AMPERAGE Marketing & Fundraising

One-Minute MarketerThe Content Beast Is Hungry

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The Content Beast Is Hungry

If you have ever worked for a media outlet, you understand that the hungry beast is the insatiable appetite of your audience–when one news day is done, it’s time to clear the deck and start filling the next newscasts.

Today, every organization is a news outlet. The quarterly newsletter is dead and the new day of fulfilling search terms has arisen.  And what people want instead of old news from the last quarter, is a video on a topic that interests, educates or entertains them.

Water's edge tinea veriscolor

Here’s a 2-minute video we produced for Water’s Edge Dermatology in Florida in 2014. To this day the views are growing. To date, nearly 54,000 views and 330 Likes. Evergreen topics can continue to educate and interest people for years.

We recommend a “channel approach” where you begin to build a library of keyword-rich videos that are tailored to audiences: For example, a credit union might have a video about just getting married and how best to combine your finances, or a bank might have a video on a family financing the building of a new home and then a separate video on how to finance an already existing home.  Building your organization’s channel will take time, but as long as the meta data is strong (video tags, description and video title are all optimized) these videos can be ready whenever someone searches the topic. Unlike a newscast that is broadcast and then the signal is off to Mars, these video stories can be told again and again.

The content beast is hungry and needs to be regularly fed, but feeding the beast the right way can help build a series of mini-shows that can play beyond their typical season.

Written by:

Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.