Episode 12: What is Content Leveraging

In this episode of The SME Growth Podcast, Dave Parry and Richard Buckle discuss the concept of content leveraging. Focussing on creating content in both quality and quantity so an SME gets the most benefit from time invested into creating content. They also discuss the concept of TikTokification and the need of shortform content in your content strategy.

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Read the transcript

Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.

David Parry 01:02

You're listening to The SME Growth Podcast. My name is Dave Parry from Wellmeadow. And with me, as usual, is the famous Richard Buckle.

Richard Buckle 01:11

Good evening. Good evening.

David Parry 01:13

Good evening. Good evening. Good evening, not this morning. So this week, we're going to talk about a technique we're using to great effect, which we're calling leveraged content creation. Now, straightaway, that's going to need some explanation. So we'll dive straight in. And I'll let you explain that. But that's what we're talking about today.

Richard Buckle 01:34

So I'm gonna try and wake myself up a little bit. Because I'm pretty tired today.

David Parry 01:37

You've had a long day

Richard Buckle 01:38

Had a long day, but here we are. So yeah, so if I suppose one of the big topics at the moment is what you could call the TikTokification of content.

David Parry 01:49

If that's not a word, it should be! 

Richard Buckle 01:52

So if anyone's watching Instagram or TikTok and following the likes of Gary Vee, you'll hear him talk about this an awful lot. A lot of people are now talking about this TikTokification. So if you're not familiar with TikTok, then probably.. where have you been? 

David Parry 02:11

Well, I think most people probably heard about it as it's in the news a lot. But I don't know if everybody has an account

Richard Buckle 02:17

Uses it. I dabbled for a while. highly addictive. And that's because it's serving you up content the algorithm is serving, content you're going to engage with.

David Parry 02:28

I must admit, I've almost been frightened of it. I see how much I get drawn into Instagram Reels or even YouTube shorts sometimes. And I thought, Oh, my goodness, TikToks designed to do this. Wow. I'm not sure trust that 

Richard Buckle 02:39

You can see now on your Shorts how many you've actually watched?

David Parry 02:42

Oh, can you?!

Richard Buckle 02:43

It's in your settings and history and scroll across It's like, yeah, you've watched like 250 shorts!

David Parry 02:49

Does TikTok tell you that as well?

Richard Buckle 02:51

No, it just keep serving you up. I think it's a bit like a casino, isn't it? You don't want to tell people the time. So this whole thing is around rather than but, what's been pushed is it's great for people that perhaps haven't got the reach. So number of followers, that type of thing. Which is a great message for small businesses or or SMEs; Because what it actually means is that the algorithm is going to reward the quality of your content by which how you know it's engaged with

David Parry 03:21

Based on behaviours?

Richard Buckle 03:22

Based on whether people like it, share it, how long they watch it for those types of things, rather than having to have 20,000 followers on LinkedIn or, you know, 50,000 etc.

David Parry 03:32

A ready made audience. 

Richard Buckle 03:35

So really what this means that there's, there's great opportunity here to actually get in front of loads and loads of people by having content that is quality, and engaging. And that's, that's good news for people. You haven't got to build a huge audience first, you can just do something well. So that's when when it's talking about the TikTokification of content, what that really means is that was because TikTok has led the way on this. There's something like 40% of younger people, and I won't define what that is, we can all we've all got our own measure of that. But we'll look at TikTok for if you want to find a restaurant or something, about 40% of people under 25 will use TikTok to find a restaurant so that the whole platform is actually driving the behaviours of other platforms. So you've had things like Instagram with Reels, YouTube Shorts, these other platforms are having to follow

David Parry 04:29

Copying it, because it works, I suppose.

Richard Buckle 04:30

Yeah because they've they've got to keep up with the way that TikToks algorithm is serving up this content. And right below engaging with the

David Parry 04:38

I think it's worth saying at this point as well. And to be fair to Verity, she's written a fantastic blog on this.

