How Siege Media Turns 1 Video Into Dozens of Pieces of Content
Originally published on DearVideo.com.
Playbook overview
In this Video Marketing Playbook you’ll see exactly what Siege Media does with its own content.
Starting from a single 30-minute video, we’ll walk through most of the ways Siege uses their original content across platforms to make the most of their investment in creating content their audience is keen to see.
When you’re done, you’ll have a playbook for recording one video and turning it into at least 10 additional pieces of content that you can share across your social media accounts, your website, your blog, podcast platforms and more.
So you can do the same, here’s what we’ll cover in this Playbook:
1 - Full length video on YouTube
2 - Podcast episode
3 - Blog post
4 - LinkedIn video posts for your
- Company page
- Personal profile
- Groups
5 - Twitter video posts
- Company account
- Personal account
6 - Facebook video posts
- Company page
- Personal account
- Groups
That’s 11 pieces of high-quality content coming from one original video.
About Siege Media
Over 1,000,000 people are educated, helped and touched every single month by content created by the Siege Media team. So you know they know their stuff when it comes to producing amazing content and getting it seen.
Siege Media is a content creation and content marketing agency with a focus on using search to drive big ROI for their clients.
The Siege Media Video Playbook
In this Playbook, Siege takes a simple concept that you can recreate -- recording a discussion between two team members on a subject your company has a lot of experience with.
Siege uses a nice stage in their office, multiple cameras, and professional gear. If you have access to that kind of setup, sweet.
If you’re at home without a studio, that’s totally ok.
You don’t need a set and you don’t even have to be in the same room as each other.
How to start this Playbook
- Schedule a Zoom call with a teammate, customer or industry professional.
Keep it simple and stick with two people. Three or more people will only complicate production and increase the likelihood that someone’s internet sucks or you run into a complication.
Aim to have a dialogue that brings out unique insights and is entertaining. - Be the producer.
Make sure both people have good lighting and a decent camera.
The camera on your phone will be better than your webcam, so use a tripod or find a place to prop your phone for the call.
To use your phone as a webcam, Camo for iPhone is easy to use and DroidCam for Android has solid reviews. Either one will increase the quality of your video big time and will save you from spending big on a camera.
If you need to use your webcam, that’s fine. - Check for good sound.
I would argue that good sound is more important than good video. Why? Because of the format of this video (a conversation) and the outputs you want later (a podcast).
If you’re recording on your phone, the mic will probably be good enough.
If you’re recording audio through your computer, it’s best to use a proper mic or plug in some headphones with an inline mic. Built-in mics can pick up a lot of extra noise.
If you’re recording in person, consider lavalier microphones that can inconspicuously attach to each person’s shirt and deliver better audio than your phone. - Choose a topic that’s helpful to your audience.
In this Siege video, they talk about SEO lessons they’ve learned over years of delivering super-high quality work for clients. What’s your service or product?
You could talk about what you’ve learned and teach viewers something that can help them. - Record your Zoom call.
Be sure you hit record. There are no do-overs of a great conversation, so please make sure you’re recording before you start.
How long should your original video be?
If it’s a great conversation and your audience will learn a lot from start to finish, just go for it. But remember that people don’t have all day and you want to make something that fits into their busy schedules.
Aim to record for 30-45 minutes. That way you can edit it down to between 20-30 minutes.
Now you have a full-length video. What’s next?
Edit to a full-length show
You’ll probably need to do some editing of your raw, full-length video. Start by trimming the start and finish if there’s any chitchat or trade secrets mentioned that you don’t want everyone hearing.
Add your logo at the end and maybe include a text CTA to tell viewers what to do next.
If you’re new to editing, here are a few editing tools that are easy to use, cost effective, and still plenty powerful:
If you’re a more experienced editor, tools like these will give you more control:
Because you’re recording a conversation, you should not need complex editing. Let the conversation flow and try to limit the amount you cut out.
Of course, there might be moments that you want to edit out. Trim those and move on. Don’t worry about fancy transitions for now.
Once you’ve edited the raw video to your liking, you can take care of your next steps.
Leveling your audio
Before moving on, let’s make sure your audio isn’t going from LOUD to quiet and back.
This can easily happen and it can be a real pain to correct. But there is an easy button:
Auphonic’s Adaptive Leveler corrects loudness and differences between speakers’ volumes so you end up with a smooth audio without any random LOUD BITS.
Auphonic’s processing times can range from a few minutes to 10+ minutes. Start the process and go make yourself a cup of tea or a margarita.
When you’ve finished your drink and Auphonic is done, you can move on.
Export the audio for your podcast
This is your chance to get one going with almost zero effort, even if you don’t have a podcast yet.
