Special guest Brittany Berger is a content marketing consultant and the creator of the Content Remix Method. She is bringing her knowledge to the eStreamly Social Commerce Community.  She helps and teaches small businesses how to use content repurposing to get off the constant content treadmill and avoid content burnout. Brittany discusses the advantages of reusing live shopping event videos for social media and marketing. We address the appropriate length for a live stream and the value of having a content strategy that focuses on results. We additionally cover social media burnout, the danger of content fatigue, and the role of automation in generating and repurposing information. Brittany shares her experience with personal branding and how it has affected her mental health.

 

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Content Remixing: How To Get More Results From Repurposing Live Video Content With Brittany Berger

Our special guest is Brittany Berger, who’s a Content Marketing Consultant and the Creator of The Content Remix Method. She helps and teaches small businesses how to use content repurposing to get off the constant content treadmill and avoid content burnout. That speaks to us over at eStreamly because we believe that you won’t benefit from the live stream content, you can benefit from repurposing your live content. Not just going live and then being done with it, but using the recording of those live shopping events that you’re doing and turning them into lots of social media posts. I’m curious, what is the average length of a live shopping video event? Is it 30 minutes or 1 hour?

Years ago, we were saying people go from 15 to 20 minutes, now to more like 30 minutes type of lengths. We’re starting to see some of them pushing to the hour, though, but it’s not very frequent. People like the 30-minute mark. I think it’s because we’ve pushed quite a bit of people trying to go on the 30-minute lengths because we see a pick of audience in the 20 minutes.

Especially when you create a live event, you have the fact that, “The live is live,” but then not everyone is ready at that specific moment. You may have your kids to take care of. You may be cooking or your boss is on the phone, and then you are trying to jump in. We’re seeing more people coming in after a period of time. If you stop at that moment, it’s a shame to lose some of that audience.

Those details are helpful because maybe at the end of this episode, people who are working on going live for the first time or revamping their live stream strategy can look at it from a different angle. To your point, if you benefit from a longer live stream because you might be able to increase your audience and your engagement, then you might as well keep going live for that.

Also, the benefits of remixing and repurposing your content as we’re going to talk about. The longer the video you make while live, the more pieces of content you can extract from it, and then you can spread that out over your social media strategy and do that over a long period of time. One live video can be helpful for your overall marketing strategy. We’re very excited to talk to Brittany about that. Before we do, Nicolas has an update on what’s going on behind the scenes at eStreamly.

One of the things I wanted to update on the eStreamly side quickly is we are working quite extensively on analytics. One of the things that excites me personally is one of the new metrics we are bringing on, which is, “Where is your audience coming from? What type of device and the origin of that audience? Is it coming from Facebook, YouTube or Instagram?” It gives you more granular information as far as the origin. You have a more sense of which platform to you you should be focusing on as you grow your video commerce strategy.

That’s the news and then we also were a feature and got a world of most innovative company in Georgia. We’re pretty excited about that. Congrats to the team. I’m very excited about getting into this conversation. If you may, I’d love to start and kick off because I do have a pressing question for you, Brittany. I wanted to first start by defining the notion of repurposing because I think it can be used in many ways.

When I think about repurposing, I’m thinking, “I have a piece of content and I chop it up, then reuse that same piece of content.” As I was thinking through that, I was like, “Are you repurposing the content from the actual production of the content or you’re repurposing the idea of the content?” For instance, if you have a piece of an idea that you are declining into a blog post, are you taking that and saying, “You should repurpose and create a video and podcast out of it?” It’s the same idea. You are just repurposing it in a way. I’d love to know your thought. How would you define repurposing and in what context?

This is a great question that I get a lot and is honestly part of the reason that I use the term content remixing more than content repurposing because I do feel like people come to this practice with a lot of preexisting ideas. A lot of people think of repurposing content as turning one long-form video into 40 pieces of social media content or whatever, like the practice and the hustle culture people love to talk about. That’s why I do like to use my own term. I feel like a lot of people think of repurposing content as reposting or re-editing quickly, something like that, reposting the same video on Instagram, TikTok and stuff like that.

