTok? And I watched it. But I did Instagram. And I was like, you know what? They’re still the same humans. It might be a bit different humans on TikTok. But I started seeing more of the millennials going over to TikTok, more of the older people, the senior millennials like me going over to TikTok. And I started seeing more runners go over. But I said, everything that’s working on Instagram will work on TikTok or a certain amount of it or a specific thing that I’m doing on Instagram will work on TikTok as far as what I’m making and I kept trying to figure out what that was and then I said aha here it is now let me try that and it’s been a bit of trial and error with TikTok but I’m really glad I sat back and didn’t try to build my Instagram and my TikTok and my podcast and my newsletter, and LinkedIn, and this, all at the same time. I’m sure as far as marketing goes, marketing is probably the least amount of resources that you’ll have at your company thrown at marketing most companies, at least when they start out. So just be really careful with that. That’s my opinion. What do you think about that?

11:26 Yeah, just start with a platform that gives you the most returns and a better ROI for your media spend. If most of your users are actually on Facebook, then it doesn’t make sense to start creating a suite of content for TikTok. You just want to go slow on that, right? But you want to focus on your efforts, your resources on creating things for the Facebook audience. And that’s where you get most returns because they are your target customers and they are hanging out at that platform. So why are you creating things that they are not hanging out? Oh, this doesn’t make sense. And also, when you are creating content for people on a platform that gives you the most returns, and I think that will be more efficient on your production spend, and the kind of returns that you are expecting, that’s efficiency we’re talking about, yeah.

12:15 And the last point is, again, this is all around brand dilution. Don’t say negative, false, or manipulative things. Especially in the titles or your first lines of your posts. It’s easy to do and I see a lot of brands do it, especially personal brands, but you slowly dilute the trust of your potential customers and clients by doing this crap. And an example is You say this post is going to be about this, and it ends up not being about that. Or there’s like, you know, if it’s a six minute YouTube video, your title is Jeff Bezos. And this is a friend of mine that did that. You’ll probably never see this. But the title was Jeff Bezos gave me a million dollars to make this video. And he starts it off with da-da-da, and it leads up to it. And then at the end, he basically goes, yeah, no, Jeff Bezos actually wasn’t involved, but I knew it was the best title to get you. I was like, oh, dude, really? Like, really? Like, it was pure clickbait. And like, there’s hooky titles, there’s catchy titles. How to, you know, how to run, again, I have a running brand, How to Run Your Fastest Marathon in the Least Amount of Time. That’s a good title. You know, it’s interesting. Oh wow, how do I do that in the least amount of time? Or, you know, when you start off your run, you’re doing this all wrong. Here’s how you fix that. It used to be called that, that’s not clickbaity, that’s just hooky, that’s good. And I actually then deliver on that promise by telling you what you did wrong and here’s what you do to fix it. That doesn’t mean that it’s being clickbaity. I could easily call it, do this thing, this will help you run your race better, but you’re doing this wrong, do this sounds way better. So again, that’s a middle ground. You have to deliver on whatever you give people in the beginning. And if you keep doing that clickbaity crap, Like, people will drop off soon, they’ll start unfollowing you quick. And that’s just my personal opinion on that. You got anything to say about that or anything else to end this on?

14:08 No, I think we’ve summed it up. You know, we talked about framework on how to collaborate and blend things together. We talked about how you should be authentic with your B-rolls and stock pictures. Don’t spread yourself too thin on too many social media platforms. And be brutally honest on, you know, at least not… Not lying, yeah. Not saying things that are not about you. So I think we pretty, you know, covered that much, yeah.

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