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Jenna Warner
Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach, and this is Shiny New New clients. This whole episode, I'm honestly just making this a how to episode because I get asked this all the time. People watch my content. They go, how does your footage look so crisp? What are you shooting on? I'm shooting on an old iPhone. It's not even a new iPhone, but there's a couple things that you can do to make your video quality on your reels and your content look so much better without spending a dime on it. My older sister moved many hours away from me and took over a business. It's actually a fishing lodge and like ATV and snowmobiling resort. That's wild, right? Like it's something right out of a TV show. Actually, there's lots of TV shows about this very situation. And man, if I've learned anything is running a resort is harder than it looks. And it looks pretty hard. Anyway, since moving there, like all of us, like all of us listening, she became responsible for managing the business's social media. And this is someone who was not a social media person. She didn't even have personal accounts. She was not comfortable with it, didn't know how to do it. And then she suddenly had to run these big accounts for this resort, which means the bane of my existence has become seeing my sister post on Instagram and then calling her immediately telling her to clean her lens because, oh, I hope she doesn't hear this. She's gonna be mad. But the thing is, I can spot a mile away when there is a thumbprint on your lens, and there's pretty much always a thumbprint on your phone lens or oil from your face, which immediately makes the footage, the quality of the video looks not as good. Actually, here's another story. I got invited to go out to Muskoka to this really fancy event with all these really fancy people to post on social media for my friend who ran an oyster company, this is many years ago. So he had a table where he was live shucking oysters, and I was supposed to go around and get footage and I had my proper camera with me then, like, not even just my phone and every photo I took looks so bad. And I couldn't figure it out. I was starting to panic because I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm supposed to be out here doing the social media and like, everything I'm taking looks so bad. And then I looked down at my lens after a couple hours and realized there was a giant thumbprint on the lens. It wasn't something that I could see from the photos. Like, I couldn't see the outline of a thumb. Everything just looked a little bit off, a little bit out of focus, a little bit blurry, a little bit muted in the colors. It's because of the lens. So grab yourself one of those little pieces of fabric that comes in a glasses case and wipe your lens and then wipe it again because it usually takes two tries to get all that grease off and immediately your footage is going to look better. First thing is you're going to wipe your lens every time before you go to record. Second thing is, you're going to go to your settings and I'm going to talk about iPhone, but it's going to be pretty much the same for all phones. You're going to go to your settings and make sure that you're recording in 1080p. 1080p. The thing is, phones can record better than that. They can record in what's called 4K, but Instagram doesn't facilitate 4K yet. So often if you're filming something and it's a really big file and it's a really high quality piece of content in terms of the footage, Instagram's actually going to compress that when you post it, and then it's not going to look as good and you're going to be there being like, why doesn't this look good? The reason is because Instagram can't handle the size. Plus, 4K footage takes up way more room on your phone. When business owners work with me in Magic Marketing Machine, yes, we give you a proven strategy to get clients from your content and post faster. But a lot of what I do for people is get really realistic about your content creation. If you're a solopreneur or you have a small business with a really small team, maybe it's just you and an assistant. The stuff that's probably getting in your way from posting is things that are more akin to, like, my camera is full of photos and I ran out of room, or I don't like editing on my phone because the screen is too small or, you know, I'm paying for too many pieces of software and I need the cheapest, easiest versions or whatever. It's stuff like that. So that's what we address in the program as well, is how do we make this actually realistic for you, what you like, what you're comfortable making and how much time you have to dedicate to it. Also, everything that I say, all of these settings and everything that I'm about to tell you, it's all on a document and you can go grab it from the show notes. So just put your name and email in. I made a little opt in form and I will send you everything that I'm talking about and some visual references so you can see, oh, that's what she means by 1080p. And you can fix all your settings. There's also a setting inside Instagram that you want to make sure is selected. So you're going to go to Instagram on your phone, tap settings, scroll down and this is at the time of this recording. You know, sometimes the locations of things change. I'll talk about that in a second. So you're going to scroll down and you're going to look for media quality and make sure the little toggle that says upload at highest quality is turned on. Because Instagram can sometimes take up a lot of bandwidth or your data, use up your data, things like that. So they have an option where you can upload at a little bit of a lower quality and use less megabytes, blah, blah, blah. All you need to know is make sure that you have uploaded highest quality selected and turned on. There's a couple other settings. Find them all in the document below this episode and if ever this is like the best tip. This is the best tip for anyone