How to run your content dry

Ben (00:00.54) Okay, Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We're excited to have you here. Thanks for taking the time today. Jeremy McLerran (00:31.286) Oh, that's great. That's nice. Okay, perfect. Jeremy McLerran (00:44.097) Sounds great. Jeremy McLerran (00:49.345) Yep. Jeremy McLerran (01:00.118) Hey, thanks very much for having me. Really excited to be here and excited about the content that we're gonna talk about and hope this is beneficial for the audience. Ben (01:08.628) Absolutely, appreciate it. Well, I'm excited. We talked a little bit beforehand about what we're gonna talk about today. I think it's a principle that really runs true, but before we dive into it, give us a little bit of background of who you are. Jeremy McLerran (01:21.294) Sure. My name is Jeremy McLerran. I'm a father of five kids, happily married to a wonderful woman who supports us all. The last few decades I've been working in the security technology industry and I've helped the past three companies I've worked for get big and then get sold. I've led marketing efforts at all three organizations and I think I'm most proud of how my efforts disrupted and consequently changed the marketing landscape of the entire industry. We put our biggest competitor out of business. forced the other two incumbents to sell off their security divisions and really changed the landscape of how security technology is marketed and sold. So it's been a lot of fun going from a startup to becoming the dominant brand in the market and I'm really proud of the contribution that I've had in that along the way. I currently run a small consulting firm called 1111 Consulting where we... work with security companies as well as companies outside the security industry to understand what their marketing looks like, help them to improve it, help them to grow and scale appropriately to use their resources effectively and ultimately to achieve their goals, whether that's to get big or to get sold or to merge with someone else or something like that. We work closely with organization leaders to make that a reality for them. So it's been very rewarding. Ben (02:47.164) Awesome, I love it. Well, let's dive into the subject. So earlier on, we were talking about this. This is something you're super passionate about. Talk to us a little bit more about your concept here of really getting the most out of your content. And some of the phrases that came to mind as we were talking are running it dry, wearing it out, things of that nature. Talk to us about how can I get the most out of my content? How do I get more out of it by really running it dry? How does that work? Jeremy McLerran (03:13.698) You know, it's really interesting because in my career, video's always been a personal passion for me. I love making video content and I've probably made thousands and thousands and thousands of videos, whether they're podcasts or commercials or teasers or instructional videos, you know, all sorts of things. And what I've noticed over the course of, you know, call it 20, 25 years of working in the marketing field and creating this kind of content, is that as much as I would love it if all of those thousands of videos got lots and lots and lots of views, the reality is there's a few of them that seem to get the most attention. Some of those are overview videos, some of those are ones we did a particularly good job of marketing via a campaign or an email series or what have you. Jeremy McLerran (04:13.902) more and more and more content, which is fun to do. Let's be honest, as marketers, we love to create content. We love to come up with new ideas. The whole idea of like, well, what if we made this is awesome. Well, what if we did that? It's really cool. We want to try and explore and examine and create as much as we can. And every time we create a new idea, we publish it, and someone comes to us and says, hey, that's really cool, I love that. You know what if you did something like that and you think well maybe i can and you got there you want to create it but the reality is in most cases. Not only are you wasting valuable resources to just create all the time but a lot of times it almost creates a noise. That your end user your consumer your business customer whatever whoever your audience happens to be it creates a noise that's hard for them to digest. So when we talk about wearing out your content, spend your resources to create that great piece of content. Maybe it is an amazing ad. Maybe it's a great, call it 60 second video. Maybe it is a really compelling infographic. Whatever that thing is, whatever you've created, and put it everywhere. And there's ways, if you're smart as a marketer, to really customize that for each of the different channels. or audiences you're putting it to. So for example, let's say that you created a small 60 second video, and that's gonna go on your YouTube channel as one of your main videos. And you're gonna put that on as your channel's primary video. Well then you're also gonna create posts using that video to promote that video. And maybe you'll take that same video file and you'll shorten it and crop it a bit and turn it into a YouTube short and promote it that way. And then you take that same video file, because