Richard Buckle 04:44

She has indeed

David Parry 04:44

And it's ranking very well on Google at the moment. So if you Google the comparison between TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, she does a good summary of that. But I'm going to bring you back to the opening question because you've gone straight down this great new route of TikTokification and haven't yet defined what leveraged content strategy and how did that link together? Why are we talking about leverage content strategy in the context of TikTokification

Richard Buckle 05:11

I suppose why we want to talk about that is because if you've got to create content that engages your audience, you've got to try and A) create great content and B) work out what's actually engaging

David Parry 05:27

And is it about volume and quantity as well? Or is it much more about quality? Or a bit of both?

Richard Buckle 05:34

I think it's probably a bit of a equilibrium between them because you want to be able to test what's working and what isn't working. And so to do that, you've got to have a certain volume. It's no good just putting out one piece of content every other week and seeing what happens, what you'll be seeing is, you know, serious players in this space will be maybe posting 10 to 12 times a day, someone like Gary Vee saying that you should be posting you should be producing 17 to 50 pieces of content per day. 

David Parry 06:03

Lest we frighten our small business owners here. These are market marketing thought leaders experts in their fields, does that copy across? Do you think to someone who owns a machine shop or machine distributor or manufacturer, 

Richard Buckle 06:19

Maybe not quite on that scale. But I think if you you know, the and this is where we're coming up with this leverage content creation idea is to say that actually, it is possible to produce, even say, a piece of content a day, because what you don't want to do is, if you've got a reasonably narrow field, then you don't want to be producing 20 pieces of content a day, and everyone just thinks they're spamming us. If you've got a huge field, like you're an influencer, in a marketing thought leader, you've got the whole kind of marketing world to roam in. And you can produce all sorts of different content. 

David Parry 07:00

But let's be clear, wherever this is, you know, if you're, once again, a small business owner, you're not necessarily sending it all out directly to people, it's going to be on platforms, social media platforms, which is there for them to consume when they want to.

Richard Buckle 07:13

So the idea here really is to say that it is possible to create a lot of content by leveraging it up. And I guess we can get into that.

David Parry 07:27

Well, I just wanted to add on to that, then, because that's a really good reason why you need to find a way to produce a lot more content. And you're only gonna do that by doing it in a different way. You know, the way people are used to creating content is reasonably longhand, I think it's fair to say they're almost imagining creating each piece on its own as a standalone, without necessarily thinking about how do we almost mass manufacture, but customers content, so that's good anyway. But when I talk to small business owners, medium sized business owners, they're already aware that they need to producing be producing an awful lot more content than they are now they know that even without the extra argument that you've just put forward that that's the way the markets going anyway, and you need to be doing more and more of it. So it's more business owners know that they need to produce more content than they do, but they're frightened on it. Because they know it takes an awful lot of effort. And the information needed to put out into that content is in the heads or desk drawers of relatively few people in the organisation. And the last thing they want is to take those people out of circulation for a long time. And to be honest, even if they said to them, could you write me a few 1000 words on what you know, you know, let's be honest, it isn't gonna happen. Those people are very busy anyway.

So when I've talked about this idea of creating huge amounts of content from concentrated amounts of contact time, that has really made business owners is eyes light up, because they think that's it, that's the I'm going to explain how we're going to come on, they get it, it's not smoke and mirrors, it's not a magic trick. It's just a clever way of thinking about what you're trying to achieve before you start doing it. And the other thing that maybe also ticks a box and people are relieved to hear is when I've talked before about an agency helping them get their message across, especially if they've got everybody has a complex story, right? Everybody's business is unique to them. And they all know that they're the best person to tell the story. And they get very worried about the thought that some outsider is going to come in a bit like a journalist and ask them loads of questions, write it down, and then go away and produce something from that, which invariably, they won't quite get the right tone with. They maybe don't quite use the same language or the right emphasis. And they often make mistakes. Because you're having to infer things that you didn't quite get right. You're putting it into your voice.

