Implementing a Repurpose First B2B Video Production Strategy, with Dane Frederiksen, Founder of Digital Accomplice

In this episode of B2B Brand180, Linda interviews Dane Frederiksen, Founder of Digital Accomplice, to discuss how to implement a repurpose-first video production strategy, which he calls the "Video Octopus" method.

Dane highlights: 
-The shift from text-based marketing to remote video. 
-The ease of creating valuable video content using AI tools and remote platforms, which can significantly enhance marketing strategies. 
-Current trends and technology to simplify video editing, and the 'video octopus' method for repurposing video across multiple channels. 

The episode encapsulates how B2B marketers can leverage strategy, remote video and AI to stay ahead in the evolving digital landscape.

01:45 Challenges in Video Content Marketing

03:20 Trends in Remote Video Content

04:55 Building a Video Content System

09:39 Tools for Easy Video Creation

14:06 The Video Octopus Method

For more information about Dane, visit his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalaccomplice/

Linda's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda's Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

Transcript

Linda 0:00

Hi, I'm Linda Feneres, host of the B2B Brand CEO of Millennium Agency. And today we're going to be talking about video and how we can really drive video from home. A really unique angle using AI and video content creation. And I'm excited to bring in Dane Fredrickson from Digital Accomplice and welcome Dane. Thanks for coming in today.

Dane Frederiksen 0:25

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This, I'm glad to be doing this.

Linda 0:28

Yes. So I'm going to share a little bit about yourself and then you can also add in anything else you may want to share as well. But basically Dane has about 30 years of video content creation expertise. He's worked with some great brands like Coke, Google, Taco Bell, National Geographic. We have heard of all of these Discovery and Adobe and many, many more. super power and it's creating smart content strategies and execution plans where you can actually use videos in a multitude of different ways depending on how you actually tackle video. So I think this will be great for our audience, especially the audience that really wants to be able to multiply the The amount of video that they're doing and maybe get organized on how they may develop video content and use it in the future. So welcome Dane. Did you want to share anything else? Today?

Dane Frederiksen 1:19

Well, you kind of covered it all. You know, it's after 30 years, I've got like so many chapters I've probably forgotten. So, you know, I'm, I'm just here to help marketers do more and do better with video. I'm a video native, That's my world. I think it's now here for everybody, but people that aren't video natives seem to really struggle because it's just not their, their, their literally their native world. So I'm just hoping to share something of value there.

Linda 1:43

No, that's great. And I think that that's the piece. I know we had spoken about this earlier, but one of the things about video is when you start to think about video, I think some people think, Oh, my gosh, it's such a big production and there's so many challenges and I have to get models and I have to get the equipment and I have to plan on what we're gonna say in the scripting. What are you finding are some of the biggest challenges content marketers are facing today?

Dane Frederiksen 2:06

You hit the nail on the head, I think for a lot of content marketers who, as an industry, I think, I'm certainly not the expert, but my sense is it's been very text focused for a long time with with blogs and articles and things like that. Cause that's, you know, Kind of what's easy. That's what's cheap. And you know, it works for like SEO and things like that. But the challenge as people are finding videos kind of become more and more relevant, more important, more consumed. The real problem is how do people who grew up in a text native world transition to a video native world where that's what everybody wants, they want their video and they want good quality and they want it, you know, consistently as well as, search engines want that consistency. And video for SEO value is very highly weighted is my understanding. So I think that's really the, the, the struggle is how do you start keeping that pace up with quality and consistency,

Linda 3:02

right? And a lot of companies won't even tackle video because the thought process itself is just overwhelming to them. So there's a lot of different trends out there relating to, especially for content marketers around video and maybe, how they should go about it. What kind of trends are you finding just sort of in general on the video side?

Dane Frederiksen 3:20

On the video side, there's been a, what I would call a sort of silent revolution that kind of creeped in on all of us. Remote video was something that was there, but the pandemic just made that, you know, front and center for everybody who doesn't remember the, the awkward early days of the pandemic with the zoom calls with people with madness going on in the background, screaming kids or like whatever people just trying to figure out how to do this. But now we've all got what, five years of. Remote video experience. We're doing interviews and conversations daily. And we kind of just know how to do this. We're sort of remote video native in a lot of ways. And I think what that also did is it opened the door for this, I don't know professional content that pre pandemic probably was not professional content. But now all the big brands are putting out like what we're doing right now. This is. on par with what the biggest brands are putting out there for content. And so I think that kind of quietly opened the door that a lot of people haven't quite figured out what to do or what they could be doing with remote video. you know, I'm just trying to evangelize that, Hey, what we're sitting on right now, this is content, right? Any conversation of any value is content. So once I realized how valuable that this remote video content had become as content that was like a big light bulb that went off for me that I think hasn't really gone off for a lot of marketers yet is that they're sitting on a potential gold mind of content if they just. Learn how to build a system for capturing this remote video.

