How to Make the Most of Text and Video on Your Website

How can you make the most of both written and video content when you're using those to make the most of your message? Well, that's exactly what we're talking about today on this episode of What's Missing from This Message. I'm your host, Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com. All right, let's take a look. At Tara's website. All right, first, starting right with the title, a very curiosity-inducing title, Death by Boredom and the Guacamole Hangover. Now, this is very intriguing as far as maybe like a book title goes, particularly if it were like fiction, because those are the kinds of titles that you want. You're like, huh, what is this? There must be an amazing story here. And frankly, Tara does tell an amazing story, but the real purpose of this particular blog post is to get people to respond to, engage, in and hire her for some of the content that she's eventually driving to. So one of the things I often say is that you never want to sacrifice clarity for cleverness, particularly when you're using your messaging to move forward something about your business. You want to make sure that the thing that you can do for your audience is front and center in that particular title. Now, she could solve this super easily just by saying, "How to Avoid Causing Death by Boredom," right? You know, even when there's a guacamole hangover. Now I know, A, you're gonna do something for me that's really useful. You're gonna help me avoid death by boredom, presumably in my audience, and you've added that intrigue of, well, what's a guacamole hangover? So adding that relevance right from the title is a really important thing, whether you're talking about a piece of content or your website, or frankly the title of a talk or something like that. Start with relevance. That's— you have to have relevance before you have curiosity, so make sure you always have that. Okay, let's go on through what she's doing here. Now the next thing she starts doing, as I mentioned, is she tells a really interesting story. She's kind of putting the reader right in this situation where it's almost 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you need coffee, you had a big old guac-laden burrito from Chipotle at lunch, and you are sleepy, and then though you're in a meeting where Skip, the chief project officer, has to roll out the new strategy. And then I love how she supports the kind of visual feeling here, like you are tired and this is not going to go well. Okay, so you— again, I love the storytelling here. Um, there's a little bit of wondering where it's going, particularly because there's not that clue in the title right now. I mean, the clue is death by boredom, but again, I don't know that there's a payoff for me, the reader. So as good as her storytelling is, again, it's so strong that the way to make this stronger is to make sure that we know up front that there will be a payoff. She doesn't have to tell us what the answer is at the top, but she does have to tell us some way that there's, there's going to be a payoff for this awesome story that she's telling. And then she is creating this situation now, setting up where she's talking about at some point he finally says, okay, that's about it. Thoughts? Where there's silence. Now I love this story because A, we've been in this situation. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon. You're getting that kind of like lull. You're in a meeting where somebody seems super excited about what they're presenting and you are not. That person asks for questions and then it's crickets. Okay. So what I, so the ability to put somebody right into that situation, in one way Tara's being super meta because she's actually recommending that later in her post. Which I love. So yay for Meta! Um, there's two things here to think about. One is that she's put us in the, in the situation of the audience, um, and not of Skip. And I just wonder actually what would have happened if she had actually put the audience, you know, us the reader, in the role of Skip, because the advice that she's giving is actually for Skip, uh, for the presenter who is excited about this and is just asks this question, any questions, any ideas, and gets nothing in response. That's a situation we've all been in on both sides. And by starting with the audience, we kind of think of like, she's leading us to think about what could we, the audience, do differently. Now, to be said, this is my own opinion, obviously, but by doing this, one of the things that she may have been doing was kind of neutralize it and say, hey, I'm sure you've never been in this situation, but what about Skip. If that's the motivation here, again, I think it works. Just be conscious sometimes if you're using storytelling that you need to help the audience map from the story to themselves so they can follow along, and they're like, oh, I am supposed to identify with Skip, not the person who's got the guacamole hangover. Okay, um, so I love how she uses this story, puts the audience right in there, and then she uses that as a setup for this talk to the brain tip that she's got. And what doing with this post is that she's surrounding a video where she's giving the specific tip with a little bit more information. I recognize this. I do