Nicolas speaks with special guest India Brown, who specializes in creating video marketing strategies that create connections on a deeper emotional level. She helps clients build trust and outshine competitors.

Find out why you need to define your target audience before you start creating content. Learn how to identify your ideal client, figure out where they are on social media, and communicate what makes your brand different. Discover the three content pillars and how to structure your posts for success. Hear tips on repurposing your live streams to other platforms and how eStreamly can support with this. Get tips on scripting your videos with talking points and using tools like teleprompters.

Ready to get started livestreaming? We have a free PDF checklist that you can download here: https://try.estreamly.com/successchecklist/

Get marketing best practices here: https://try.estreamly.com/marketingbestpractices/

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Reaching Your Ideal Client With India Brown

In this episode, we have a special guest, India Brown. She is a video strategist. I can’t wait to have a conversation with her. Before I go into this great conversation, Whitney is not here. We all have some good time off and Whitney is probably on the beach somewhere. Whitney, we all hope you have a great time and we can’t wait to have you back on the show for a future episode.

Before I go on, usually, we start with the conversation with an eStreamly update. We don’t have much to update. We have a lot going on at the moment so we always continue posting blogs and episodes. If you are looking for resources, get there. I can’t tell you about what’s going on in the space but what I can tell you is that we have an awesome guest for you.

India Brown is a video marketing strategist and a social media manager. She tries to empower entrepreneurs and small business owners to develop their full social and video marketing strategies. We met her through different conversations. As we were doing a lot of research for our show, we felt she was relevant because she has a very unique approach. She worked mostly with Instagram. As we found on the show, every social media has its way of working, tips, and things. Instagram is good for social selling. We are excited to have her on the show.

She’s from Greater Philly. I’m pretty excited about that. One of the things that she’s great at working with is she will take an entrepreneur or a small business going through their strategy either in a couple of sessions for a couple of days but driving down about holding the element they’ll need to make a great video campaign. I’m super excited to have you. Thank you, India, for taking the time.

Thank you so much, Nicolas. I’m super excited to be here.

One of the things I want to discuss with you is we have a lot of entrepreneurs reading this. We have brands and retailers. The data we are gathering is that people want to know more about how we create good content. The first question I would like to address with you is Instagram by itself has a lot of different specificity but when an entrepreneur comes to you and say, “I want to have a video strategy as it’s related to Instagram,” what are the first recommendation? What are the first things you look at when you work with that creator or entrepreneur to make that happen?

I don’t recommend anything until we know exactly who your ideal client avatar is. I want to know exactly who you’re serving, what that person looks like, what they like, what their pain points and their struggles are, and how you can provide content to them. Once you have those basic fundamental things, creating content will be so much easier once you have that information available but you have to study that person and target audience in detail. A lot of people throw their content out and create it. It doesn’t get the results they were looking for. They need to go back to the drawing board to see, “Maybe I missed something.”

Creating content is so much easier when you have your client avatar. Click To Tweet

That’s very interesting because this is something that we are seeing. We do have people that are coming that know not so much what they’re doing but exactly who their customers are and how to reach out to them. They want to roll out effectively their strategy. On the other side, we have people coming to us and saying, “What do you think I should be doing?” It is very interesting.

We had Olivia in the past that was talking about training. We had many other guests and we talked about the content of answering the question that your product solves. From your perspective, let’s define who is your customer and your persona. When a client comes to you, how do you work this out? How do you engage in conversation about defining what the ideal client is?

Go through their product suite or if they’re not an entrepreneur and they’re more like a brand, an e-commerce brand, go through their catalog. That’s what you would call it. Who are the clothes or products for? What makes your brand better than the next brand? Finding that differentiator is so important. There’re a million clothing brands and a million brands in general. What makes you different than the next brand is what you want to create content around.

 

Once you have identified and meant the selling point, the USP, as what many people would call, are you looking at who is the target audience that potentially will resonate with that? How do you identify that target audience when you have this USP?

Platform-wise, once you know that information, you want to figure out where they are hanging out on social media. Instagram may not be for everyone. You may want to create content or live stream on YouTube. Figuring out where your target audience is hanging out is important. TikTok, of course. Everyone’s on TikTok but that’s a whole other conversation or talking point. Create content around those pain points. Being as educational, inspirational, and entertaining as possible are the three. If you don’t have any content pillars, start with them and create content around those three.