To me, that’s a very narrow definition of how we can reuse content. I like to look at content remixing as the larger umbrella of all of the ways you can get new results from old content. That might mean taking a video and chopping it up into social clips. That can also mean taking a blog post idea and making a video out of it. That could also mean taking an idea from an older video that might be outdated and doing a newer version of it. It could also be updating old blog posts or turning blog posts into evergreen email sequences. It’s any way to reuse old content to get new results, customers, leads and subscribers or whatever your goals are.

 

I saw your posting on social media from 2021. I’m curious if you still have this belief system about no more Cowbell, which is a reference from this funny episode of Saturday Night Live. You mentioned that you don’t need more content. You need more strategy. Do you still believe in that? If so, can you explain what that means?

First of all, from the repurposing angle, a lot of people dive into repurposing as a tactic without thinking about how it fits into their larger marketing strategy. They need more strategy around repurposing. Also, we have imagined content and content marketing as this never-ending thing. You start a YouTube channel and upload one video a week forever. We never think about an endpoint, but especially when you are using content to market a larger product or business as opposed to being a more straightforward content creator, it’s important that you remember to step back and think, “What is this doing for the business?”

My background is in in-house content marketing, where I realized it was easy to get caught up on how often we were posting, blogging, posting on social media and things like that at the expense of paying attention to things like, “How many free trials did this content create for our software?” I like to say that your job as a content creator isn’t to create content. It’s to create results from content. That doesn’t always mean content creation. That means sometimes you have to focus on content strategy, distribution, or repurposing. You don’t need as much content to succeed when you take a strategic approach.

Sometimes you should focus on content strategy, content distribution, or repurposing. You don't need as much content to succeed when you take a strategic approach. Click To Tweet

I like to talk about defining enough content. For example, the software businesses that I worked at. We would think, “What topics do we absolutely need to cover to have content all throughout this buyer’s journey?” Once we created that content, we didn’t try to keep blogging every week forever. We focused on improving that content better, distributing that content better, optimizing that content and focusing on getting the results that the content has the potential to provide.

On the other side, one part of me says, “This is great, but in the end, how can you define that your content can provide you result when you are starting a whole content strategy?” Content takes time. How do you go after those brands that are thinking about creating a YouTube, a live shopping channel or whatever that piece of content is and saying, “I need to have a start and the end and then I’m going to produce that content hoping to get some results.” There is this phase of time that can be viable depending on the type of content to start getting results. How do you go after that? At what point do you say, “My content is performing or not performing.” I’d love to know your thought on that because there is a notion of time that is difficult to grasp.

In the quality versus quantity debate, which I think this is touching on, the complicated answer is quality over quantity, but quantity leads to quality. I like to talk about The Content Remix Method and the whole minimalist approach to content marketing is having different stages. When you’re at the beginning, that is when content creation and creating new content is going to be most important so that you can find out what’s working.

I think that there are different results that you can be looking towards at any stage. When you’re first starting out, maybe it’s not revenue yet. Maybe it’s views or subscribers or something that shows you you’re getting a little bit of traction. Once you know how to get views, then you move on to the next goal or something like that. Results are very flexible and you can pick one for any stage that you’re at. I also think that putting out the videos and the content is important to learn what works.

I do think that especially starting out, that is when you create a lot of content, but I find it’s easy for us to then get caught in that content creation mode, constantly creating new content mode, and get caught up in that you don’t necessarily remember to pause, take a step back and think, “Is content creation still my primary priority or should it shift?” Social networks and stuff like that don’t make it easy. They put a lot of pressure on us. It can be hard to step back, revisit strategy and think, “Am I using my content in the best way?” If you can remember to do it, it’s helpful and important.

Speaking of looking at a strategy, evolving with the times, the changes and all of this, which can feel confusing and overwhelming, I’d love to know about the brand pivot you’ve been working on as an example of how you think through these things when you’re either adding a new social media handle to your collection or maybe switching from one handle to another or rebranding yourself. Talking us through what that pivot and transition look like for you personally and how you’ve figured it out for yourself.

