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Welcome to the socialized strategy. If you are here with me on YouTube and seeing the video of what's happening now, you will know who the sponsor is for this week because I'm surrounded by hangry pets. And these guys are plush toys that represent being hangry, and we all know what that means. When you're hungry and you're annoyed, and that equals hangry. So I've got my hangry pets here.
Helen:Why? Because the subject of today's newsletter brings me back to my toy roots, and I'm gonna share a little bit about that. But I have been working with Hangry Pets on some of their content for social media, and they are looking for influencers as well to work with them on creating content. So today's topic is how to make videos with your products without being in your videos. So if you want to make videos about products, but you don't wanna have to necessarily show your face, or you can in some of these ideas, that's what we're gonna cover today.
Helen:So before I get started, I'm gonna move these guys out of the way so I can get to my notes. But I did want you to have a good look at them because they're super cute, and they make hangry noises like that. And this, we think, I mean, for sure, is gonna be a kind of a phenomenon because we know what it's like to be hangry. And because it's such a trendy word, these guys, I think, will span the ages. So they're gonna be able to speak to all different age groups.
Helen:So whether you have little kids, grandkids, teenagers in your life, or whatever, this is the story. Okay. So now let me slide these guys a little bit out of the way, and let's get into the topic for today. So not only have they sponsored the newsletter, but and are looking for influencers, they've also challenged me with making some content for them. And in doing that, I realized, oh, I could do a teaching moment where I can teach my followers how to make product videos by using my own experience in doing it in real time for a client.
Helen:So you see how it all blended together. I love when that happens. It's like perfect symmetry in my work world and my social media life. So hooray to that. And what I'm going to do is cover what I did.
Helen:I did it in a tutorial in short form, but I want to cover in more depth each way that you can make a product video, different types of product videos using your products. And you don't have have to have of an a stuffed animal with a personality to make product videos. Anything you have in your world, whether it's a skin care line or nail polish or, water bottle cups or whatever. Anything can have a personality because social media is so creative and the things that you can do. I can take on this water bottle and put the little eyes effect on Instagram and TikTok.
Helen:They have an eyes and a mouth effect. You do the mouth effect where you your mouth could be superimposed on your product and you can bring your product to life. So you don't have to have a product that has a face. You can create a face. You don't even have to have voices for them, anything like that.
Helen:You can use sounds and put different sounds in and give your products personalities in that way. So I'm gonna walk you through lots of different things and you're gonna see examples and a tutorial that I share and will and it's linked in the newsletter, and it's also linked in the show notes. So let's get started. Boom. If you run a small business and you have products, a lot of times you don't want to be on camera.
Helen:A lot of times you wanna figure out how to how do I, how can I batch a bunch of content without getting myself stressed out? And what I did for these guys, in fact, is I took I'm gonna give you all the inside tips now because I didn't even explain this in the tutorial, how I made the videos. But I took I took each one of these, sat it on a bench in front of a colored wall. So for in my case, I the lighter colored ones, I sat in front of a darker wall. And the dark the darker colored ones, I sat in front of a light colored wall.
Helen:And I took a still photo of each one of them so that I could cut them out in cap cut with one click and then put them in any environment. So I'm gonna explain why that's important because even if you think, Ugh, I wouldn't even know how to start with something like this. The apps we have at our fingertips now make this so incredibly easy. If I tell you what it used to be like back in the day when I worked on Furby, HitClips, and what are the ones I did recently? Fingerlings.
Helen:I wrote the jingle for Fingerlings. I worked back in the day on part you know, all the commercials I did back then. And it was very involved to make content. We didn't have phones in the palm of our hand. You have the advantage for your products to do DIY, and it can look as good as a real professional commercial.
Helen:So I don't know. Use the tools and take advantage of them and don't be overwhelmed. Consider it that you can do it. It's not such a far reach that you can't make it happen. So let's start with number 1, my favorite, and that is creating a stop motion video.