you got a YouTube short out of it, you say, well, I'm gonna take it and tweak that slightly, maybe edit a little bit of it, and put it on TikTok. And then I take that and I also wanna put that in my Instagram channel as an Instagram story. And then I'm gonna take the full video in its wide-screen format, and I'm gonna put it as an Instagram post. And that Instagram post is also gonna be the same as my Facebook post. And maybe you wanna make a shorter version. Jeremy McLerran (06:34.338) to publish next week to say, hey, if you've seen this, check out the whole video on our YouTube page and link back to your YouTube page. Whatever the case may be, you don't necessarily have to create new video content for every single one of those platforms. Even though you're putting it in, call it five, six, seven, 10, 20 different places, maybe it's on the homepage of your website and it's also on your LinkedIn. There's lots of places to put this content. But instead of trying to create new content for each of these platforms, Take that existing content and wear it out. Put it everywhere. And what that does is it creates consistency across your message. Now when someone sees it on LinkedIn, for example, and then they see it again in their YouTube shorts, and then they see it again in their Instagram story, soon they start thinking, boy, this content's everywhere. I'm seeing it wherever I go. This must be big, this must be important. And after the third or fourth time viewing it, instead of skipping past it, they start to watch it, they start to ingest it, they start to look at it, they start to be interested in it. And that's when sharing occurs, that's when clicking occurs, that's when whatever your call to action is starts really taking an impact because now you've gotten it into their mind several times. And there's lots of great examples in the market of people who've taken their same content, tweaked it slightly, but they didn't have to redo or recreate the content. It was simply just an edit or an adjustment to fit the media that they were putting it in. and then they put it out there all the time. Ben (08:05.796) I love that. I think that's perfect sense. So you use the numbers of three to four times. What is your ideal target? When you're like, hey, I want this content to be out there on every platform and every channel. I want people to see it. If you had like a perfect target number of how many views someone had on it, what would you guess? What would be the target of like number of times your audience saw it? Jeremy McLerran (08:28.106) It's such a hard number to say because it really depends on the type of audience you're doing There's some markets where you know, some of your listeners might be thinking that they're really serving a very niche audience and A type of audience that maybe doesn't consume media as easily I know I face that industry when we first started doing the digital content we were creating Half the people weren't on Facebook or Instagram at all like they were security technicians who've been doing this for 20 years and they were crotchety old installers who who were used to just turning screwdrivers, and half of them had flip phones. Fast forward five years, everyone's got all the social media out there, and they're working hard to try and implement, and get involved in, and join the Facebook groups, and follow the Instagram channels, and the YouTube channels that you create, and things like that. So, I would seriously look at your audience, and see what kind of expectation. You're going out there to the masses The whole world to see your content is a big ask, and you're probably gonna have to spend some marketing dollars for ad revenue to create some ad action. So I'm blurring on this. To create some ads that will draw your people into your content, as opposed to if you've got a very niche market, a very closed audience, that you can target that within your email campaigns, your Facebook groups. your individual channels where those people tend to live. So I wish I could give you an exact number, but it really varies. In my experience, it takes about three to four touches for someone to actually take an action. So whether those touches are through social or through an email campaign, again, if your audience is only on email, it might take three or four emails for them to want to click on that and actually do it. And you might have to tweak those emails. every single time in order to get them to finally say, okay, now I'm ready to click and view. But three to four touches seems to be about the magic number to get someone to want to engage with your content. Ben (10:28.893) Thanks for watching! Yeah, I love that. And a lot of it's based off the data, like you said. It's based off the idea of where in the funnel are they? If it's top of funnel, probably takes more. Middle of the funnel, it might take less. Bottom of the funnel, it might only be one. So really understanding its place in the funnel, understanding the data, but really to your point, the magic number is when do people take action? And if you can find that out and find it consistently for the level of the funnel for your specific audience, yourself great. This is how often people need to see it before I know I'm getting the full kind