Honestly, this is less of a business strategy move and more of a mental health strategy move, but I feel like my relationship to personal brands is changing a lot. I have had my “personal brand,” my blog, and stuff like that since I was a twenty-year-old in college. That was when I bought BrittanyBerger.com and started blogging about my PR and marketing classes. It’s been a long time. That was many years ago. I am very grateful for what my personal brand has gotten me, but in the past few years especially, I’ve been feeling the toll that being a person of interest or whatever we want to call it on the internet takes on mental health and stuff like that.

I’ve been revisiting the boundaries that I have in my own personal brand. I have another business, Work Brighter. Since I started that one in 2018, it’s never been the Brittany Berger Show. It’s always been, “Work Brighter by Brittany Berger.” I’m still a very public-facing founder for it, but it’s not so much based on my personality, my interests, my always being on. I find that it’s much easier to show up in that business than in my content marketing business.

I feel like some of that has to do with the fact that BrittanyBerger.com is still like a personal brand where I feel like a personality. I have been looking to shift that to a more similar setup as Work Brighter, where instead of being BrittanyBerger.com, it is the Content Remix Method by Brittany Berger. It’s less about me personally and more about the audience. It’s easier not to overshare and protect my own boundaries, not even from other people, but from myself.

That is an interesting thing here because, in this show, we’ve had a lot of people coming and talking about the necessity, especially for live streams to be authentic. When you think about authenticity, you are thinking about being the face of your brand and having that ownership of the brand, being authentic, sharing what’s going on in your life and sharing what’s going on with the brand at this specific time. It’s sharing what’s going on at this specific time about the product people relate to the fact that it’s you and it’s not someone behind the screen that we don’t know who that person is and all that. What you’re saying is that you’ve been doing that for many years.

You had your share mode of success and now you are getting away from it because it’s taking a toll on your mental health, which I think is interesting. How do you feel about this notion of authenticity? In this case, we are obviously talking about video because that’s the thing. With blogs and all those, it’s easier to detach yourself from that. I don’t know if you had those conversations with some of your customers or people that are around you saying, “How do you detach yourself from that authenticity? Can you be authentic and not be yourself?” Can you see what I’m trying to say here? I’d love to know your feedback there.

I feel like it’s important to say that the content I’m creating and stuff like that probably won’t change that much. It’ll still be the same amount of personal and authentic stuff. It’s hard to explain, and this is why I say it’s more mental health strategy than business strategy because I’m still going to be like a public-facing founder. For example, in the work writer business, the newsletter, every week, it’s basically a story from my past week.

It’s something from my personal life but very focused on the topics that Work Brighter focuses on. It ties back to like a lesson for the reader. This might be stuff that’s all in my head, but it feels that when the brand is my name, there’s more of a pressure to stray from the focus of how I help customers and also share less relevant stuff from my personal life, too, show people what I’m doing on the weekends and stuff like that.

I’m still sharing personal stuff, just more focused and more related to the content. I feel like it has to do with the expectations. When you are a person’s name as your brand, there is an expectation from social media followers to know more about your personal life beyond what I am comfortable sharing. I’ve fielded a lot of DMs being like, “That’s personal.” I feel like I get a lot more of those weird questions with my personal brand than Work Brighter. I feel like the expectations between a person-brand and a non-person-focused brand but that still has a public-facing founder. The expectations are very different.

I feel like sometimes social media followers expect all influencers to eventually morph into lifestyle influencers and tell you like, “Where all of your home goods are from?” I’ll be like, “I’ll upload a video talking about marketing,” and people will be like, “Where did you get that shirt?” I’d be like, “I don’t know.” I felt like there was a lot of pressure. It probably would be easier to grow faster if I stayed very open and shared whatever people wanted me to share. That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s burnt me out a lot and I’m ready for a change.

It feels like this social media burnout is something many people can relate to, whether they’re aware of it or not. That’s been an issue in social media for many years. People feeling stuck, overwhelmed, blocked, making mistakes, not knowing what to do next, how they want to transition, but not knowing how or where or when to do it and all of these factors. With what you are learning through your pivot, what are you advising other people either at this moment on this show and/or with your clients? How can you take those lessons to guide people to create content that feels authentic to them without the expense of their mental health?