Helen:I love that there's 2 ways more than 2 ways, but my favorite two ways of doing stop motion. Number 1 on TikTok, you have a stop motion effect where you can just tap the screen and record the frames as you move your products through a scene. The one that I did for these guys is I had them raiding my cabinets. I have them moving through trying to find food in my cabinets, for example. But you can do the same thing with whatever your product is, a skincare line where it's packaging itself up and it's jumping into your your packaging or it's unboxing.
Helen:You can create stop motion unboxing videos. I did this recently in a workshop with an Olay product where I had the box kind of just dance onto the table and come into the scene and open up and the products came out. And I mean, it was very, very easy to do. It took me about 10 minutes to shoot it. So there's so many easy things you can do with stop motion effects.
Helen:And you can do it with the stop motion effect in the app. Or you can simply go into your app, your phone, and stop and start your video recording, like quick stop start, stop start, move the product, stop start. Lots of easy ways to do it. Or still photos, still photos, still photos, still photos, still photos as it moves around and then just edit together all your still photos. The key thing about stop motion though is not having your background change.
Helen:So you want to put your camera on a steady on a tripod of some kind or keep it steady because the magic when a product moves is that the background isn't moving. Alright. So that's a quick tip and more on that. We can include the stop motion tutorial and as a link as well. And if you got the newsletter, you already saw it.
Helen:The next thing you can do is have some fun with your products by doing some popular transitions with them where the products are doing the transitions. So in this case, I did an up and down. Remember that one that was going up and down and round, and it was like a head spinning trend? I took one of these guys and I put it on camera by itself looking up, looking down, and then spinning around. So cute.
Helen:It's a trend. It'll probably get a good amount of views by itself. So when you think about what the trends are and how can you put your product as the person in the trend, you can do so many things. Lip sync trends. You can have them lip syncing 2 characters.
Helen:I mean, you can have your nail polish or your water bottles battling, lip syncing. You can do whatever you can to bring your products to life. They don't have to be characters with faces to come to life. As long as they have voices and attitude, you will have product fun product demonstrations. The next one is also somewhat similar.
Helen:It is multi character, creating a multi character video and giving your characters personalities. And this is fun because there's so many audios on TikTok, on Instagram that you can tap into that are already there. And I had a fun one with this one where it was like, I'm in the mood for a salad. I'm in the mood for a sandwich, and it goes back and forth. And there was a bunch of trending audios.
Helen:So I went through and thought about my characters and I was like, okay. What's their vibe? What's their personality? Mine are hungry and angry. Let me find some audios that are people arguing about food or something like that.
Helen:So think about whatever your product is. It's skin care. It's clean. It's fresh. Think about audios where someone's talking about I love this.
Helen:It's so demure. That word again. But you know that demure thing's really trending hard right now. So run with it. That's a great one for product videos.
Helen:So demure if you have a skin care line. Like, give your product a personality. Put a face on it. Make your product demure. Take that idea and run with it.
Helen:Take that audio and run with it. It's such a good one. And so you can do this with old audios. I did some research for these characters and I went back deep into some fun prior trending audios. And if they have a good amount of videos, it could they could pop off if you use that audio and add it to your product videos.
Helen:So it's fun. And then you can write and then using those using those audios that are already existing is easy. But I also did one where I talked and I was the voice of both characters. And I these 2, I think it was. And I had them having a conversation in my kitchen about looking for grading the cabinets.
Helen:And I what I did was after I recorded my voice, I put the trickster voice on. And it sounds so funny with the trickter trickster audio because it's like they're grumpy and angry and that voice sounds grumpy and angry. So I made a whole script out of top off the top of my head about, like, them there's nothing in this cat. This person has to go grocery shopping. I'm out.
Helen:And then they left the scene. So I had a good time with the audio that I created by using an effect on my voice. So it didn't have to be my voice. So that's another way to do it. Think about putting voices on that, you know, using the speech to text with all the characters, using the character sound effects when you do a voice over.
Helen:You can do so many things with voices that make your your, videos interesting. The next one is using a cap cut template. This is quite easy because a lot of times there's just a frenetic template happening, and you could literally put a product still photo behind it or your office photo and then a a text on there that says when the let's say the lady who was really frantic and, like, run-in a million directions, that's a great one for a small business because you could be me trying to pack up all the orders I got because of a viral video. That's a funny caption right there. And there's the person going around in circles trying to pack up all her.