Richard Buckle 09:48

They haven't got the passion for it

David Parry 09:51

Yeah, there's no authenticity, the expertise is coming through the filter of a journalistic interviewer and writer than from the person themselves. So Then we go on to explain how we do this. And it's the experts voice that's coming out that we're leveraging and producing hundreds of pieces of content from then that has yet another win. So I think we've hit upon three really good reasons why we needed to do this. And probably the start point was the TikTokification, the way we're all consuming video content in particular, but information generally, and not just the younger generation, is it not true that the fastest growing cohort of TikTok users is 35 to 45 year old males. So there's that really strong argument, the fact that it's a concentrated amount of time required client side, and then we do all the hard work to mushroom out into hundreds of pieces of content. And then the third point is that it's still the experts voice that's being used, rather than someone else like us writing it down, and then misinterpreting it as we reproduce it.

Richard Buckle 10:53

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's, so we can get into the process, maybe of how you can go about doing that. But I think also, it's important to note here is that when it comes to content, then a lot of people are not just afraid of, okay, it's going to take a lot of time and resource away, but just actually afraid of making content. And I think that's a bit of a mindset that You've almost got to get over and realise that big picture. Nobody really cares, in one sense, because you're just scrolling through through

David Parry 11:21

Well they probably care about what you're saying, but not about whether you're doing it like a news reader, or Gary Vee.

Richard Buckle 11:28

So it's a case of you've just got to always go back to this quote by Aristotle who says, what we must learn to do, we must learn by doing, you're never going to learn to produce good content if you never start.

David Parry 11:41

I've had that exact same discussion with people who say they can't do public speaking. Nobody can't, well, I'm gonna gonna probably be proven wrong there. But very few people can't do it, you just speak right? As long as you can speak, you can speak publicly, the reason that people don't think they can is that fear? And that's an internal construct, isn't it? how we feel about things. And like you say, the more you do it, suddenly it gets less scary.

Richard Buckle 12:02

The more you do it, it becomes more natural. And, you know, and it can be a case, you know, if we talk through our process of how we actually go about doing the content leveraging, but also it could be you could just pick a news, you could just pick something that's in the news, that's relevant to your sector, to camera a 30 seconds piece, you know, your thoughts on it. You could do that every day, you can find something every day you do that. So it's almost an even if you don't post it, it's actually quite a good discipline to just get used to seeing yourself on camera. Do a selfie, you know, I did it for a while just to kind of

David Parry 12:38

You realise that would be the perfect one. It's like the practice swinging golf is always the one that would have been great isn't the practice runs if you do a dummy recording of yourself? And who can't talk about something that they're passionate about? You know a lot about you just talk like you're talking to your mate in the pub

Richard Buckle 12:52

Find an angle.

David Parry 12:54

So, how do you do that? There's a magic spell here that we keep teasing people that we we've concocted what is it?

Richard Buckle 13:01

So maybe if I just talk through an example of how we've what we've done,

David Parry 13:05

You did a good one the other week, why don't you use that.

Richard Buckle 13:08

So we had client come in. And we before they came, we'd prepared, say 20 questions that we were looking to get answers for around a particular subject.

David Parry 13:22

Were they done with a sort of collaborative work with the expert?

Richard Buckle 13:27

I mean, you could do that. In this case, we just, you know, we knew what we were looking for, because we had an idea of what kind of content we wanted to put out.

David Parry 13:33

And you can see what other people have done where the gaps are in the search market. You can even go and ask an AI bot, you know, what are the most important things to know about XYZ subject?

Richard Buckle 13:42

So we came up with a list of questions, and we had about 20 questions or so. And the idea when when we sat down to video it so that's one of the things you want to do when a video is that's pretty accessible nowadays, I mean, you can

David Parry 13:54

well, if you're watching this on Spotify, here we are, we're videoing it.

Richard Buckle 13:57

And again, you don't have to have fancy cameras. Obviously, the production value is important,

David Parry 14:04

These iPhones are flippin amazing, aren't they? And Androids, it's phenomenal quality 

Richard Buckle 14:09

I've just got the new 14 with the Duplo camera thing going on at the front. So you can use an iPhone. So we sat down and we videoed a client. And the idea was to try and keep the answers as concise as possible. So try not to let the answers turn into a rambling 

David Parry 14:35

Do you have to train the client or do you have too few practice runs?