It’s important to know what you’re willing and willing to share. I used to be very open with a lot of my health issues and how those impacted me. Over time, I realized that was making the health issues harder to deal with when I had tons of followers asking me how things were going and the answer was horrible, and things like that.

 

Try to find your boundaries and it takes time. I didn’t know that this was what I wanted until I’d been doing it for so long. Maybe it wasn’t what I wanted back then and it wouldn’t have been best for me then. It’s important to know yourself. People talk about product market fit and stuff like that, but they don’t talk about like product founder fit and how well the business is suited to your own quirks, challenges and stuff like that. That’s important if you want to keep your business as sustainable as possible.

What I’m taking from this conversation is that authenticity doesn’t mean everyone has to know everything about everything. Being authentic is a way of showcasing yourself, your company and your product in a less artificially produced way, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no boundary and everything is open bar in some way. That’s interesting because maybe the theme is that people think that, “If I want to be authentic, I have to show and tell everything.” Now, define your boundaries, play with them, stay within that frame, and you’ll be fine. You can be authentic and you can preserve your own space, which is important.

I’d love to go back to the remixing elements because one of the things that people are often asking me when we talk about repurposing and I know you don’t like this word, I’m going to say the word remixing, is the fear of having your audience seeing the same content over and over, and saying you are bombarding your audience with the same thing. They’re going to have this content fatigue.

I’d love to know your thought on that because if you take a stream, for instance. It’s 1 hour or 30 minutes, and you decline it into clips. That’s what we do for the show, for instance. We’ll take the episode, clip it and publish it on different social media posts. Is content fatigue a problem or how do you address it? If not, how do you go after that set question overall?

I think it exists, but I think it’s a lot harder to reach that point than we realize. If we think about the average reach on most social networks, your average post is going to be seen by maybe 10% of your audience. It’s not always the same 10% with each post. Reposting content is a way to make sure that different people are seeing it each time.

Remixing content is reposting content to ensure different people see it each time. Click To Tweet

I also think that this is where strategy comes in. I think that something that goes overlooked with this type of strategy, a lot of reposting longer video clips, is the timing and the pacing. For example, I worked with one client who, before we worked together, was doing a podcast that was released once a week. Every day on social media, she was posting something from that week’s podcast episode.

In that case, it did get repetitive and a bit jarring and jolting because every day for one week, the social post only talked about one topic, but then the next week, it completely changed to a completely different topic and never talked about that topic again. It’s still a great idea to take 1 podcast episode and turn it into 7 social media posts, but instead of posting all of those 7 posts back to back, you could space them out a little more.

What we decided on with this client was over the first month the podcast episode was live. That way, in any given week, her audience was seeing repurposed quotes and clips from a few different podcast episodes on a few different podcasts. Overall, her content had way more variety. She was still repurposing as much content. She didn’t have to create any more than she already was, but adjusting that schedule was a way to add more variety and cohesion to her social media feeds.

I’m glad that you said that because we’ve been experimenting with that ourselves at eStreamly. It’s very affirming. Our readers can take a look at our social, for example. We can try a little bit more. We have a tendency to space the clips closer together to the release date, but maybe it’s worth spreading it out more over the month and that’s something that’s part of that experiment to see that’s what’s going to work best for us. The other thing I wanted to make sure we touch upon that I’m curious about your thoughts on is automation.

You mentioned this on your website. I’m curious what your feelings are around automation. That ties into the authenticity and it is in another subject we’ve mentioned a lot on the show, which is using artificial intelligence and all of these different tools. They’re making our jobs a little bit easier so that we feel less overwhelmed, can be more efficient, and don’t have to do it all on our own. The downside with automation is that you can potentially get a little bit disconnected from it. How do you approach something like automation when it comes to content? Do you have any tips on the best ways to automate your content?

I love automation in general. I’m starting to get into AI. So far, I do like it, but I think the most important thing, especially when it comes to content creation and automation, is adding your own voice. For example, with AI, make sure to edit your own voice and opinions and not just use any written content generated on its own. Add in some of your own voice, but if you can add your own experiences and unique insights, that’s doing something that AI can’t. That adds unique value to the content.