Create content around your customer’s pain points. Be as educational, inspirational, and entertaining as possible. Click To Tweet

Are you taking content and saying, “Let’s do an inspirational piece, an educational piece, and then a more entertaining piece,” or is your strategy a mix-and-match?

If we’re posting three times, I mix and match. One day, I’ll do the educational piece. On another day, I’ll do entertainment and then inspirational, promotional, or whatever the other content pillars they have.

For people who are doing live streaming, one of the main requests we are getting is the ability to broadcast live streaming across multiple social media, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so forth. I wonder because you’re saying that you want to reach where your target audience is. What’s your point of view as it relates to getting the same content at different locations, especially in the case of a live stream? Is that something you would recommend or is it not a specific idea? What’s your point of view as it relates to live streaming across different social media platforms at the same time?

Test it out and see what works. If you’re using StreamYard, you can only go live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. For some reason, Instagram wants to be the evil stepchild where they don’t allow third-party platforms to go live. You just have to go live on Instagram. The loophole to that caveat would be downloading that live stream and repurposing it to an Instagram reel. You could take 30 to 60 seconds or even 90 seconds to Instagram. Introduce 92nd reels, grab a piece you think would most resonate with that audience, and repurpose it into a reel. You can take that live stream, chop it down to the juiciest 30 to 60 seconds highlight or clip, and then repost it on Instagram.

eStreamly we will be streaming and simulcasting at the same time on Instagram. You will have the ability to simulcast on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all at the same time. We have some other social media platforms that we’re working on integrating as well. I’m pretty excited about that but we’re not here to talk much about this. We want to talk about content creation. You’re saying something sweet to my ear. If Whitney is here, she probably is jumping on that, which is repurposing. This is something that we’ve talked about quite a bit during this episode.

You are creating this piece of content. What you’re saying is because you can’t broadcast your live stream on Instagram, the best advice is to take that and repurpose it. When it comes to repurposing, how people should be thinking about repurposing that content considering especially that you are talking about these different pillars like education, entertainment, and inspirational content? Do you feel that all should be repurposed? What’s your strategy as it relates to repurposing the content you’ve created through a live stream or a regular video?

Going back, look at the strategy as a whole and your target audience. I’m not saying you have to repurpose the whole live stream or video but pull the juiciest part out. You don’t want to make it seem like you’re just creating content and throwing it across different social platforms. That may work in some cases depending on your audience. I have implemented that strategy before but it doesn’t always work. Pull out the juiciest part and then tweak the caption to correlate and resonate better with the audience of that platform you’re repurposing on.

You take the video and when you repurpose it, select some of the elements within your live that were relevant for that specific platform. I wonder when you have a client coming to you and saying, “I want to create this piece of content or this strategy with you.” You will be sitting with the client. Once you have an understanding of their client base and you know what platform is ideal for them, you write the script. Can you walk me through how that came about? What do you think about that? How is that creation happening?

It came about when I suggested we started going live with a client and she’s like, “That sounds great but what do I show up on video and talk about?” She asked for talking points. I offer that to clients because I realized that people want to go live but they may have no idea what to show up on live and talk about. That’s the most frightening piece of going live.

People don’t know how to set up a whole live stream session. They may have the equipment ready to go but they lack the confidence because they don’t have the strategy behind going live and what to talk about. In terms of the strategy, everything goes back to that audience, those content pillars, and us forming a conversation.

I look at live streaming as a conversation and a way to interact with your audience on a more personal level versus a reel or another short piece of content. When you’re on live, you can interact with them in live time. You can interact with them in comments but you aren’t able to do that in real-time. If you ask a question, they can immediately say, “I resonate with that. I love that piece.” That portion is crucial. That’s very important.

We can’t relate more to that. We saw on some previous live stream events that the more live you do, the bigger your community gets. People start to answer each other’s questions. That’s powerful. The us come to write and enjoy the show. It’s cool to see that. It’s true. The community feeds itself by having those questions going on. This is something we see that has a lot of value and creates generosity.

One of the questions that I want to ask you when you think about content is because of the people in the space. When you think about YouTube, you are way more easily producing content. When you look at TikTok, we were having a conversation with some TikTok execs and they said, “Producing content on TikTok doesn’t resonate well with the TikTok audience.” Knowing that authenticity and genuine content seems to be at least what’s more consumed on TikTok. We start seeing with the shorts on YouTube that it starts to get that way.