Richard Buckle 14:39

We didn't, he was reasonably well trained not trained with good at what he was doing. So quite passionate about it. The trick the trick really is for the interviewer not to you know I've got this horrible thing I always get told off for doing that kind of active listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, interrupting because then that comes across on the actual video. So I don't talk. So, we've got this say 25 to 30 minutes then of video. 

David Parry 15:08

So it's 20 questions. Takes about half an hour. And you're getting people used to the idea of one one and a half minute answer is rapid fire. You don't dwell.

Richard Buckle 15:17

It was rapid fire and it was it was in fairness like off the cuff. Really? Yeah, because we've given a little bit of warning that we want to do it. But actually, a lot of it was kind of,

David Parry 15:24

And you find it works better that way not overly rehearsed.

Richard Buckle 15:28

I think it depends on who's answering. So if someone's quite natural in front of the camera, if someone's quite happy to do that, then and that comes with practice most of the time, then that that's fine,

David Parry 15:40

A scripted answer probably is a bit too far the other way

Richard Buckle 15:43

Yeah, you don't want someone looking down all the time and reading it, because that's going to come across well as, but if you've got someone who's passionate about their subject knowledge and about their subject, once they warm to the theme, normally, you're going to get good content. So the idea is then to is to get those kind of little one to two minute nuggets for each question. So once we've got those, obviously, we've got 20 pieces of content already So the full answer to each question. And then keep telling now we're up to 20. So each of those could well be a blog, they might be a bit short, the way that we structured the questions was that we could have maybe every two or three answers could actually sit together and make a blog between them. So out of 20 questions, you're gonna get, say, six, seven blogs. Yeah, maybe great. And the way to do that quickly, is to try and just transcribe use something like Otter AI.

David Parry 16:41

Otter is quite incredible, other transcription services are available

Richard Buckle 16:45

Not sponsored, yet. But you can transcribe it. So that's quick, and then kind of work it into a blog. But then what we did with the each of those videos, so you know, two minute video doesn't sound like a lot. But let's say average attention span now is seven, eight seconds.

David Parry 17:04

What did you say?

Richard Buckle 17:05

Exactly, so if you're still listening, listeners, great. So for each each video, we made maybe three to four shorts out of that. So a short would be something in the region of seven to 20 seconds.

David Parry 17:22

So this is taken out of the 60 to 90 second long form answer, which is still pretty rapid fire, you grabbing what you might call sound bites, if you hear on the news, 

Richard Buckle 17:31

Yes, something like this sort of thing

David Parry 17:32

Something that you'd hear on a news summary

Richard Buckle 17:34

Anything you think actually, this is interesting enough for me to draws you in for more see a little bit more

David Parry 17:39

Yeah, the ad for the ad.

Richard Buckle 17:40

So for our 20, you know, 20 initial questions, we've now got, say three or four for each, three or four shorts

David Parry 17:49

I forgot to count my blogs so 7 blogs.

Richard Buckle 17:52

Then say 60/80 plus the original videos, 100 plus the blogs, maybe 110. So you've got 110 pieces of content there

David Parry 18:00

That is not including the transcripts, which could be used separately review separately. And can the whole thing be used as one ensemble?

Richard Buckle 18:06

Yeah we can do it as one, one big, you know, you're really into the subject, and you wanted to do that

David Parry 18:11

And you could write an e book around that, if it was enough 

Richard Buckle 18:14

And that was that was part of the purpose of it actually was to produce an ebook. So we're using these, these shorts and all this content to promote an ebook, which is then part of a bigger lead gen strategy. So that's, that's the purpose of it. But as you say, each short isn't just a shortened clip of a particular question. We're trying different styles. So some of them might be the interviewee on camera, just saying something for a couple of seconds, we might do one that's got an illustration or an animation on it, we might do one that is just you sometimes see the same little same waves in the text popping up. So we're trying all sorts of different because you don't know which combo is going to actually work. And that's the great thing about That's the beauty of it isn't you don't know and no one else knows either. So try it. Try it, Experiment, see what works as it was already once Is it a particular type of content? Is it is it you know, big picture stuff, detailed technical stuff, the way that it's displayed. So, so anyway, so we were taking that initial 20 minute interview with very little actual preparation

David Parry 19:17

20 questions, half an hour

Richard Buckle 19:18

20 questions. Half an hour, very little prep on behalf of the client subject matter expert interviewee. And so already, we're up to say 100 120 pieces of content.