Your edited, full-length video conversation makes for a great podcast. (This is why getting good audio is important)
Any of the editing tools above will allow you to export just the audio. Using the new version with leveled audio, export your audio only.
Tip: Save the audio file in the same folder as your video so you can easily find it later.
Now you can upload your audio to a platform like Anchor or Transistor. Your audio will shoot out to all the podcast players like Apple Podcast, Spotify, Castos and more.
You can even use your transcript as show notes. (more on transcripts below 🚀)
What if your video has important visual elements?
Not all videos make for a great podcast, but if your listeners will still get value from listening to the audio you can record a quick intro (and maybe an outro too) telling listeners where they can check out the video for the full experience.
Transcribe your audio to create a blog post
You don’t have to write the entire accompanying blog post from scratch. You have the copy already - it’s just in audio format.
Using tools like Rev.com or Otter.ai, you’ll get a transcript in minutes or hours.
The transcript of your conversation will be the first draft of your blog post. You’ll have to edit this, but you can also outsource the edits to a writer to shape it into an easy-to-read article.
Don’t just post the transcript to your blog. It won’t read well and will need to be cleaned up.
The hard part of figuring out what to write about is taken care of and your first draft is done. You just need someone to clean it up and add structure to it.
While you have someone doing the writing, you can get to work on the edits.
Editing for multiple platforms
Edit the full-length version into shorter versions for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
How to do this? Apps like iMovie or Filmora are easy to use and will let you trim your video to shorter lengths.
Here’s how Siege cut up their videos:
- LinkedIn 9 minutes
- Twitter 2 minutes
- Facebook 2 minutes
How long should each version be?
Social platforms do have time limits on video. Here’s your quick guide on maximum length for your social videos:
- YouTube - 12 hours
- LinkedIn - 10 minutes
- Twitter - 2 minutes, 20 seconds
- Facebook - 120 minutes
- Instagram - 60 seconds
- Snapchat - 10 seconds
- TikTok - 60 seconds natively, >60 seconds if uploading
What goes into each edit?
According to Facebook, viewers who watch the first three seconds of a video are most likely to watch it all the way through.
So the first three seconds are important to hook your audience.
How did Siege do it?
When you watch Seige’s video on Facebook, you’ll notice that it’s a series of outtakes and funny little moments they captured while shooting the full video. It’s casual. It’s funny. It’s a personal feeling two minutes that ends with a Siege Media slide and a call-to-action.
They did have to edit that together, but it wasn’t an altogether additional edit.
This same 2-minute intro is in the full-length version tool. Siege starts with this same friendly hook on each version of their video.
And the hook does what it’s supposed to. It kept me watching long enough to get into the main body of the video on YouTube version and on socials it tells you to visit their YouTube page to see the full video.
This means that they edited their videos once and were then able to use them across different platforms with shorter length requirements. You can find your hook and do the same.
To do it like Siege, keep the hook under two minutes so you can simply post that part to socials and point to the full version on YouTube or your website.
Following this playbook, you only need three versions of your video:
- Original, full-length
- 10-minute version for LinkedIn
- 2-minute version for Twitter and Facebook
For your 10-minute LinkedIn video, don't worry about finding the perfect time to end it. Use a simple fade transition and include a call-to-action somewhere between 9-10 minutes. Done.
The next question is...
How do you find your hook?
Keep this as simple as possible…
What’s the one part of the conversation that you felt great about? When did you have to write down a note? What made you laugh so hard you had to do another take?
Find a few of those moments and see if you can start your video with one of them.
As Taylor Moyle mentioned (Dear Video Podcast Ep. 15), don’t be afraid to start your videos with a trailer to hook your viewers and get them to stay.
Once you’ve given viewers a reason to watch, transition to the heart of your video.
Posting it all
Now that you have all this content, how do you get it out there?
I’m not sure how Siege does this exactly, but here’s how I would plan out how each piece of content is shared.
Start with YouTube
Post the full video on YouTube. Be sure to write a good title and description that include search terms you’d like to be found for.
Here’s Siege’s title on YouTube:
SEO Lessons From Running a 80-Person Content Marketing Agency
They could be targeting “SEO Lessons” and “Content Marketing Agency”.
Be sure to include a good description, too. Siege takes a minimalist approach to their descriptions (see above) and I like that.
One sentence to describe what happens in the video and the rest is a series of simple calls-to-action.
Note: You will come back to your YouTube video after publishing your blog post so you can update the description to include a link to it.
Publish your blog post
Your new video is on YouTube. Next up, publish your blog and embed the YouTube video so readers can get the best of both worlds: text and video.
Once you’ve published your blog, head back to YouTube to add a link to your article to the description in your video.
