A year’s worth of video content from a handful of conversations: Julia’s story
- Miranda Birch
- May 19
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Sometimes I help businesses to ‘jump start’ their video production machine.
I record a batch of conversations with their clients, cut them up into lots of snippets and create a bank of video ‘nuggets’, which they can use in different ways for several months.
In 2022, I did this for Julia Chanteray. Julia‘s the brain behind two brilliant companies: Adventures in Products, which helps founders to escape the trap of selling their time for money by productising their expertise, and The Joy of Business, which supports ambitious owners and founders with business coaching and Mastermind group matching.
I recorded six conversations with Julia’s clients. Each call lasted an hour.
This is what those chats gave her:
Thought #1: just ask
I talk a lot about recording chats of 15, rather than 60 minutes, because they take up less of your time and your clients’ time.
But… if you need to scale up your video production, don’t be afraid to ask your clients for more time.
In my experience, clients who have been helped by you will be happy to block out sizeable bits of their diary for you. (If you’re sceptical about this, read my article about the ‘Surprise bonus of testimonials and why you mustn’t be scared to ask for one’.)
What Julia did next
In 2023, I did some training sessions with Julia, so she could record client interviews herself.
Two years later, I caught up with her to see how things were going:
Thought #2: ask more than once
Julia makes a good point: don’t limit yourself to asking for a testimonial at the end of a project. If a client gives you some feedback early on or mid-way through, use that as an opportunity to say something like:
“You’ve just mentioned some kind things about our work together. If you have 10 minutes to spare tomorrow or next week, I’d love to record your comments on Zoom/Riverside FM, because it will help other business owners understand what a difference my approach makes.”
And even if you get early feedback, feel free to ask again at other points, including several months (or two years!) after your work is done.
That way you can collect snapshots from different stages of your client’s journey, just as I have done with Julia’s story.
What Julia taught me
And Julia’s story isn’t just about the fact that she’s recording interviews herself.
It’s also about how she’s making the most of the videos she’s recorded.
Earlier she mentioned how she can “reuse them sneakily in different places”. This isn’t sneaky at all, of course. It makes sense to repurpose the same snippets – resizing them so they can go on different platforms, and reach your target audiences, wherever they stop off to be sociable.
She’s also embedding them in lots of places on her websites: for testimonials, success stories and for digging deep into her area of expertise.
In this example she’s done something that I’d never thought of: mixing other people’s work with her own:
Thought #3: get more ideas from Julia
Have a closer look at Julia’s long-form article and see how she uses a range of video nuggets to illustrate her writing. It could give you ideas on how to repurpose your own videos, to create a new blog post or revamp an old one.
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