David Parry 19:33

We're just we're just talking about a video and maybe if your transcripts, few blogs, we've still got all the image assets that can come from that stills of it. Maybe infographics, you can join out of it. And then we've got you got all the channels as well because you need a slightly different formats

Richard Buckle 19:47

So I'd say Well, that's that's then so you've got a sort of content production or content creation of actually making it Yeah, content of doing the interview coming up with the questions and everything in content production. That's what I say by making all of these shorts coming up with these images, assets all that. And then you've got the content distribution, which is where you're looking at all your different channels. So LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or so, you know, let's just take those five, for example. Now you might want a different style and a different approach from TikTok to LinkedIn, different users, different audience. But if you take those 120 pieces of content now and you put each one of those across those five, you know, you're at least 500 individual bits of content then for that 20 minute interview. So, from that you're getting a huge amount of data to say, Well, what what is working, what isn't working? What do we do more of?

David Parry 20:47

And of course, it can be spread out over a reasonable period of time as well. So one concern that I've heard back and I had to start with myself was if you've got a subject matter expert, saying something which takes them, in your case, half an hour, but you can do an hour versions, well, we've done that before, you produce an awful lot of content from it. If that then goes out almost back to back on the various channels, you're going to be pretty sick and tired of hearing if that person all the time, aren't you. And the trick is not to do that, but to spread it out and have other people in the gaps. So I suppose if you're really clever at this, you'd find three different subject matter experts on different topics within a business, do this treatment of half an hour to an hour's with a very structured interview, but unstructured, unprepared answers, and then interleave it so that every if you're doing you take one piece of content a day, you mentioned earlier, so it's every third day, you see the same person again. So if you're in that channel, you're seeing a whole variety of people. And that's just for three. Now imagine if that content you've just talked about could be a few 100 pieces of content by the time you've scaled it up across the channels. And that was just from a half hour interview. There's the hour version, which gives you more that could easily last six months, surely.

Richard Buckle 21:58

And depending on the subject, it could be evergreen as well. You've, you've always got that content to go back to

David Parry 22:03

You can cycle around again.

Richard Buckle 22:05

And then what you see some people doing is they say, Well, this is what we said last year, two years, three years ago. Let's come back now, three years later, and see we'll give an update to update on it. Where are we right, you know,

David Parry 22:16

Have our forecasts come true? Have the state of the art changed?

Richard Buckle 22:19

Exactly. New technology, whatever examples. So. So there is that? I think the I think that's that's right, you don't want to just see the same person all the time on someone's LinkedIn feed or you know, social feed. There's a little bit of personal brand building, potentially, you can run

David Parry 22:39

for someone like Gary Vee, maybe. But if we're talking about small businesses here, they're trying to show a very broad front. We are not just one person, there's lots of people here, you can talk to lots of experts. 

Richard Buckle 22:49

So there is that I think it's important as well, to say that this is a good, almost backbone content strategy. So you already know you've always got stuff going out. I think it's still important to say you've got to do stuff that's relevant and current as it were, yeah. And stay at the forefront of things. And again, there's other ways of doing that, that you can you can do quite quickly. It's almost, you know, short form content leveraging and 

David Parry 23:15

But if this fills that base load, you can still do your seasonal work, which overlays on top of that you can do your reacting to news and events, which overlays on top of that, and then this fills into all the gaps in between, 