this with my own content as well, where I'm like, hey, here's this video, also here's some content which is related but not exactly the same content that's in the video. So it makes sense. It kind of allows people to go deeper or kind of just watch the video. Either way, they're going to get value. So I think that's really well done. So I like how she pays off what could Skip have done differently with, hey, we've got this talk to the brain tip that's gonna help you in beating boredom, whether virtual or in person, with any size audience, and it's easy to employ. I love this payoff right here. This leads me though to this interesting use that she's got of boldface. Now, I typically love boldface. I probably love it too much when I talk about online writing because I am a big fan of making it work for the scan, right? You want somebody to scan through, and even if they don't read everything, you want them to catch their eye on enough stuff that your message comes across. So if we go back, and I'm— this— there is a point here. So, um, and that is I think there's a way that she could use her boldfacing a little bit differently. Um, because if we go back and look at what she is highlighting here, she's highlighting, "You're in serious need of caffeine. You raise your eyebrows into a fresh Botox stare." which aside from the, yeah, may or may not make her audience feel like she is talking to them because maybe not everybody identifies with that. Just a note. Bullets and lists, charts and graphs, a lot of data, new load of KPIs, silence, he waits. I guess I'm not the only one with a guacamole hangover. So if I were scanning this, I might have thought that Skip was the one with the guacamole hangover. And in fact, I did actually the first time that I read this and I was like, oh, oh, oh, it's, It's the person who's telling the story is saying out loud, "I'm not the only one with a guacamole hangover." But you see the pattern here is that if instead she'd kind of highlighted, you know, that you are, you know, you're in serious need of caffeine, but then I would also highlight you have to be in a 3 o'clock meeting where Skip, the chief project officer, will roll out the new strategy. So now we've got the context and now we've got a little bit of the problem, right? You're in need of caffeine, but you have to go to this meeting. Then I think, you know, you can kind of talk about Skip did not have the burrito bowl for lunch. He's, you know, that's one to highlight. And then you can highlight again, I think, probably the bullets and lists, charts and graphs and whatever. And then you've got this— then I think what's missing potentially from the story is, oh my gosh, what is Skip's reaction? Because again, if we're trying to empathize with Skip, and if we are really meant to like avoid Skip's issues, then we want to see how Skip feels about this comment that the storyteller just told. Okay, then I would definitely highlight what Skip could have done differently because that's the point of the post, right? Like, so she's got this information here, but make sure we see it. That's super important. And then I would highlight The kind of this whole thing, what can aid in beating boredom, whether virtual, in person, any size audience, and it's easy to employ. That's the point that we, the viewer, needs to see in order to feel like, okay, this 2-minute video is going to be worth it. So I would say sacrifice the, the, the, the boldface on the call to action here and make sure that you've actually used your boldface to create the case for taking that action. Okay, I'm not gonna play this video for you. I encourage you to go to Teracyte and watch it for yourself. It's actually a lovely— it's a lovely video. I'm gonna scroll forward so you can see that she's got— I love her color— she's got a great— I've got a— she's got a great setup, and she gives you a lot of really powerful information in 2 minutes. She gets straight to the point of what she's gonna give you. She tells— gives you a little bit of science to support what she's about to tell you, and then she gives you a very specific tip about question infusion and then gives you 3 qualities that those questions need to be. And I'm just looking at my notes here. She said they need to be individualized, thought-provoking, and relevant. Okay, so I want to bring that up because that content of individual, thought-provoking, and relevant actually doesn't show up in the blog post. And That's really just a question for me, because you're always taking— you're always making a choice when you put a video into a blog post like this, and having to kind of accept some element of human nature, which is that probably very few people will both read the post and watch the video. So it's a, it's a question for you about where you want, where you want to put the most important information. So this is really a question back to Tara. Is it more important that people understand the qualities of effective question infusion, of having that individualized, thought-provoking, and relevant? Is that more important than what she puts in the article, or are they both important, and therefore there's this element of what's in the video that should be repeated in the article? My gut would tell me that The video is a really nice introduction, and if someone wanted to