What is your recommendation when a client comes and says, “We’ve talked about content but how do we produce that?” Are you going through the heavily scripted produced content or are you trying to get more into a natural flow? I would say more genuine conversation but with that, there is some problem with how we’re reacting to that. I’d love to get your feedback and perspective being on the other side of the strategy side.

I never want my clients to seem scripted. That’s so boring. It’s not going to perform well at all. I do provide talking points. When you’re an expert in your field, those talking points are simply talking points. You’re not going to read the talking points verbatim. You’re going to put your two cents to all of them. That is what makes it unique, authentic, and personal to you. I would say always be authentic on video.

That’s one of the things that I love about videos. You can show up and be your authentic self. You can’t hide behind the video as you can. Like a carousel, your energy is magnetic. If someone is going through and watching your video or they’re scrolling through their Instagram feed, if they see you talking, they’re going to say, “What is this person talking about?” Let me stop my scroll and click the play button to listen in and tune in. Video is able to build that like, know and trust factor way faster than static posts in general.

 

I did an analysis of a client. We posted pretty much all carousels, a few other static posts, and one reel. In the following week, we did all reels and her engagement went up 1,800%. It was crazy. The shares alone were insane. Creating content, especially if you’re in the eCommerce space, a video of someone trying on something will perform way better than just you showing a mannequin with the clothes on.

Creating a video of someone trying on something will perform way better than just you showing a mannequin with the clothes on. Click To Tweet

I cannot only relate to that. One of the stuff that I love out there is that 80% of the internet consumed is video. eCommerce is mostly text in pictures. If you are not thinking of video in doing eCommerce, you’re removing yourself from 80% of what people consume.

You’re leaving money on the table.

It’s important to be part of that video movement. The other stat we saw is that only 1.5% of all those videos are actionable and profitable. Think through that as well as a big opportunity for you too. When you go after videos, how do you make this an easy journey for your consumer? That’s interesting. I love the fact of creating those talking points. When you have people on TV, they have their script in front of them. They have teleprompters. Why not have your teleprompters?

When you think about this in the context of live streaming, we have seen people having actual talking points but having them on a sheet of paper they put next to them is probably not the ideal case but it’s already a thing. One of the challenges with live streaming is you’re probably recording from your camera so the teleprompter is a second screen. Maybe it’s the first thing to go on camera and then the second thing to have those content. You’re telling them, “You also have to think about this teleprompter.” Do you see that to be a concern or is it a natural thing that people say, “That’s no problem with the teleprompter?”

I’ve never had a client that had an issue. Everyone is different but knock on wood, I haven’t had one because they just glance. They have it right below the camera so they’re not looking off to the side. It’s like when they blink, they’ll look, and then look back up at the camera but no issue.

That’s a good tip that you are giving here and there. You could also have your script into a paper format and then tape it underneath your camera. At the end of the day, a talking point shoots a bullet off, “We’re going to talk about the recipe with coffee and why this machine is better,” and make sure you follow the answer.

One of the things that we see when people are going live is very often, they go into delivering the content and then go back toward the end of the chat. We see that leads to, from time to time, losing out on opportunities with people having questions and everything. Do you recommend doing that in that two-phase or are you more into going back to the chat as many times as possible? What is your recommendation as it relates to the delivery of the message? Is the delivery of the message the most important or is the engagement with the audience in your point of view more important?

Both. Sometimes it is hard to balance because if you have a large audience, you may have a million questions and you’re like, “Are we ever going to get back to the topic?” As long as the questions are relevant to your topic, go ahead and answer those because you don’t want to have your audience feel like they’re being annoyed but try to find that happy medium of sticking to your talking points but also engaging with the audience and answering their questions.

We had a great conversation where you talked about thinking content for the three pillars, entertainment, education, and inspiration. We’ve talked about the talking points being a critical piece for delivering your message through the live stream and the balancing act of interaction with the audience versus delivering your message. You do this for a living so where can people find you?

I’m on Instagram. My handle is @VideoByIndia. My website is www.IndiaBrown.co.

We are super excited to be here with you, India. If you have any questions for the eStreamly team, you can reach out to us at eStreamly.com. We are super excited to bring you on your live stream shopping journey if that were to be of interest to you. Thank you, India, for taking the time. It’s a very delightful conversation.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• India Brown
• Olivia Steele – Past episode
• @VideoByIndia – Instagram