Helen:And so it's neither your product nor your packaging nor yourself are in that video. It's just literally the the lady that's going around in circles and some text you put on screen with a background. You don't even need a real office. You can pull an office off off Google images, and you have yourself an office with, like, a nice caption on it. So those are super easy to do, and you can make some really fun stuff out of cap cut templates.
Helen:So easy to do. And it just was showing, like, you're gonna love these guys with the heart, with the Ni Amor thing. The other thing you can do is to create a music video. Oh my god. And this one, I'm gonna take you down different places with this one.
Helen:So being that you can take any product and cut it out and put it on any background, you can take your products around the world. You can put them in different environments. You can take them so these guys I had in a pizzeria. I had them in a donut shop in front of an ice cream. I had them moving around in front of different types of food because that's what makes sense for a product like hangry pets because they're hangry.
Helen:So I thought about what are my characters about? Where would they go? Treat them like people, treat your water bottle, your slick water bottle is like, where's it gonna go? To the gym. It's gonna go to the park.
Helen:You can take your product. It doesn't have to be a a personality with eyes and nose. Again, I keep saying it, but this water bottle can come to life and it can travel around because it can be cut out with cap cut and it can be moved around and it can go to a park, a playground. It can be at a birthday party. It can be at your office desk.
Helen:It can move around without you even being in it. So I'm gonna take a sip because I'm thirsty and say, you can create videos for any types of products. If you can get your mind into thinking, what is the personality of your brand? And it's such a old school way of, using that term. Because I remember when I first started in advertising and I was in an account executive meeting.
Helen:I don't know. And one of my bosses said, well, what's the personality of the brand? And I'm like, what are they even talking about? And I think that just rings in my ears again and again so many years later because it's this it's really true of any brand that we create. What's the personality of my personal brand?
Helen:It's, like, very driven by who I am. But what's the personality of your product line? Is it clean? Is it health conscious? Is it fun?
Helen:Is it irreverent? Is it comedic? What think about assigned personality traits that you would assign to a person and assign them to your brand. And then you will be able to leap outside of your brain and think creatively about how you can make content about it. These are the hot tips that I just think about all the time when I'm creating content for brands for any brand, when I'm whether I'm on set doing it, whether I have products in my house here that I have to figure something out.
Helen:I really, really enjoy it. And this is a funny thing that I'm gonna share, but my husband said one time, don't you run out of ideas? Like, how do you keep and I said, no. Point blank said no. I'm like, I don't know.
Helen:I always have new ideas, and I never worry about running out of ideas. So, I mean, a lot of people aren't like that where where it's brimming with creativity at all times, and I never used to be like that. I was always thinking I'm a producer. I'm an organizer. I'm not creative.
Helen:And that was the mantra I had in my brain for so many years of my career. And now it's like I'm outside that. Like, those were my own prison prison bars that I put on myself, and there's just no end to it. I think I just get such a charge out of thinking, how can I do something different with this? And how are these gonna be brought to life in a different way?
Helen:And then I'll have ideas where someone will present an idea to me. And then as soon as I start thinking about it, I see it a different way, and then that becomes another idea. So you just have to allow yourself. And I don't believe that people who say I'm not creative because now that I know what I used to be and used to think of myself and who I am now, I I sold myself that that BS story. I'm the producer.
Helen:I'm the organizer. I'm not creative for all those years. But I was working with creative people, surrounded by creative people. And and after a while, I started to realize that I either I learned from them or I became like them. It's you know how that phrase that phrase, you are who you hang with?
Helen:That's like a big I think, a very favorite person of mine in my life who is Jamaican used to say, show me your friends, and I'll tell you who you are with that Jamaican accent. Okay? I wish I could do it. But that so it's who what the people that you surround yourself with, you tend to feed off of them. So if you hang around with creative people and you hear them and it's just like hanging around with funny people, then maybe you start to pick up a little funny a little humor about yourself.
Helen:I think it's just how we evolve in our life, and we go through different phases, different friendships that form who we are and change who we are. And then we become better from the people that we hang out with if we choose the right people. I should add that. Alright. So some of the questions that I had this week came from videos that I posted.