Linda 4:55

Do you have any recommendations for the audience on how they might be able to build some sort of system or have a system in place? Funny

Dane Frederiksen 5:02

you should mention.

Linda 5:03

Yeah. And the funny thing is, is when you talk about, remote video, what does that mean to our audience? Yeah. Does it mean using their iPhone? Does it use using a teams video? What does it mean?

Dane Frederiksen 5:14

It could kind of be any of those, right? There's, there's a place for all of this in the business world and in the consumer world, there's, there's everything from influencers with with phones, and then there's people still making amazing commercials. So, and everything in between. I think where I'm kind of trying to focus right now is. This intermediate content. It's not necessarily Superbowl commercials, and it's not, you know, someone with a cell phone jumping around, being all crazy. We're talking about business issues or issues that affect your customers. And when you're having conversations like we are right now over webcams, this is stuff that, that could be valuable content for your customers. So I think you really need to look at who are you trying to talk to? Who's your target audience? And what are the issues that they care about? And then you start to build a plan backwards for how can we have a remote video conversation like this about the topics that they care about and then produce those at a regular cadence and just put those out there as content. And then, we're kind of getting to the point in the conversation where it's obvious everyone's talking about AI, but like this is, this is, this is an area where AI combined with video can really be your superpower because you've got all these tools now that make accessible to edit, repurpose, and put that kind of content out there to all these different channels. It's really a kind of a amazing opportunity. That's been sitting right there in front of us that we're just now starting to wrap our heads around.

Linda 6:41

So what do you think a company should do or a marketer should do? Should they pull together some sort of a document that says, okay, let's focus in on X, Y, Z. Let's use this person. Let's talk about ABC. What, what are your, can you provide some insight on that?

Dane Frederiksen 6:56

Yeah, I think you, you kind of touched on it, but just to sort of reiterate and maybe add a little bit more of a process to it. I would start with target audience, who are we trying to talk to? And then you can make a list of what are the topics that they care about that we can speak to, that we have some expertise or could get to. Get people talking about these issues. And then you start looking at your channels. Where are these people gathered? Where are you going to find them? Are they on Tik TOK? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they listening to podcasts? And once you identify the channels that people want to be learning about this stuff, then you can come up with a production plan. At a cadence and for the right channels that's going to work for you and for them. So for myself, I'm just launching a video podcast. Now I'm going to talk to do one interview a week with content marketers and I'm going to take that interview and release it in full on video and audio podcast. I'm going to then chop up the seven questions that I ask for release one short every day, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. And then what that's going to provide me is video content every single day of the month. And then all that content will get repurposed into text format, blog, LinkedIn. And it's going to just go out to every channel that I can think of that would resonate with content marketers, my audience. And so just using that as a template for what other people could do audience channels. And then just come up with a production plan to, to fill that pipeline.

Linda 8:24

that's a great way to tackle that pipeline. Because I think to my point earlier, just the thought of video can be very, very overwhelming. So how do you create this more comprehensive message or video and then break that up into pieces that can provide some valuable content because frankly, even today we know people do not have a lot of patience. They don't want to be listening to something, anything too lengthy. So I think Some key tips and tricks are really important for the audience. So when you talk about video creation, there's small companies out there and then there's larger companies who have a lot of resources available. But for those companies that don't have resources available, are there tools that you think that would be valuable for them? So because what I'm hearing now is think about Who your audience is. Think about what you might want to deliver to your audience. Start to build out some sort of plan or strategy outline in place that we deliver and doesn't have to probably be just one person. It could be a multitude of different people. And then how are you going to break that up and slice that up into different pieces that you can deliver over a course of, a period of time?

Dane Frederiksen 9:31

Right.

