Episode 606 Piece of Cake Video Content Strategy With Adam McLaughlin
Show Highlights
The is a conversation between Rob Cairns and Adam McLaughlin, focusing on McLaughlin’s new business venture, pieceofcakevideos.com, which provides easy, subscription-based social media video content for small and medium businesses. They discuss the challenges of creating consistent video content and how McLarin’s service simplifies the process by recording a conversation with the client, then using AI and manual editing to chop the footage into short, engaging, evergreen clips for platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. The speakers emphasize the importance of authentic, unscripted content for building trust with an audience, contrasting short-form video as a “Costco sample” that funnels viewers to longer-form content. They also address the role of AI in their workflow, noting that it assists with efficiency but does not complete more than 60% of the final product, with human oversight necessary for quality and timely content monitoring.
Show Notes
Welcome and Introduction
Rob Cairns and Adam McLaughlin kick off the podcast with a friendly chat, discussing their shared interests and the ease of their conversations. The episode starts with Adam in sunny Hawaii, a fact Rob jokingly laments due to the contrast with the cold Canadian weather. They reminisce about growing up in Montreal with huge snowbanks and the unexpected beauty of Niagara Falls in the winter.
Adam’s New Venture: Piece of Cake Videos
Adam introduces his new business venture, Piece of Cake Videos, which focuses on creating social media videos for small to medium-sized businesses. The service came from a client’s need for more web traffic without a large ad budget. The client was great on camera but ran out of ideas. Adam secretly recorded a casual conversation with the client, then edited it into short, vertical clips, providing weeks of evergreen content. This experience sparked the idea for a service that makes video content “a piece of cake” for business owners.
The Power of Short-Form Video
- The Content Landscape: Adam and Rob discuss the shift in content consumption. While they tend to consume long-form content, the younger generation prefers short clips. Social media platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts favor this format, boosting visibility.
- Audio vs. Video: Longer content, like an hour-long podcast, is often consumed as audio during commutes or evening walks. Short-form video, however, acts as a “Costco sample,” a teaser to pique interest and drive traffic to a longer-form video or website.
- Authenticity over Perfection: Rob and Adam emphasize the importance of authentic, unscripted content. They believe that a conversational, natural style is more relatable and effective than a highly-produced, rigid video. This approach helps clients feel comfortable and builds genuine trust with their audience.
Building Trust Through Video
- Personality Sells: The conversation highlights that people often choose to do business with people they like and trust. Video is a powerful tool to showcase personality, helping potential clients connect with a person behind the brand. This is especially critical in competitive industries like real estate or consulting, where personality can be a deciding factor.
- The Foundation of Trust: Adam explains that trust is the foundation for any purchase or business relationship. Video helps build this trust well before a client asks for stats, prices, or credentials. It provides a face-to-face feel, making the connection more personal and genuine.
How Piece of Cake Videos Works
- The Process: Adam’s service is a monthly subscription. Clients have a one-hour video call, which is then recorded. Using AI, the conversation is edited into short, vertical clips with captions, descriptions, and hashtags.
- AI’s Role: Adam clarifies that AI is used for efficiency but doesn’t do all the work. He follows two key rules:
- AI only gets them 60% of the way there. A human editor manually checks and adjusts every clip, including spelling of names and brands.
- The goal of AI is efficiency. It helps them quickly create a month’s worth of content, a task that would otherwise require a full-time video editor.
- Evergreen Content: The service focuses on creating evergreen content that can be reused. By the fourth or fifth month of a subscription, clients can have daily social media content for just one hour of their time per month.
- Video First, Then Audio: Rob and Adam agree that starting with video content is the best approach. It’s easy to extract audio and create short clips from a video, but it’s difficult to go the other way around.
Pricing and Expansion
- Subscription Tiers: Adam offers three subscription tiers:
- $1.99/month: Includes the video call and edited clips for the client to schedule themselves.
- $3.99/month: Adds active social media monitoring and scheduling to optimize post timing. This package also includes evergreen content recycling.
- $9.99/month: A full marketing package that includes long-form YouTube content, blog content, and a newsletter, all sourced from the one-hour video call.
- Global Reach: Adam and his wife travel full-time, and while he currently works with English-speaking clients, he has plans to expand the business to include interviewers and editors in other continents to accommodate different languages and time zones.
Where to Learn More: Rob wraps up the interview by directing listeners to pieceofcakevideos.com for more information. Adam’s goal is to simplify video marketing, making it an accessible and effective tool for any business.
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