Baylee Gunnell and Dallion Durán-Ballén sit down with Anna Burgess Yang of ABY Creative to dive into the intricacies of content creation and automation. As a solo marketer, Anna has mastered the art of maximizing content utility, turning every piece into a long-term asset. She discusses how leveraging automation tools can help streamline the content creation process, saving time and mental bandwidth.
Anna emphasizes the importance of repurposing content, a crucial step that often falls to the bottom of the priority list. Many marketers, after the initial push of creating and publishing content, neglect the potential that lies in further utilizing that material. Anna explains that even simple conversations, such as sales calls or coffee chats, can be valuable sources of content. By using tools like Zapier and ChatGPT, these conversations can be transformed into various content formats, extending their life and reach.
Dallion and Baylee explore the accessibility of Anna’s approach, highlighting that even those not constantly on calls can benefit. Anna suggests starting small, manually processing transcripts to extract key insights before moving on to more advanced automation. This step-by-step method allows marketers to gradually integrate automation into their workflow, ensuring they don’t miss out on valuable content opportunities.
Anna also discusses her specific tools and processes. She uses Otter for transcriptions, Dropbox for initial storage, and Zapier for automation, moving files to Google Drive for further use. She stresses that the best tools are the ones that fit individual processes, budgets, and preferences. This flexible approach allows marketers to tailor their tech stack to their unique needs, optimizing their content creation efforts.
The episode is packed with practical advice and insights, making it a must-listen for any content creator looking to streamline their workflow and maximize the utility of their content. Tune in to learn more about Anna’s innovative methods and how you can apply them to your own content strategy.
Featured Guest
Name: Anna Burgess Yang
What she does: Freelance Fintech Writer + Product-Led Content
Company: ABY Creative
Noteworthy: Anna Burgess Yang is a former tech executive and product manager turned content marketer and journalist. As a niche writer, she focuses on financial technology. And as a self-proclaimed workflow geek, she is obsessed with tools and automation. She’s based in a suburb of Chicago and lives with her family, including three kids and three cats.
Featured Guest
Key Insights
The Power of Automation in Content Creation
Automation can significantly enhance content creation processes, particularly for solo marketers and small teams. By using tools like Zapier and ChatGPT, repetitive tasks are streamlined, freeing up time for more strategic activities. Automated workflows can handle everything from converting transcripts into social posts to scheduling future content, ensuring a continuous and varied content stream. This approach not only saves time but also reduces the mental load associated with manual content management.
Maximizing Content Utility
Every piece of high-quality content has potential for repurposing, extending its lifespan and reach. Instead of letting valuable content fade after its initial use, it can be transformed into multiple formats such as blog posts, social media updates, and videos. This practice ensures that the effort invested in creating original content continues to yield returns over time. Consistently sharing repurposed content helps reinforce brand messages and maintain audience engagement without constantly creating new material.
Continuous and Consistent Messaging
Reinforcing core messages through varied formats and repeated sharing is crucial for brand recognition. It often takes multiple exposures for an audience to associate a message with a brand, making consistent messaging vital. By scheduling content to reappear at strategic intervals, brands can stay top-of-mind for their audience. This method not only aids in building a strong brand identity but also ensures that the key messages reach different segments of the audience at various times.
Episode Highlights
Automating Content Creation for Efficiency
Anna discusses the importance of automating the content creation process to save time and reduce manual effort. By utilizing tools like Zapier and ChatGPT, tasks such as generating social posts from transcripts can be automated, allowing for a more streamlined workflow. This process ensures that high-quality content continues to provide value long after its initial creation.
“Once a transcript hits a specific folder on my Google Drive, then in the background, Zapier is running through that and saying, look only at my side of the conversation. I want to repurpose my own content. So look at just this via Chat GPT specifically. So I’m telling ChatGPT, look at me, look at what I’m saying. Now, what are the insights you can pull out of that? And then take those insights and drop them into another location so I can review them. “
Leveraging Transcripts for Content Repurposing
Transcripts from conversations and meetings can be a goldmine for creating varied content. Anna explains how she uses transcripts to extract insights and transform them into different content types, such as blog posts, social media updates, and newsletters, ensuring no valuable information goes to waste.
“I’m just automating all of those steps in the background via Zapier. Certainly that could be a process also of uploading a transcript to ChatGPT or things like that.”
Continuous Messaging Through Automation
Repeatedly sharing core messages in different formats helps reinforce brand identity. Anna describes how automating the scheduling of repurposed content can maintain a steady flow of varied posts, ensuring the brand message reaches the audience multiple times without overwhelming them.
“I can put a date with it. So I say, I’ll put these social posts and kick it 90 days into the future, kick it six months into the future. And then it’s part of my overall content plan that when I get to that point in time, now here’s this piece of content waiting for me. So it’s building out this calendar simultaneously.”
Utilizing Conversations for Content Ideas
Every conversation, whether it’s a formal interview or an informal chat, can be a source of content. Anna shares how she captures and repurposes content from everyday conversations, demonstrating the potential of turning casual interactions into valuable marketing material.
“I even include coffee chats with people. […] In some way, shape, or form in those conversations, I’m talking about who I am, what I do, the type of work that I do in the background. And so why not turn that into a social post? It’s saying a lot of the same things I’m already talking about, but each time it’s a little bit different.”