The way a lot of people put it is like an assistant. I don’t use AI much to create content yet, but I use it to help me brainstorm ideas that I then go off and create and I help it at the end. It helps me edit after the fact. With things like automation, something like Zapier, it’s most useful when taking on the job of clicking buttons.

I still think that if you’re going to automate a social post through something like Zapier or a social media automation tool, it still should be something that you wrote at least part of yourself. I like using it and looking at tools like those as ways to offload everything but the creativity, I can focus all of my energy on the creative parts of content that tools can’t do as well.

This notion of AI automation is a hot topic. When we’re talking about strategy, do you feel that when you are creating a live stream and you have this whole piece of content, what do you think is your strategy? Is there any way to automate some of that work to remix that content? Let’s say you have created a podcast piece of 1 hour, 30 minutes or whatever? How do you go after remixing that content? What are the things that the branch should think about? You talked about the idea of, you should think about spacing and remixing, but what is the other thing people can do? What can they implement in a strategy from an automation standpoint as well as from an overall strategy about this?

Remixing is always easier when the content you’re creating in the first place is well planned out. A well-planned outline or something like that for the live stream is something that’s always important. That makes the video smoother and higher quality, at least for me. I’m not a video pro. I definitely need the prep time. That makes the video also more engaging, less ums, ahs and pauses that could make the quality of the remixed content less high quality.

 

When you’re planning, you can look at, say, an outline for each section that will be its own standalone video that can be edited. You can do something like that. If you have any specific talking points that you want to make quotables, those can be helpful to pull out in advance too. Make sure you say them exactly as you want and stuff like that. A lot of it comes down to planning and some things that you can do like during the live show.

If you say something that wasn’t planned but you know is going to be remix worthy, it was like a mic drop moment. You can make a note of what timestamp it was at. In terms of automation, I know some podcasters at the Relay FM Podcast Network that are all about automation, shortcuts and stuff like that. They have talked about something they’ve set up where they press a button after any time that they said something they want to make a note of for the show notes or something like that. It grabs the timestamp and a link to like the transcript or something like that.

There are cool workflows like that where you could probably even set up something to automatically start screen recording your live stream or automatically clip it. I’m sure something like that exists where like you press the button, it makes note of the timestamp and then later it cuts at that timestamp. I’m sure that exists. I haven’t looked into it yet.

Planning in advance will definitely help, as well as taking note of any remix-worthy moments during the live stream. Another thing you can do to make sure that it’s great and remix worthy during the live stream is using any supporting visuals if you want to do lower thirds, slides, screen shares and stuff like that. Get creative with visuals.

Personally, for me, live streaming is hard. I usually like to keep it simple when I do it, but then when I remix the content, edit the clips and stuff like that after the fact, that is when I’ll add in more visuals and more interesting things like graphics, texts and stuff like that. That’s another thing you can do. I like using the script, editing through the transcript and then that also makes pulling out texts from the transcript to remix as text to social posts very easy. They also have built-in templates for creating things like audiograms, subtitles and the progress bar that people love on social videos.

They’ve got a lot of great tools. I’m a big Canva fan. I haven’t played with their video stuff as much, but I think they have a lot of similar great video features now as well. Along with video clips after the fact, also text posts. Blog posts are important in having good transcripts. Also, for accessibility reasons. I think a lot of people overlook the fact that a lot of people might be interested in your video or your podcast, but they can’t listen to it.

They think that like, “If people are fans of podcasts, that means they’re fans of podcasts,” but sometimes someone finds you because they’re interested in what you have to say. That’s important from an accessibility standpoint, as well as an SEO standpoint with your website. It’s a lot easier to get long-form text, like a blog post summary of a podcast, to rank in Google for any keywords you might want to target than it is to get regular podcasts or live stream show notes.

