In this solo presentation, video strategist Sheryl Plouffe explains her 4P framework—Plan, Produce, Publish, Promote—as a practical roadmap for creating weekly video content. She argues that the expert should retain ownership of the first two steps (planning ideas and being on‑camera during production) because they involve intellectual property and personal branding, while a virtual assistant (VA) can handle logistical support in planning, as well as the repetitive, technical tasks of publishing and promotion using SOPs, project‑management tools (ClickUp, Trello, Asana) and mind‑maps. Sheryl distinguishes between a VA’s organizational skill set and a specialist video editor’s technical expertise, recommending outsourcing editing to a professional editor rather than a VA. She also describes her agency’s virtual video production system, which extracts the client’s “nuggets of wisdom” from existing content to create new videos without speaking for the client. The talk concludes with actionable tips for delegating publishing and promotion to a VA and encourages viewers to explore more of her weekly content.
Chapters
How will the videos get produced? Sheryl Plouffe here, Video Strategist, and unfortunately videos don't fall from the sky, so you have to get the videos made somehow. I always teach my 4P framework, and I'll tell you what it is. It's to plan, to produce, to publish, and to promote. The 4P framework is how I create my content every week, and it's how I teach my clients to create their content every week. The parts that you as the expert, leader, resource, and authority in your niche need to have your hands in are the first two. It's the planning and the producing that I believe, especially if you're building your online presence, you're at that stage where you've been maybe an authority in what you do for a long time, but you're building your online presence now and video production is maybe a little newer to you and you're getting into the routine of consistent content, you know, every single week. Let's take this video, for example. I did not consult with my virtual assistant to ask her to give me the inspiration or the ideas to come up with this topic. This came from me because I'm the expert. So I don't ask my VA for inspiration on what videos I should do. That is intellectual property. It's my ideas, my thoughts, my expert opinion and insights that I'm sharing. And so the planning process is, is that it's coming up with the ideas and conceptualizing it. Your VA is likely not going to conceptualize a video that's going to be, you know, standing in the place of your own thoughts. So the planning really is and lies with you. Can they help from a logistical standpoint? Yeah, a VA can help in the planning process from a logistics standpoint, let's say, to manage a spreadsheet of ideas that you came up with that you ask your VA to put in the spreadsheet, you see. So logistically they can help. But as far as the planning of the topics and the content itself, if you are the expert, it really should be coming from you. I'll give you an example. In the agency side of my business at Sheryl Plouffe Media Inc., We do virtual video production, and with that, we will work with the client to do all 4 of these steps, but we're not putting the words in their mouths. We're actually creating a system. We've created a system whereby we extract out the nuggets of wisdom and the smart things that you've said on video, and that's what we make your video from. From. So we're never positioning ourselves to be your voice. It's always coming from your voice. The second part of the 4P framework is to produce the content. Now, if you're in the early stages of creating your content, there is a lot to be said for the process. You know, in many cases, clarity of your brand message comes from the process of creating the content. So I like to suggest that experts and, and speakers and authors who are building their online presence do have a hand in the production of their videos. You definitely want to be the person on camera or a representative of your company, but let's presume it's you. You definitely want to be the person who is on camera connecting with your audience. The recording is you. However, the editing might be you depending on your level of of interest, of time, and other factors that may determine whether you should or should not be editing your own videos. The editing could be something that's outsourced. That could be— now I would not necessarily suggest it's a VA. A VA is going to be someone who really has specific skill sets, and typically they're very good with organization and file management, things like that. An editor, an actual video editor, is a very specialized skill. So you could outsource the editing, likely not to a VA, but rather to an actual video editor. So planning is, is with you. Producing is with you, with an exception, a little asterisk that the editing could be outsourced. So the third step of the 4P framework is to publish the content. Now the publishing can be done by a VA. This tends to be a very technical step. It's a lot of button pushing. It's a lot of repetitive tasks. And if you're working with a virtual assistant and you have an SOP or a standard operating procedure that you've laid out step by step, maybe you're using a project management tool like we do. We use ClickUp. You might be using Trello or something like that, or Asana. You could be working with your VA and saying, okay, here's the process every single week when I make my video to publish it here, to publish it there. That's one thing that we do., where we have an actual whole mind map that we'll create and provide to, in this case, my VA for my own content. We give her the mind map and say, okay, here is exactly where we want all this content to go so that we get the ultimate exposure to the content that we're creating. And then the fourth step in the 4P framework is the promotion of the video, and the promotion could also be something outsourced to a VA. This could include things like emailing it out, emailing the video out to your email list or to your database, including your video in your blog, promoting it that way. Some other, you know, other ways that you could be promoting, maybe using the link in a communication with someone through DM. You know, these are different ways that you could utilize your video content to promote and get more leverage the content that you've created. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to check out these other videos on my channel. New videos every Thursday.
