APRIL 15, 2022

Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs.

CEX Opportunity: One of our sponsors (who wants to remain anonymous) has purchased 10 complimentary Creator Economy Expo (CEX) passes* specifically for content creators who can’t afford the ticket price. So … we are going to give those away to 10 lucky TILT readers.

Just fill out this form before 2 p.m. US ET Monday, April 18. We will notify the 10 random winners after that time. Good luck!

*Only good for new registrations

In this issue:

Full Tilt: Smart Video Strategy
Stan: Tailor-Made Content

full tilt

Develop a Smart and Easy Video Strategy

Think about Chevy’s 2021 holiday commercial. A man replaces an old wreath on his barn and opens the door to reveal a dusty 1966 Chevy Impala. As he climbs in and brushes away the cobwebs, he discovers a picture of his late wife.

Fast forward to the end of the video, he returns to the barn to find the Chevy Impala has been restored, thanks to his daughter. A photo of his wife dangles from the rearview mirror. As the dad and daughter drive away, she tells him it’s what her mom would have wanted. He replies, “This is the best Christmas present ever.”

Within a week, the video had 4M hits and garnered plenty of positive press.

What made Chevy’s video garner so much attention was its emotionally driven story told in a strategic and authentic way. That’s something you can do whether your content business is video-based or you’re a creator looking to use video for marketing. Here are five steps to help you do that:

1. Establish goals for your video content: Want to grow your subscriber base? Increase views of related videos? Reach prospective customers? Knowing upfront what you want out of your video content will guide your strategy. It also assists in keeping all your scripts and storyboards consistent and targeted.

2. Watch lots of videos: The best way to brainstorm ideas and concepts is to check out the highest-performing videos on the market. Look at video content both inside and outside your content tilt, and be sure to note what works as well as what doesn’t.

3. Create something: For many, the biggest barrier to producing video isn’t budget; it’s fear. Your first video likely won’t be perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. It should serve as a learning tool and launchpad for all the videos that come after.

4. Work with a video partner to level up your output: Just because you’re limited financially doesn’t mean you can’t work with a production company. You can still cut costs when hiring outside professional help. For instance, you could film the content in-house and hire a freelancer to edit it. Alternately, you could work with a micro-influencer and ask them to film content as a promotional partnership.

5. Track your video metrics: Keep tabs on how the video performs so you can find out which ideas, formats, etc., connect with your target audience. Metrics like watch time, social shares, engagement, and call-to-action conversions can give you an at-a-glance understanding of the power of your content.

It doesn’t take an expensive or complicated video to build a relationship with your audience. All you need is a tailored message, a good idea, and a strategic plan.

– Hope Horner

To get a few more details and important caveats, read on.

tilt shout-out

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we’re a stan for … Perkens Bien Aime

https://www.thetilt.com/content-entrepreneur/kat-kamalani-changes-tilt

Entrepreneur: Perkens Bien Aime

Content Business: Garcon a la Mode

Tilt: Professional tailor on men’s fashion and styling

Scene: Website, Instagram (69.6K), Pinterest (346)

Snack Bites:

Perkens is a tailor by day. Before and after work, he’s a successful content creator focused on men’s fashion and styling.
He has done sponsored social content deals with brands such as Gap, Boss, and Dior.
Perkens expanded into lifestyle content, sharing his home and travels. He’s even done a brand deal with Saudi Airlines.

Why We’re a Stan: Perkens’ lifestyle content dovetails well with his career as a tailor. He works hard to offer advice on a topic he knows well while connecting with companies to craft sponsorship deals in the form of Instagram and blog posts.

– Shameyka McCalman

quick talk

Caught on … Twitter

“Your content should be in sync with the daily lives of your audience.” – Google Creators

things to know

Money

Content marketplace: Dropbox has created a content marketplace for creators – Dropbox Shop. In its beta version, it lets you create product listings for digital content and enable a tipping feature, too. Dropbox gives you a shareable or embeddable link. (Tech Crunch; h/t SuperCreator.ai)
Tilt Take: We love an easy-to-use marketplace to sell digital content products.
Cold reality: Meta is monetizing its Horizon Worlds metaverse app and letting some creators sell in-world items to users. In exchange, Meta will take a 47.5% cut of the transaction. (CNET)
Tilt Take: Meta’s taking almost half of the creator’s revenue for this in-app world. We can only imagine what it plans to take from creators who mint NFTs through its apps.

Audiences

Do the research: The research tab in your analytics can open your eyes to what your audience (and the rest of YouTube) searches for on the platform. Identify content gaps that you can fill. (YouTube Creators; h/t Liron Segev)
Tilt Take: It doesn’t matter if YouTube is the second largest search engine. What matters is what your target audience is searching for.
Accessible videos: YouTube and TikTok are upping their accessibility games. YouTube added a feature to let creators outsource the creation and editing of their clips. And TikTok’s making auto-captions the default for English-language uploads. (Social Media Today; h/t tl;drMarketing)
Tilt Take: Great news. And remember, captions work not only for those who have permanent hearing loss but for people who can’t listen for other reasons like forgetting their earbuds.

Tech and Tools

Don’t like: TikTok is testing dislikes for individual comments on videos. The dislike button is in addition to its report button for community guideline violations. (The Verge)
Tilt Take: It would be even more helpful if the TikTok creator could see the dislikes (that doesn’t appear possible now), so they could better understand their community.
Recommend me: Substack’s new cross-promotional feature lets writers recommend other writers on the platform. The recommended writer will be notified and prompted to recommend back. (On Substack)
Tilt Take: We like cross-promotion when it’s genuine. But asking a recommended writer to endorse the recommending writer can be awkward and inauthentic.

And Finally

Master plan: Substack is experiencing growth and growing pains. Paid subscribers to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters topped 1M and it’s valued at $650M. But to keep that growth, it can’t be just a site for newsletters, its execs say. It needs to be a multimedia community. (The New York Times; h/t Jesse Butts in Tilt Discord community)
Tilt Take: Do we really need another multimedia community? (Oh, and we can only wonder what newsletter creators think about a plan that moves away from its founding strategy.)
Real hit: “FINAL: Guardians 17, Royals not 17.” (Kansas City Royals on Twitter)
Tilt Take: We love a baseball game score reported like this – a simple but funny way to say they lost. It got a lot more attention than a boring “Guardians 17, Royals 3” tweet. Don’t settle for boring.

the business of content

Why You Need to Risk More as a Content Entrepreneur (Content Inc.)
It’s CNN Minus (This Old Marketing)
6 Mistakes Every Business Must Avoid (Entrepreneur)
Why You Should Build Your Product Like a Rube Goldberg Machine (WRAL Tech Wire)
Small Business Owners Feel ‘Hit to the Throat’ When Applying for Bank Loans (Yahoo Finance)

the tilt team

Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony, with an assist from Angelina Kaminski, Hope Horner, Shameyka McCalman, and Don Borger.

Before They Watch – April 15, 2022