know a little bit more, then they would kind of go and dig deeper into the post. At that point, I think it's important to make sure there's a connection beyond just the topic of question infusion to those 3 elements of individualized, thought-provoking, and relevant. Now, that said, what she gives you in the article is really good. You know, she's talking about, you know, here's, you know, the tip is question infusion, and She explains immediately what it is. "Make it a habit to infuse your talks with questions and you will keep listeners listening." Then she goes on and says, "Okay, they're designed to do a specific thing, and because of that, you know, that's why we should be doing it." So, I think what we've got here is she's got a nice little baby red thread where she's saying, "Hey, you want to do this, you want to engage people, and you know you wanna ask questions, but the kind of question is important." Truth statement, the questions are artfully curated to encourage vulnerability, active engagement, spark creative new perspective, and then change. That's why we should be asking questions. If I were doing kind of a red thread analysis on this, there's two things here that I would think would make it a little bit stronger. Make sure that she's explained outside of the video why the best questions are artfully created, curated to encourage vulnerability, active engagement, spark creative new perspective. Because without that, it's hard for me as a first-time reader of this to go, oh, absolutely that's true. Now in the video, she gives us some science behind it, and that's the little piece that I would pull forward here to the post to make it even stronger. Um, and then on the change here, we should still be asking questions. Um, I think she could again make it a little bit stronger and reinforce her great message here by giving us a little bit more specificity about the kind of questions. And this is where the individualized, um, thought-provoking and relevant piece could come back in. And then she's got a nice tight package that is related to the video, and then she's going through and giving additional information. Now one thing I would recommend that she do is break out these two types. So she goes deeper here in the post, so thumbs up for that, by giving us two types of questions that achieve what she's talking about in both the video and the article. One's the leading role question, and you see this other one here is this kind of say my name question. And then explains how that works. I would, again, for, for scannability, break those two out and maybe even set them up. So right after she's done this piece where she's introducing it, hey, these are the kinds of questions you should ask, there's two types that you can start using right away. Bullet, leading girl question. Bullet, say my name. And then take and then split and then use these explanatory pieces under that. So we're just really tracking with her, understanding the value, kind of seeing on a scan that she's about— that there's information she's giving us, a very specific thing to do, or two very specific things to do. And it just helps us kind of go through it even more. So when she's talking about the individual types of questions, she does actually go back into some of the science she talks about up in the, in the video. But again, if some of that, even briefly, that, that science in the video makes its way into the post, this all hangs together even even better than what she's got right now. Um, so the last thing I want to point out, because I think she does it really, really well, is that she does a beautiful transition here to a call to action, which is great. Um, she's got, talk to the brain tip to infuse— it's, is to infuse your presentation with carefully crafted questions, repeats the point, question infusion, and then ties it to a thing that is something that she is ostensibly, I think, selling through here, through On Pointe. Um, I would love if 10+2 components of a winning presentation were linked to something so that I didn't have to go digging through her site to go find it. But she did a great job kind of saying, hey, if you like this, this is the thing that I can tell you even more about in this particular thing that we're doing. So, um, and then I love this kind of humor at the end of just like Okay, let's pile on the guac. So overall, this is a really strong message, strongly presented in both written and video form. So kudos to Tara for that. What's missing from it? I think just a connection between those pieces of the video content and the article content to encourage people to move from one to the other. Always there's a theme of how can you help people with scannability of your website, but really I think the big lesson here is think about when you've got multiple forms of content within one post, make sure that those things tie to each other and that they add on each other so no matter where somebody starts, they're engaged, they're curious, they're connected, and they want to keep watching, keep listening to the important message message that you've got. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com. If you want me to take a look at your message, send it to me at redthreadme@tamsenwebster.com, and you might just see it here on a future episode. Thanks so much.