You put in a ton of energy into creating relevant content for your audience, but is it getting noticed when you share it on the web?
Did you know that 80 percent of videos on social are played with the volume on mute?
What about your podcasts? Are folks able to quickly spot and hear a quick take from your show via social channels?
We recently interviewed Baird Hall, founder of content creator tools Zubtitle and Wavve, for the Rethink Marketing podcast. His tools help you better promote your content on social. Wavve allows you to take your audio content, from podcasts or elsewhere, and turn them in eye catching video snippets. And Zubtitle allows you to create captions for your videos quickly and cheaply.
“If you think about yourself laying in bed at night or just sitting at home and scrolling through social media, when you think of that concept of scrolling, we’re browsing this massive, massive amount of information and we’re looking for something that interests us,” Hall said. “Now, from a marketing standpoint, you know, obviously grabbing someone’s attention is half the battle and then the second half of the battle is retaining their attention and actually delivering your message.”
How do you discover your customer’s pain points?
Nathan: You founded Zubtitle and Wavve to solve problems you and others were having in sharing their content on the web. How do you discover what other people’s problems are? Any advice for that?
Baird: I think pattern matching is probably the best term for it, but I spend a lot of time, well let me take a step back. First off, I think it’s really important to really pick a niche and a target audience to serve. The more focus you can be on your target audience, the easier it’s going to be to figure out what those recurring themes are and like what they really need. And one thing that we’ve, from day one, we’ve always focused on content creators, people that are creating audio or video podcasts or video content for social media. And I spend all day working with these people and support and following them in groups on Facebook. And when you just, you see how they behave over time, it’s really easy to figure out what those patterns are, what keeps coming up most and how they’re solving it.
So we found a lot of people in both of these situations that had this problem, and they were going to extremes to do it themselves. They were, you know, learning new software like Adobe After Effects, which is pretty complex. We also saw a lot of people that were just manually typing out their transcripts for the captions themselves. And so when you see people really putting a lot of effort to solve their own problem, and you kind of look for those patterns and then look at it from a fresh lens of, “Hey, we could automate this.” Or, “We could build something to make it a little easier.” That’s kind of the general approach. But the, I guess the short answer would be you just got to dive in to a target group or a niche, and really get your hands dirty talking to people and seeing what they’re struggling with.
Who uses Zubtitle and Wavve?
Nathan: Who uses your products? Is it B2B? Is it B2C? Established companies or startups? Can you talk about your users?
Baird: It’s a good question. We definitely see a lot of everything across both companies for Wavve and Zubtitle. Wavve is really across the board because it’s generally just podcasters, which could mean really anything. We have some really large corporations, and some large companies that are doing podcasts, a lot large radio shows that are using it. And then we also have hobbyists that are kind of doing a podcast in their basement with friends on a weekly or monthly basis, so that’s definitely all over the board. For Zubtitle, our initial user base, it’s still early. We just launched it about six months ago. So it’s still early and getting its footing in the market. But, we definitely have a lot of businesses that are creating video content as their content marketing strategy and also a lot of like personal coaches and people with personal brands that there, maybe they offer a service, or coaching, or courses online, social media influencers has for Zubtitle kind of been the early adopter group.
So, it’s a little across the board and we don’t really fall B2B, or B2C. We’re kind of in this in between space, which I like to call the prosumer market where it’s a lot of people that are maybe starting their own business or they’re hoping to turn their content and do business in the future. So, it’s definitely an interesting group of people to work with.
How are people engaging with your content tools on social?
Nathan: Do you have any customers reporting back any specific success stories from either using Wavve or Zubtitle, and just how it’s worked for their business?
Baird: We hear from a lot of people, especially in the Zubtitle side, just how much more engagement they’re getting on LinkedIn is really one of the most popular places that our customers are using Zubtitle. And the main reason for that is people, when you’re on LinkedIn, you’re generally at work and your computer’s not blaring volumes. So when you play a video this subtitles, they need to be there, especially on LinkedIn.
So that’s definitely one place where people are reporting back just the comments, the engagement that they’re getting on the videos, the views themselves are really a product of the algorithm and what you’ve done in the past, how many people see it initially, but that engagement is really what people are shooting for these days.
And that’s a lot of the success stories that we’ve been getting.
And then for Wavve with podcasts, probably the most success stories that we get is people that are really excited about sharing their podcasts on LinkedIn or on Instagram, sorry. People that share on Instagram and again, create that engagement with an audience that they’ve built on that platform already. So those are definitely the two, probably the two highest use cases for both of those products.
What are the big trends out there in social?
Nathan: What other trends out there? You talked about LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been big for video this past year, any other trends out there that you’re starting to see people using your products for?