Linda 9:32

What should they use? are there key tools out there that just make it so easy? And

Dane Frederiksen 9:37

what are

Linda 9:37

your thoughts on around that?

Dane Frederiksen 9:39

Well, you know, whenever we're talking about tools, I always like to remind myself that some people can't even, you know, use a remote control, it's like outside the scope of what some people want to handle, but some people want to have their tech friendly home and have every gadget in the world. Let's just acknowledge that there's a range, right? Of what people are interested in, capable of handling. The good news is the stuff in the middle has gotten a lot easier. You don't need to be a video editor anymore to edit video. So most people by now will be familiar with tools like zoom or Google meets or something like that. There are tools that are basically that easy that are used for video recording. You know, you've, you've got stream yard, which I think we're using we've got squad cast is another one that I use for recording. Video assets at a higher quality, and then you've got editing tools like this one called Descript. Which is a little challenging for existing video editors like myself because it works a little differently, but that's good news for amateurs because the way that it works is you bring your video into the script and it is just transcript is all text and then you use these AI tools to select the block of text that you want and you kind of selecting these text blocks to move it into basically an edited video. And it's got amazing tools that will take out the ums and the ahs, all the unwanted stuff that you want. It's got a tool that'll make your eyes look like you're pointing to the camera when you're really not. So there's all these like little. AI tips and tricks that you can absorb for most people pretty easily. I've seen people that don't really know how to edit, pick up the script and get into it. All this stuff is going to continue to evolve rapidly. So, you know, without getting into a list of like every single AI tool, let's just say it's a lot easier and it's going to get easier than it's ever been. But for some people, they just don't want to do that. There's a, there's a huge group of video professionals and people that are influencers and things like that. They can, they can probably take the load off. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding people that want to help out with the process like this.

Linda 11:38

You mean using freelancers or other?

Dane Frederiksen 11:40

Exactly. There's

Linda 11:41

the

Dane Frederiksen 11:42

economic conditions and the way things have changed so fast. There's, there's all kinds of people out there that would love to, to help.

Linda 11:48

So what other sort of tips or tricks would you recommend to our audience around AI and video development and editing and so on?

Dane Frederiksen 11:58

Yeah, I think there's a lot of Good reasons to educate yourself before you get started. And I think that there's some of us that want to figure it out completely before you start. But I think that we're in an age of rapid experimentation where you're probably better off just taking little small pieces of this process and testing them small. Just get started today. You could open up an application like QuickTime. On your computer and just record yourself talking, see what it sounds like. Does, do I like the background? Do I like the lighting? Are there little things that I could do? You know, can I close the door? Can I turn on the light off the light? Maybe get on Amazon and buy yourself a USB microphone and take it from here to there.

Linda 12:46

And

Dane Frederiksen 12:47

when you start playing with those kinds of things, you'll start to see pretty quickly. Hey, it's not too hard to make an incremental change. It's gonna make a cumulative difference as I, as I start going down this path of, just always be recording. And I think just giving yourself permission to experiment and try, even if you don't post it online, that's okay. That's actually probably a really good thing. And I think that once you get enough of those tests under your belt. Getting stuff out there and start sharing it in the community. Get that feedback, say, Hey, on on LinkedIn, Hey, I'm working on something. I'm trying something out. What do you guys think? Maybe on a work Slack channel, I think there's been a tendency of being, needing to be camera ready to get out there, but in the spirit of the remote video revolution, we're all doing it anyway, so. And it's usable business content. So let's take advantage. Let's not get, you know, yeah. And, and also like, let's not get left behind by AI. Let's start playing with this stuff. Let's see how it can help us. The tools are there. A lot of them are free. So just get out there and try it.

Linda 13:49

And we've had a lot of people on the, on the podcasts that speak about AI and I'm a big, big advocate. I think it's a great foundation for the development and also the support of any marketer or marketing team. It's a way to really start to kickstart some, it's great for ideation and other things. But you also mentioned the video octopus I think that's a great visual. So I'd love for you to take that and summarize like, all right, it's, it's pre purposing. I understand. But if, if I was to say to you, What is video octopus and how does this work? You explain that to me?