Helen:And I'm gonna talk about a couple of them right now just to finish us off. So number 1 is when you are scrolling on the for you page and you hear sound coming out of one headphone, I'm amazed at how many advertisers have made this mistake. And I've seen it in sponsored content again and again where the sound is coming out of 1 headphone. And it's because they recorded it incorrectly with a wireless microphone that was set to stereo. When you have a wireless microphone and it you should look on the little thing that plugs into your phone and make sure it's set to mono.
Helen:It seems backwards. It seems like stereo would be better quality and stereo would give you better surround sound. Actually, what stereo does is it separates your voices on the different microphones onto different channels. So if you don't work with a professional audio mixer, it's only gonna have your sound coming out of one channel. So make sure if you're working with a wireless microphone that you have the little dot the Bluetooth thing that plugs into the phone set to mono.
Helen:So this way, you're not annoying your viewers by having your voice coming out of 1 headphone. It's not noticeable when you play it on the speaker on the phone. It's only noticeable with headphones, but it's very annoying. So make sure that if you're working with a wireless microphone, you have it set to mono. The next question I got is interesting because it could apply to TikTok or Instagram, And that is what's the difference between a story and a regular post.
Helen:And so I am gonna tell you, it's a little more cryptic on TikTok with the story than it is on Instagram. And maybe because it's been on Instagram longer and we're used to knowing where to find the story up in the circle. We know that it lasts 24 hours and it goes away. There's different options you could do on the story, which are so much better, where you can link directly to products or link directly to websites. If you have a podcast, you can link directly to an episode.
Helen:I love that feature of the Instagram story, and that really needs to come to TikTok, please. I'm sending it out to the universe. But anyway, on TikTok, the story is a little different. It's harder to find because people don't realize that you have to go to your activities, your DMs. And then at the top, you have to pass by all the lives and get to the blue circles where the stories are highlighted.
Helen:And then you can tap through the stories. A little bit harder to find, not so intuitive, and also not as clear. Although I'm getting a lot of views on my stories. So there are people up there in the circles doing their doing their job, doing the work, putting in the time. But I don't personally do it.
Helen:And I really should go there more. Because I don't think that it used to be that stories would show up in the regular feed on the for you page. But I'm not seeing stories any longer on the for you page. I just don't think they are sending them out that way. So be aware that stories on TikTok and to give a hot take there, stories on TikTok are really helpful if you want to share your posts in case it's not doing well on the for you page.
Helen:You can put a comment and share it to your story and give it a little boost because then your core followers who go to the stories and watch the stories every day, those people at least are giving you some some core views. So that's a good way to think about your stories if you haven't been thinking about them. So I'm gonna sign off. But before I do, I'm just gonna say that if you are interested in making content for a brand like this and you have an audience that makes sense for this type of content now I'm gonna just put myself under the bus. Typically, this would not be content for me.
Helen:I don't have kids this age nor do I have grandkids. I don't have teenagers. It's really a stretch for me as a personal brand to promote products like this. It wouldn't even make sense. So what I chose to do with my, I guess, collaboration, if you will, is create videos about how to make product videos using these guys in the product videos.
Helen:So I chose to keep my content authentic to me, to what type of content I share, and include them in it without it being all of a sudden now I'm talking about, oh, look. Hangry Pets, these are great for your kids. That no one's gonna buy into that from me. I don't even I don't even see it, and it doesn't make sense. So note to influencers that when you are doing product content, if you are doing collaborations, figure out how to work that into what you're already doing.
Helen:And don't just go all of a sudden, I'm a dancer. I do dancing videos, and now I'm talking about product. No one's gonna watch those videos if they're watching you for dancing. They would make sense it would make sense if you were dancing with these guys in a dancing video, then it makes sense. So think about your content.
Helen:Think about how you would take that product into your content in an authentic way. And that is my hot tip for influencers everywhere. It's a PSA. I'm gonna sign off. Have a very lovely weekend.
Helen:I hope you're not too hangry. As if you are. Give your hangry pets a squeeze, and I'll see you next week. Have a good weekend. Bye.