of capacity out of my content. So that leads me into my last question. How do you know you fully run your content dry? Like at one point in time if you're working with a client or working with yourself in your own video in-house, when do you say okay great I've gotten this content out there long enough that I feel like I've really squeezed the orange so much that there is Ben (11:31.423) How do you kind of know that point has happened and then it's time to start crafting that next piece of content? Jeremy McLerran (11:38.794) You mentioned the word data earlier and I think that one's so powerful. We have been given so many amazing tools. Almost every social platform, almost every email platform now has analytics built into it and you can look and see how many views your video is getting on YouTube, what kind of traction it is, where they drop off. The YouTube analytics are incredible. Facebook analytics are great if you're using that. Instagram has analytics. I mean almost every platform has a form of analytics that you as a as a marketing leader can look at and see is my content still making an impact? Am I still getting the views I want? If I repost it what's the reaction? And you can gauge that over time. If I take one particular piece of content, let's say I've got an image that I put on a particular platform and you see that the first time you got so many impressions, the second time you know, what are your impressions? Do they go up? Do they go down? You know, the third time you post it, again, very similar image, you know, what did you get? You can see that information. Using that data, you can make the decision on when my content is running dry. There are some people that continue to run their content for years. I think we've all seen content that was created two, three, four years ago, and yet still is out there and still being used and still being proliferated because it's still effective. And I think a key to that is not only having good quality content, But it's also having a strong call to action. That strong call to action will allow you to make your content live because it gets people to click on it. If your call to action is buy now or learn more or get the free brochure or get contacted today, whatever that call to action is, you gotta have a strong call to action that allows the user to say, okay, I've seen your content, now what? Now what do I do? I wanna do something now in reaction because I had an emotional response I want to act on that emotional response and I need to know what to do. So your calls to action need to be clear, they need to be concise, they need to be consistent, and you need to also vary them from post to post. If it's the same one every single time, it's like, oh yeah, it's that same, you know, I watched that video and the action was learn more. Well, next time you watch the video and the call to action is, you know, get a call back. And then the third time, the call to action is, Jeremy McLerran (13:59.55) join our newsletter or join our group or things like that. So the call to action can vary and you can even again use the data to see which of my calls to action got the most traction, got me the most impact out of this and that will be another way that you can see whether or not your content has been as dried up and just ends up as pulp or if there's still some juice to squeeze out of it. Ben (14:22.248) I love it, 100%. This is fantastic, awesome. Well, Jeremy, thank you for taking the time. Again, I think this concept is great. How to get more out of your content, squeeze it dry. Get it till you just got the pulp, and I think you're gonna see a lot of results with that. I'd love for you to share a little bit more about your agency and where people can find you if they wanna connect with you online in any way, shape, or form. Jeremy McLerran (14:44.074) I appreciate that. Come find me, connect with me on LinkedIn, Jeremy McLaren. I would love to meet you and connect with you. And certainly if you've got some needs, then we'll assess what you're doing, what you're trying to do, help you decide the best course forward and whether you're using your internal resources and agency or wanna use resources that we have at our disposal, then we can certainly help you take your company from good to great. achieve whatever goals you're looking for. Thank you again for the opportunity here. And I hope the people that are listening really take this content seriously because the types of things you'll learn in this series are really gonna help you round out your abilities as a marketer. And sometimes it's just as simple as hearing a message over and over again that lets us remember the things that we've known for years and maybe gotten distracted. Again, as marketers, we love the content we create. We get excited about creating new content. and it is easy to just spend all our time creating content, but if you're not publishing that content, you're not milking that content and squeezing it dry for everything you possibly can, you're missing opportunities out there for customers to see it and take action on it. Ben (15:56.656) I love it, absolutely true. All right, well thank you so much and appreciate your time today. Jeremy McLerran (16:02.41) Yeah, thank you. Good luck, everyone.