who like me, fights with technology can get frustrated. Isn't the most tech savvy of all of the online business owners out there? ChatGPT is so good at explaining stuff because you can be like, I don't understand or I don't see button chat, tell me where the button is. So often if I'm experiencing tech issues or I need to know how to change a setting, or I can't figure out how to add something to my website or whatever it is, I'll go to ChatGPT and I'll explain the problem and ask it to explain to me it literally exactly what to click next in order to fix whatever I'm dealing with. The next thing is lighting. Good lighting improves your video. Good lighting makes it look like you have a fancy camera filming you when it's really just your Old iPhone like me. And I don't mean expensive lighting. The sun is going to be your best friend here. The mistake folks make is you sand directly in the sun, which then makes you squint, which then makes your wrinkles pop. And it makes the lighting look like, really intense, and then it makes the shadows look really intense too. So you don't want direct lighting. The next thing people do is set up a bunch of like, lights in your house. Maybe they're fluorescent bulbs. It always looks a little bit yellow. Even if the room feels bright when you're sitting in it, it's not. So you don't want fake lighting either. Light bulbs just aren't going to do it. If you have to film at night, I mean, there's ways to make it work. Maybe you're busy during the day. That's another thing where we're just going to be realistic about this content creation process. But the best thing that you can look for is diffused natural sunlight. So what that means is if you have light streaming in through a window at you, put a sheer curtain in front of it, just like one of those IKEA $10 sheer curtains. If it's a bright day outside and it's nice and bright, stand in the shade. In the bright shade, but not directly in the sun. If it's nice and bright outside, stand in front of a window. As soon as that light is shining at the back of your head, you're now backlit. And it's gonna lower the quality of the video, not just like the subjective quality. It actually makes the footage look less crisp. When you're lit poorly, you wanna look for natural, diffuse sunlight. And again, in that document below this, I'm gonna show you, literally link you to a video where I show you a bunch of options of what diffused sunlight can look like. Like a cloudy day is actually better than a sunny day because the clouds are gonna diffuse the lighting. So a day that's sky just looks like cloudy and white all the way across, but it's not raining and it's not gloomy. That's perfect lighting for your content. My clients create what's called a consistent content strategy. So in one afternoon, they're coming up with months and months worth of content that's sorted into all of the different sort of strategic check marks that you need to be posting in order to make it so that when your followers are seeing your content, they're always being led down this path towards working with you. Now, the reason I say that is if you're someone who needs to rely on good weather to film reels or the like. Appropriate rather weather like overcasty days. You want to make sure all your content ideas are ready to go so that when you have time to post or when the lighting is right, you can create your posts then and not spend all of that beautiful sunlight thinking up what the heck to say. Ideally, you want to have a content strategy that tells you what you need to post so all the ideas are ready and sitting there waiting for you. And then you can film them when the moment is right. I film a lot in the car because we have a puppy. Well, no, she's not a puppy anymore, but she's still a puppy. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, we have a puppy. They don't allow puppies in grocery stores for some crazy reason. So when we drive into town, because I live in the woods, God, this is taking a lot of context. I live in the woods. We drive into town to go to the grocery store, we bring the dog. I stay in the car with the dog while my husband does the grocery shopping. And that's why you see me post so many videos from the car. Because the lighting in the car is diffused when it's bright outside, there's all this light streaming into the car from all the open windows, but it's not that harsh. Direct sunlight and the sound quality is good. I've heard of people recording podcasts in their car because the sound quality is good, because there's lots to absorb the sound, it's quiet with the windows up, yada yada, just drive to an empty parking lot in the middle of nowhere so no one can see you and film your footage in your car. Earlier this week I posted an entire podcast episode on having on camera confidence and it was similar to this one in that it's very tutorial esque. So if you like this tutorial series style podcast episode, very how to podcast episode with some really clear tips on how to have more confidence when you're showing up on camera. It's a really good sister episode to this one as well as that document that I said that's down in the show notes. I try and share content with you that will cue you up to be ready to come work with me to be more strategic online. Like full disclosure. That's what content marketing's all about, right? I want you to feel like you have confidence to show up on camera. I want you to feel like you know some of the nuts and bolts of your phone so that that you can come work with me in Magic Marketing Machine. You can start using a true strategy, have amazing messaging, know what kind of content you can create that's gonna get clicks and likes and shares and all of that. Cause that's exactly what I do with my clients when we work together to help you get clients from your content. If you're ready for that step, there's also information about that below this episode. With that, I'll see you next week and it'll be back to our regularly scheduled podcast programming.