If you can build out more of a recap or not a straight transcript because if you try to read a transcript, it’s never that easy, but a cleaned-up transcript as a blog post can be great. Also, email newsletters. Email is very overlooked when it comes to repurposing content. It’s also a high-value channel. I don’t know the most up-to-date stats, but emails are usually among the highest when you see the statistics about the ROI of different marketing channels. Focusing on how to use content you have elsewhere to improve your email strategy is always worthwhile.

I love what you’re saying. It sounds interesting and appealing. The thing that’s resonated with me is we talk quite often on the show about the notion of preparing your life. It’s one of the perks. We say a show as a pre-step. It’s the pre-event where you prepare. We often focus on you want to prepare the marketing of it and the layout of your live, but to be thinking through the live, making sure it flows well, then on the live, you obviously have all the thing.

There’s the afterlife where you think about repurposing. In this context, we’ll call it the remixing of that content. What we have failed to address so far is this notion that when you do your blueprint, not only do you have to prepare for live itself but also for making it easier for the repurposing or the remixing afterwards is like, “If you want to create 2 or 3 clips that are highly effective in this repurposing, maybe you need to talk about coming on my next show next week. Maybe you need to talk about a snippet that some point, will be easily shareable across social.”

Thinking through those things makes remixing much easier. I love that insight. It’s certainly something that I will definitely bring up in future conversations. It’s been interesting. Repurposing is so far in the live stream world, at least in the live shopping world, something that we are not seeing much, unfortunately. I think it’s because it does require a lot of labor and people are thinking as, “I’m doing my thing, and then I’m moving on.” That’s why I was asking like, “What is the automation tool? What is the thing you can make it easier?”

If we are able, as an industry, to think through those steps and make it easier to optimize the ROI on the content, there’s a neat opportunity for users to discover you and have a chance to consume the content. Let’s face it, not everyone has the time to spend one hour on the livestream but would love to know how that coffee machine works or all those things. It was an interesting and insightful conversation. I’m grateful that we had you on this show.

The value of thinking this through for your planning is great. You don’t have to get it perfect. It reminds me of what you said earlier about quantity can lead to quality. One of the biggest things that come up in our show is how you need to experiment. You need to focus on not trying to get it perfect all the time. It’s through lots of repetitive trial and error that you figure out what’s going to work best for you. All of us seem to have that same experience so we can speak on that very easily. I also like the thread between live streaming and podcasting because a lot of what Brittany said is how I’ve been thinking through the strategy for this show.

Quantity can lead to quality. Click To Tweet

I use AI tools for a lot of it in the combination of obviously recording and being myself in that present moment. I don’t do much planning. I have an idea of what I want to talk about and then I flow with it as it goes on, but that’s taken a lot of practice to feel confident with doing that. I still have a lot to learn.

I hope that I always have a lot to learn with it, but the tools out there have been incredible and the developments for podcasting tools have blown me away. I’ve seen all sorts of things come up that companies are trying to think through, “How can we use artificial intelligence to automate repurposing podcast clips?” That issue is being fixed and addressed from all these creative angles.

We’re seeing it in real-time. It’s very exciting. Hopefully, that will follow for the live shopping world and more live shopping content will be remixed like podcasting is being remixed. Thanks for bringing that up, Nicolas. Thank you, Brittany, for all of the things that you’ve shared based on your personal experiences and your clients and what you’ve thought through over these many years of experience. It’s been wonderful to have you here.

What is Live Shopping?  Live shopping gives consumers the opportunity to purchase as they watch video streams. With social commerce, retailers can broadcast live video streams and engage with consumers in real time. eStreamly’s video commerce solution enables brands to host live shopping events across multiple channels. From shoppable live shows on social media to hosting video commerce events. Live shopping is the future of retail. Live streaming shopping apps, shoppable videos, these are the tools successful retail brands will need. eStreamly’s white label solution gives brands shoppable videos. As live streaming shopping gains momentum eStreamly is empowering retailers to leverage these Live streaming shopping apps and shoppable videos to drive higher conversion rates. Connect with today’s mobile first consumers. 

Readers, if you want to see how we do things, you could see it in action on our social media @eStreamly. We’re so grateful that you read this episode and we’ll be back again with another episode. Hope to see you then.

 

 

 

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