‘2020 is the year of video’ will proclaim any marketing expert, as they would have in every year since the dawn of the internet. 

However, this year it feels different. 

For anything to become widely adopted, the environment needs to be just right. The Political, Economic, Societal and Technological factors all need to be in perfect alignment. (Commonly referred to as PEST)

In the context of video, here’s how the landscape looks:

• Political – Social media regulation is coming and trust is at an all-time low, video communication is a fantastic way to build trust back up.
• Economic – The costs of devices and data has fallen to a level that video communication is not just for developed nations anymore. 
• Societal – We’ve been faced with an unprecedented situation in COVID-19, forcing us into social isolation, realising that we rely on video communications far more than we ever realised. 
• Technological – The advent of 5G, the explosive growth of video-first platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Byte and the prioritisation of video content on social media platforms.

Whilst it’s clear that 2020 really IS the year of video, in my experience, it’s not a lack of desire that’s preventing businesses from creating more video content, it’s having a lack of process in place. 

As with everything, it starts with a strategy.

Introducing the ‘Mountain Method’

The ‘Mountain Method’

Theme

It all starts with your ‘Theme’, this is the topic that you want to be known for. Consider it the ‘goal’ or ‘summit’ of the Mountain. I’d also suggest that you should have three themes to run with and apply the Mountain method to all of these themes. 

Let’s say that you are a cleaning business, one of your ‘themes’ could be ‘time-saving hacks’. Now we have a ‘theme’, it’s time to create the content that sits at the top of the mountain. 

Anchor

Your ‘anchor’ is the BIG piece of content that everything you produce around this theme will be built around. The ‘Anchor’ content you create should go in-depth on this theme. Going deep and creating something of genuine quality and value is key here.

So, in our cleaning business example, it could be an in-depth video of ‘How to clean a 3-bed house in 30 minutes’.

This piece of content you create at this stage could take a number of forms; Podcast, Blog, Video or Webinar, the format is less important than the content. Your choice of format is a balance between where your audience is and what medium you are comfortable with. However, video, as we’ve already discussed, would be the recommended approach for maximising engagement. 

Repurpose

This is where most people go wrong with content marketing. They create an ‘Anchor’ piece then just throw out some links to this on social media channels. After hours have been invested in the creation of some quality content, the promotion of this gets limited to one series of social media posts – it’s a missed opportunity.

Let’s take our cleaning business example again. So we’ve created our video of ‘How to clean a 3-bed house in 30 minutes’, here’s 5 examples of the mileage you can get from one piece of content.

1. Take the transcript of the video and create into a blog post from it
2. Re-purpose the video as a webinar/online course
3. Cut the video into multiple 1-3 minutes sections, taking the salient points into bite-size chunks
4. Write to owners of podcasts around household cleaning asking if they’d be willing to have you as a guest on an episode
5. Write to owners of relevant Facebook Groups to see if they would be willing to run an expert session for you to talk through your ‘How to clean a 3-bed house in 30 minutes’ strategy.

Distribute

Now that we’ve got our ‘theme’ and we’ve defined a number of ways to repurpose that content, it’s time to plan where we will be publishing this content.

This is where a content calendar comes into its own, to help you map out how you will deploy all of your content over the upcoming weeks. Using our cleaning business example again, here’s how the whole process might look:

Theme: ‘Time-saving cleaning hacks’ 

Anchor: ‘How to clean a 3-bed house in 30 minutes’.

Repurpose:

• Blog
• Podcast
• Webinar
• Short-form Video

Distribute:

• Social media feed posts
• Social media live streams
• Social media stories
• Blog
• Podcast platforms
• Email
• Partnerships
• Press releases

Before we get into the tools that help you deliver on the ‘Mountain method’, constant learning is a critical requirement to make sure that the themes you are working with are resonating with your audience. 

From the Lean Startup Methodology, we need to build our content, understand how to engage the audience, and make tweaks to continually improve the output.

Tools

With an understanding of the framework, you’re going to need three tools to bring this to life. 

The first one is Quicc.io

Once you’ve created your video ‘anchor’ content, Quicc is a great tool to not only subtitle your videos (which is really important as most watch videos on social with the sound off) but also to create a full transcript.

This will be a big time-saver when it comes to Repurposing video content for blogs.

The next one is Wave.video

Wave.video will be a critical tool to use for both the repurposing and distribution parts of the methodology. 

Wave.video will help you edit your longer-form videos into beautiful social media optimised videos in a really simple platform. 

Finally, the third tool you’ll need is ContentCal

In the distribution phase, there will be lots of content being distributed across multiple channels. Here you’ll need a tool to make sure you have everything organised in a simple and visual way and set to be automatically published. 

Not only that, but you’ll also need the analytics within ContentCal to ensure that you can learn from what’s working and make continual optimisations. 

A real-life example of the ‘Mountain Method’ 

1. Theme

Here, in this example we want to explore how to improve content creation processes for a remote team and introduce a ContentCal methodology, called ‘VOICE’. 

2. Anchor

Here we’ve used phone camera to make this recording of me going deep into this topic:

3. Repurpose

This video was then uploaded into Wave.video, to trim and apply some edits to, like text and stickers.

Next, we want to subtitle this video (as most viewers watch video on social with the sound off)  and get a transcript of the video to repurpose as a blog.

To do this, we upload the video to Quicc.io which automatically transcribes and adds closed captions (subtitles) to our video:

We can now take that video file and upload this YouTube:

We then take the transcript and create a blog from this, in which we’ll include the link to YouTube:

4. Distribute

Finally, in this step we will be publishing shortened ‘teaser’ versions of this content out to all of our social channels and measuring which types of posts and which content is performing the best.

In summary

With an understanding of the ‘mountain method’, the ‘build, measure, learn’ framework and these 3 tools, you’ve got the perfect process for creating a video-centric content marketing plan. 

About the author: Andy has over 10 years’ experience of creating markets, building profitable businesses and leadership roles in industry-leading SaaS organisations.

He is one of the founding team members of ContentCal, a Social Media Marketing technology software, that since launching in January 2017 has achieved: won the award for the ‘Best Newcomer in B2B Marketing’ (March 2017), raised £400,000 of investment (April 2017), was crowned Content Management Tool of the year (November 2018). Today, ContentCal is used by over 35,000 companies in over 135 countries and continues to grow at 100% YoY.