Richard Buckle 23:26

I think as well, it probably starts to help change the culture a little bit, when you see content going out a lot more, then it becomes a lot more familiar in the organisation, it becomes a lot more part of the way that we do things, hopefully, people get more at ease with creating content, they can see, sometimes it's, it's quite hard for people to visualise what this content is gonna look like. So they think well, I you know, it's my face that's going out, I don't want to be embarrassed, you know, my friends, colleagues, professional connections, that type of there. So

David Parry 24:00

I get that. And I can relate to that when we started doing podcasts or when we've promoted economic reports before. In the early days, when you coming from nothing to doing something it provokes comment. And other people, even amongst business friends and social circle who are aware of our output. They comment on it, say, I've seen you doing an awful lot on LinkedIn, you're always seeing your face cropping up. But after a while, it just becomes Oh, you're another one of those experts. I see a lot because there are a few other people out there giving educational interesting content all the time, you just join the ranks of them. And that gives you a certain status of absolutely someone that might have something to say worth listening to.

Richard Buckle 24:37

So I think it's a great it's a great opportunity. I think the situation or the zeitgeist is that it's all about content now. It's all about engaging content, creating content, trying new, it's adding adding value into your content, rather than just having a huge network that you can pump it out to.

David Parry 24:58

I'm just looping back around to where we started. From now on, why is it and I'm just sort of mentally checking the boxes off as to how we're delivering it is definitely catching the zeitgeist, like you say, The TikTokificication, the shorter attention span, the educational content on these different platforms, pretty much video lead following, generating other types of content thereafter. It also definitely ticks the box of efficient use of busy people's time. And that's where outsiders like us can leverage, which is why we call it the leverage content strategy. But we can use a small amount of interaction time to produce all this stuff. And then there's that third point, we've said, we don't write anything new ourselves. And we fill in the gaps and embellish and so on. But it's the, it's the clients, experts voice that is being heard, literally, or at least transcripted, depending on how that's being put out. So fantastic way of giving clients that tremendous amount of output. And we're using this technique to be able to do that to leverage it for them

Richard Buckle 25:56

Absolutely. And then I think off the back of that, just to maybe wrap it up a bit is to say, you're getting a huge amount of data from this as well, you can you can treat this not just as a way of adding value and getting good content out there, but a way of actually working out what's working, what isn't working, what's your audience actually wanting to hear from you. Because you can produce a lot of content using this. And depending on how you you know where you put it.

David Parry 26:28

You need to do a few, measure the results, your work standard carry on doing the same old, same old learn from what's happened. And then think, well, that type of output worked. Well, this subject worked well. 

Richard Buckle 26:38

And again, this is I mean, I was watching something the other day, someone on Instagram, who's got a large following. So they've obviously got the data, but they would say we know, after 20 minutes, whether or not a post is working or not, because we have our numbers that we know if it hasn't hit this, you know, 1000 likes or shares or whatever, within a certain amount of time, that piece of content isn't working. So they'll take it down rework it then have another go. So that's clearly if that's your business, then

David Parry 27:12

Yeah, that's not necessarily for the people listening to this

Richard Buckle 27:15

But I think the same principle can apply have put something up and measure it. Don't just put things out for the sake of putting things out. Nobody wants to see pictures of cats or whatever, you know, unless

David Parry 27:31

We've seen this, and Twitter seems the worst for this sort of thing I found people feel they need to tweet something several times a day and they resort to the cat playing video isn't that type of thing and why they think just eyeballs for the sake of it is gonna help their business I don't know

Richard Buckle 27:47

Don't fall for vanity metrics 

David Parry 27:49

So yeah, that's been a good round up of what we call our leverage content strategy, which can help people so thanks very much Rich. Thanks for explaining that so clearly. You've been listening to The SME Growth Podcast. And as ever, I was asked you to like and follow podcasts wherever you get your podcasts from, but more importantly, tell your friends and colleagues in other businesses that we're here and that we're worth a listen. And in the meantime, good luck with your businesses and hope you tune in next week. Bye now.

Further resources

If you want to read our blog comparing TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, click here.

We also have a great blog on repurposing content with suggestions on how you can use different forms of content.