Publish to LinkedIn
Remember that you’re publishing to at least two profiles on LinkedIn:
- Your personal profile
- Your company profile
Don’t worry about overdoing. If you had help from team members to produce the video, get them to post it too.
This way you’ll maximize the video’s potential exposure.
Don’t want to post it to each profile? You can post it once and then engage with it through your other profiles.
For example, if you post the video to your personal profile, make sure your company page likes your post. Ask teammates to like and comment on your post too.
If you’re going to follow this approach, pick the person or profile with the most followers to be the original post. The Siege video we’re talking about here got the most traction from Russ’s profile on LinkedIn.
Are you a member of any groups on LinkedIn? Be sure to share the post into the relevant Groups, too. Yes you’re promoting your own work, but if it’s good and helpful content you should. Don’t be shy about sharing into Groups.
Upload to Twitter
Twitter is enough of a business network that you follow the same pattern that you used on LinkedIn.
Publish the video to all your relevant profiles and be sure to get your colleagues to like and share too.
Publish on Facebook
Facebook is a little different in that many people don’t like to share business stuff through their personal account. That’s totally cool.
At a minimum, publish the video to your company’s page. If you’re particularly proud of a piece of work, share it to your friends and family through your personal account.
Like LinkedIn, share the post into any related Groups.
Publish your podcast
Why are you doing this last? Because now that you’ve written your social posts, you have your podcast description written too.
Take the text you used for your LinkedIn post and use that as your episode description.
If you also include the CTAs from your YouTube description, you have all you need.
Don’t worry about a unique episode cover image. Just add your audio, update the description and hit publish!
🚀 Bonus move: If your transcript is time-stamped, you might be able to publish it with your episode for extra SEO lovin'.
If you don’t already have a podcast, this is a great time to start. We won’t go into how to do that now, but with every video you publish you have another potential podcast episode. Why not make it work as much as possible for you?
What else can you do with this content?
You now have a full-length video with audio and text to go with it. There’s no shortage of things you can do with this.
The simplest way to get even more out of this video is to use the transcript.
Read through and highlight little snippets that you can use as social media posts with or without the video.
If you record a 30-minute video, you’ll find tens, dozens, even hundreds Tweet-sized nuggets you can share. Take these highlights and turn them into posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Just be sure to link back to your blog post or video in those posts.
Recap: what you get from one original video
You now have one full-length video on YouTube, a blog post with your video embedded in it, a native LinkedIn video for all of your profiles, Twitter posts for days, native Facebook videos for all of your accounts, and as many snippets and tweets you can to take from the video, audio or transcripts.
Not bad for recording one video, right?
How long will all of this take?
8.5 hours or working time.
Of course that's a wicked rough estimate. There's no golden rule here and depending on how much experience you and your team have producing this kind of content, it can go quickly or it can take a handful of hours to get this all made.
But the first time I try anything usually takes the longest, so don't lose faith if your first video isn't perfect and your edits take longer than you thought they would. Any piece of content that's worth sharing is worth putting the effort in to get it right
Here's a summary of how long it could take you to produce all of this content if you're working with 2-3 people to get it done:
- Planning, scheduling, producing and editing your video for all three lengths: 3-5 hours
- Leveling your audio with Auphonic: .5 hours for upload and processing time
- Exporting your audio: .25 hours while your video editing tool exports the file
- Using a transcription service: .25 hours for uploading your file and reviewing the transcript
(Services like Rev will tell you when to expect to get your transcript back. It's usually a handful of hours. They're fast and the quality is good.) - Working with a writer to refine the transcript into something easily readable: .25 hours of your time
- Uploading to YouTube and writing your description: .5 hours
- Publishing your blog post: 1 hour to make sure it looks nice and reads well
- LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook posts: .5 hours
- Publishing your podcast: .25 hours
That's roughly 8.5 hours or 45 minutes per piece of high-quality content you get to share with the world. Professional writers can take dozens of hours to publish one amazingly written 1,000-word article.
And that brings me to the final point.
This playbook can help you produce a lot of content, but it's important to make it worth your audience's time to consume it. Find interesting topics to talk about and present them with your unique and helpful perspective. If you start there, the rest is production effort and time.
Final thoughts
Siege didn't try to be everywhere, but they did put their content where their ideal audience lives: on socials. You can cover as much ground as they have by starting with one video. From there it's a matter of investing the time into getting it seen.
This is where so many marketing and content efforts fall down - promotion and distribution.
If you're not going to promote your content and work hard to get it in front of people who it can help, why bother, right? But don't let that be you. You have this playbook now and know how you can turn one long-form video into tens and even dozens of pieces of promotional content. Got questions? Holler at me on Twitter.