Baird: I think LinkedIn is the big one, and LinkedIn also just released the LinkedIn Live. I don’t have access to it yet. I haven’t been able to try it. But, they’re launching more video products. They’re really doubling down there. I think LinkedIn’s really interesting people for a long time that have been kind of predicting that social media was going to move towards more like community focus and niche based social media. So leaving, Facebook that covers anything and everything to more focused on social media platforms that are subject related. And I think LinkedIn is really the first one that does that, because it’ll list all LinkedIn users are connected with a similar interest or a subject matter which is business. And I think that’s why LinkedIn is really starting to, really skyrocket engagement and views for content because people are all, your audience is already there. You just have to start creating content and put it out there.
So that’s really, I think that’s the biggest one right now. Also, I think with Facebook, a big trend recently has been moving away from having a page or a personal profile and building groups out. So again, social media has been trending from a place where you promote and blast out messages to a place where engagement is really what ranks well and performs well. So the more interaction and engagement you can have with your audience, the better. And Facebook groups is a really great way to do that. I think LinkedIn is trying to revamp their group features as well. But those are definitely two of the biggest, two of the biggest trends aside from Instagram just to kind of dominating everything at the moment. But I think that’ll be interesting. I don’t know how much that plays from a B2B standpoint unless you’re focused on consumers. So I’ll be interesting to see how Instagram evolves going forward.
How do people get started using captions and other tools to promote their content?
Nathan: I’m wondering any advice you have for the users out there? You’re the founder of the company, any best practices for using Wavve or using Zubtitle that you could offer people that may be had been using the product or will be using it after they’ve listened to this podcast.
Baird: I think for new users that are getting started, one of my first tips is to visit our Instagram pages for Zubtitle and for Wavve, especially for Wavve. This is where we, it’s really the best place for us to highlight content that other users are creating, and it’s a good way to see how other people are using it. How they’re maybe using it differently or trying to be creative and more importantly to see the visuals that other people are using. Because it’s a great place to kind of set the bar for what your content should look like. I always encourage people, especially on the Wavve side, that are turning an audio clip into a video, you need to have an image included. That’s the way Wavve works, is you upload an audio file and combine an image with it and create a design around that to create videos.
I always recommend a free image editing tool. Like Canva is probably the most popular, it works really well. It’s free for the most part and it’s a great place to go grab templates to get started quickly because you really want to make sure that your visuals are sharp, and they look professional. Because again, it goes back to that, the idea of how people operate when they’re viewing on social media. You really have to grab their attention and use large fonts, images, make sure you’re using head shots from the people that are speaking. So there’s more of a human connection involved there. That’s always important. And then with Zubtitle, I think honestly with video content, I think it’s just encouraging more people to do it because video can sometimes be a little intimidating.
But when you do it and you get more comfortable in front of the camera and you can just use your phone, and your phone will record an HD, and it’ll look really good. You might want to get a little tripod to put your phone on, which is usually pretty cheap on Amazon. But, just creating more content and trying new things and putting yourself out there, I think the more people that we can have creating contents, spreading their ideas, the better.
How do you marketing Zubtitle and Wavve?
Nathan: How do you get in the word out about Zubtitle and Wavve? What’s been the most successful tactic in growing your businesses?
Baird: I think we’re very lucky in both scenarios that the product outputs content that people share and just naturally that starts a conversation and people will see something, or they’ll see the captions in a Zubtitle video, or they’ll see the Wavve form animation on a Wavve video and they’ll see it and I’ll talk about, and they say, “Hey, how’d you do that?” So for us, making sure that we’re including features that create really great looking content, unique content that stands out has been a big focus for us because we know that, that’ll help generate conversations, and kind of bring people to us naturally. But probably our most successful marketing tactic has been content and organic search traffic.
So, I spend a lot of time thinking and putting myself in the shoes of content creators and writing content on our blog that could help them in different ways. And we’ve been doing that for two plus years now and we try to get a blog post out every two weeks. So over time we’ve really amassed a pretty good organic traffic funnel through there. And so between those two, it really all of our traffic for the most part, aside from some Google ad words and some other paid things that we experiment with most of it is organic traffic, which we’re really proud of. It’s taken a long time, but it’s worked really well.
Is Zubtitle powered with AI?
Nathan: Is AI or machine learning involved at all with Zubtitle?
Baird: Definitely AI is really what powers the speech to text engine as well. We kind of, we use some different services and package them together in an interesting way to get this service done. So, definitely one plan for us is to really roll our own machine learning functions into the App so that as you’re making edits to your videos, it’ll remember those edits and try to suggest those going forward. It’s going to take a lot of time to, it takes a lot of data and uses usage to learn those things and to get that machine learning rolling. But that’s definitely something that we want to do going forward. And just from a general marketing standpoint that, you know, a Google and Amazon and all the big players are really releasing a lot of interesting AI, and machine learning services that services like ours can tap into. So I’m pretty excited to see what other tools come down and more capabilities that’ll get released from those services.