Dane Frederiksen 14:24

Yeah, it's just sort of a term I use to summarize basically all the things that we've been talking about in a a cohesive way. Because when you think about the ways that you could repurpose content, I think for a long time, repurposing has been an afterthought. You're like, Oh, we did this video. We should share it on this platform, or let's chop it up and put a new call to action at the end. Yeah, you can do that. And it makes sense that you would think that way. However, if you were wise and you took a step back, you might be able to, if you had the breathing space, come up with a pre purposing plan, right? Which is, you know, as a video native, I know this intuitively, but people may not realize video as a format actually has all the other formats. in it as part of its DNA, it's visuals, it's audio, it's got still images and graphics from time to time. So like, all that transcript is text that one piece that head of the octopus. Could be chopped up repurposed across all your channels in different ways easier than ever now. And so part of the video octopus is adding to the remote video revolution and, and the AI revolution, the idea of pre purposing with video, which this is not an afterthought, right? We need to plan from the beginning. Who are we trying to reach? What are the channels they're in the tentacles? And then let's go to the start to the head of the video octopus, make that video content and let it go out through the tentacles to all the different channels. So that's really the way I talk about it that I think resonates. And when you think about how cheap and easy this is repurposing that on a regular cadence, there's your pipeline. This is the pipeline that content marketers have always needed. Didn't quite figure out that, Hey, we have a solution. This is going to solve. the cost problem, the frequency problem the relevance problem, because you're using subject matter experts. I don't need to sit down and come up with content ideas anymore. My experts are giving it to me on a weekly basis. Right. This is, putting together of all the things that we've been talking about is the, master plan to pre purpose.

Linda 16:35

That's, that's great feedback for our audience. So if I was to just sort of summarize, what we're looking at here is really number one, knowing who your target audiences and number two, building out a plan for video, which is obviously your content. know what you want to deliver and then how you're going to deliver that to your point. How will that get cut up? So it's used over a period of time. You're not just building out one video and it's, you know, you use it for 20 years. So, you know, some of that, those days are over. So it's really about building out content that you can continuously repurpose and use and maybe build off of that and come up with other ideas and strategies. So I don't know if there's anything. Additional that you'd like to share with your, with the audience that you think would be a great takeaway. Like remember this, if you do video just for this. Yeah. I think that video is the king of content, the content is king. Video's gotta be the king of content. It's the most valuable format. And you can have that. You can have it right now. And if that's not something that you want to handle or think you can wrap your head around, there are people like myself and others that are here to help. I'm happy to have a conversation with someone about trying to figure out how to do this or what other resources you could have. It would just be a shame if people didn't take advantage of this, this special moment, because if you're not going to do something like this, I'm sure your competitors will, People are catching on that. This is. Why, you know, why, why keep messing around when we can set up a machine to do this? So like now is the time is, the parting message. You've got this content goldmine. Let's take advantage. Know I had asked you previously, if you've written a book or anything like that, you said you didn't, but your father did. Would you like to share?

Dane Frederiksen 18:23

Yeah. Oh yeah. Let's do a shameless plug. So we're at this, we're at this magic moment in my life and my father's life where he's just retired. But as he, as he retired, he just finished publishing this book the visible expert revolution, which is really just a way to talk to professional services firms about the importance of being visible, You can be the best lawyer or construction company or, any other professional service in the world, but if people can't find you, if you're invisible, then, you know, you're not going to be successful. So that book is really just a culmination of. His his career of all all the lessons and research that they've done is backed by a lot of research. And frankly, this is the gateway to me. Figuring out this video octopus method is like In there, you know, you need content, you need a lot of it. It's got to be relevant. And you know, as things change, you've got to evolve. So how are people going to do that? Well, here's the solution, this video octopus method, And so that's, that's your way to be visible, no matter what kind of expert you are.

Linda 19:25

So I would love, thank you very much, Dan. I think you provided the audience with some really great insight. I'd love for you to share how our audience can get in touch with you.

Dane Frederiksen 19:34

Right. So, my company is digital accomplice. You can reach out to directly to me either on LinkedIn or by email at Dane at digital accomplice. com. I'm always happy to help. that's what we're here. And that's why. That's why I came up with the company name of a digital accomplice is because I want to be your accomplice to help you be successful.

Linda 19:52

That's awesome. That's great. Thank you, Dane. So again, my name is Linda Feneres and I am the host of the B2B Brand 180 podcast. Thank you for joining us today. And if you like what you heard, please hit like share or subscribe. If you need to connect with me, you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn or at mill, M I L L dot agency. And thank you again for listening.