Jeff Harrison breaks down three principles for better content: be entertaining with music and varied visuals, be educational with data and clear objectives, and be engaging by asking questions and changing shots every few seconds. Target your ideal customer and you'll see better results.
Hey, let's face it. There's nothing worse than putting your heart and soul in something. Whether it's a written blog, it's social media posts, it's a video, and it's just crickets. Nobody watches your video, nobody reads your article, nobody gives you a like or share on your social media post. And you're thinking, why would I do this? Why would I do it? Well, I want you to think of it like this. If I made cookies and it didn't taste good, someone might nibble at it, but then they don't come back for more. So we want to make what we do worth coming back for, worth taking more than a nibble. And there's three things that you can do to help do that. One is be entertaining. Two is being educational, and three is being engaging. Now, let's break that down, because I think sometimes when people think about, well, I want to be entertaining, well, that means I need to be juggling or I need to be telling jokes or, you know, I've got magic tricks. If. If you can do those things, fantastic. Work it into your presentation. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is having appropriate background music, making it entertaining. I want you to think about this. When's the last time you watched a movie that had no background music? Just doesn't occur. Because what happens is music engages other parts of our brain to keep us interested. So when the music goes up or down, it will entertain our audience. So I want you to consider that. Am I adding music to my content? If it's a video, if it's a podcast, okay. If it's a still image, are you using the right type of looks? In other words, you know, sometimes we can just put a stock photo up there. And let's face it, we all know it's a stock photo. I'd recommend doing this. Getting in front of your camera and taking a bunch of different still shots of you doing different things, pointing, looking, confused, all these things. And then put you in each one of those social media posts and make sure it connects with that audience. That's entertainment. The other thing you could do if you're making a video is put text on screen whenever you're making video and you make a point, a key point, put that information on screen again. It engages more of our senses and. And it is more entertaining to watch. We've all been in that situation where someone just talks and talks and talks, or we just read and read and read. There's no break in it. Well, we want to add some breaks in there. So the on screen text, if you're a video, if you're, if you're a blog post, put some images in there, break up the text, put an engaging headline in there, make it bold, make it what they call an H2 headline. In other words, it's bigger than the rest of your content. It helps us give that feeling like, oh, there's a break coming up, or there's a change of pace. That's entertaining. Another thing you can do is be educational. And when you start doing an educational video, now, I want to point something out. Not every video you do is educational. Sometimes it's just, it's just entertainment. You're just entertaining somebody, right? You're not educating them. But if you are educating them, have things that will support that. It might be data. If you're doing a case study, show that case study. If you're doing some data, put it on an infographic, put it on the screen, maybe do some charts. These are things that people will remember beyond exactly what you said, but they'll remember that chart that showed that there was 73% this and 30 or 27% this. And you want to be aware of the 73%. So use that for educational and, and also remind people, hey, why are you here? The goal of today is to do what to help you make content that will get more action. Now, the third thing is engaging. Now, when I talk about engaging, I'm talking about making some eye contact, maybe putting a pause, maybe saying, hey, click the button below asking a question. Let me ask you, what two things could you do to be engaging with your audience? What? Whether you're writing a social media post or it's a video or a podcast. Well, you know, most of us say, well, we could ask questions to be more engaging. Well, you can do exactly the same thing. Even though this video is something that I recorded a while ago, it's not live, in other words. So if I ask you to stop the video right now, and I want you to write down two things that you can do when you're presenting your content that would make you more engaging, what would that be? When I do a live presentation, a lot of times I'll leave the stage and I'll walk among the audience and I will have a conversation with someone in the audience. And what that does is I'm engaging that one person. But when I do that, everyone else becomes more engaged because they're looking to see, hey, oh, he's got something he wants to share. And tell with this one person. But I want to make sure not to miss it. This is engagement, right? There's a thing when we're making videos and therefore clients, you know, we say we don't want to keep the same picture on screen more than a five seconds. In fact, it might be in that three to five seconds where we're changing things up. It might be changing the pace of the music, it might be changing the B roll, it might be changing my position on camera. It might be changing my hand. It might. Whatever it is, it's keeping things moving. Because if I just stand here and I don't move around, it gets boring very quickly. So those are the three things we talked about. One, be entertaining. Two, be educational if it's appropriate. And three, be engaging. Be engaging. Those are the type of things people remember. Here's a bonus tip. Now lean in real close. You see what I did there? I got you to engage, is make sure that your ideal customer that you're making this content for, it's something they want. Something they want. When I thought about making this, I didn't think, hey, this is something I want to share with people because no one cares. No, you can go to YouTube right now and say, you know, what's the reason I don't have a lot of views on my videos? There's a lot of content there. Why? Because a lot of people are asking that question. Nobody likes you. It's like, hey, if I started a diet and I keep doing the diet, it doesn't work. Guess what? I'm going to stop the diet. Well, the same thing with this. If I keep making content and it's not effective, I'm going to do one of two things. I'm either going to stop or I'm going to start investigating on what other people are doing that they're getting a lot of views, they're getting a lot of shares. There are a lot of people going to the website to read their blogs. What are they doing that I'm not? Because I need to fill in that gap. I hope this has made sense to you today. My name is Jeff Harrison with Swing Point Media. We're a digital marketing agency and we help customers, mainly local businesses using automation and AI to generate more ideal customers. Thanks for joining me today. I hope this makes sense. I'd love for you to do me a favor. I'd like to see you put in the comments your best takeaway from today's message. Thank you.
