I have heard it before…
You have the world’s greatest branding expert on your team.
Your VP of Learning has been teaching virtual since the dawn of the Internet.
You are blessed with having a former Hollywood producer on your team too.
But still… you seem to struggle in putting the technology you already have together in order to create remarkable experiences and digital communications for when you hop on your next Zoom meeting, OR produce high-quality training videos for your company OR onboarding new customers FAST.
You don’t have time to figure this all out on your own.
Macarena Rose, Operating Principal of the Keller Williams in Belize, is a celebrity REALTOR, star of House Hunters International having been on multiple episodes.
Let me share some of her concerns:
- Overwhelmed with technology.
- Lack of creativity when making new designs.
- Existing high cost of producing visually stimulating graphics of multiple sizes.
- Zero-knowledge on editing videos.
- What new equipment she needed to buy without breaking the bank.
- Didn’t want to overspend on buying technology she didn’t need.
- How to use the technology she already invested.
- Needed to scale a breakthrough customer experience that could be customized on the fly.
- Wanted to differentiate herself and the company from the competition.
- Needed a faster turnaround time to receive marketing collateral from assistants.
- She didn’t know what she didn’t know to outsource marketing activities to her team.
- Needed to stop wasting time on inefficient tasks that kept her from running her business.
This Operating Principal of a Keller Williams franchise, a full-time practicing REALTOR, and Keller Williams rainmaker didn’t have time to figure all of this out. That’s when she asked for my help. Click the play button at the top of this post to see a video produced from her new environment.
This is what we did in a short period of time.
#1 Find (or Create) the Brand Styling Guide
Every brand has preferred logos, colors, and font types listing in their brand styling guide. The red you see in a graphic design tool might not be the same exact red used for the brand. If you use the wrong red (or another color), it will dilute the brand and look unprofessional when you compare two different marketing pieces from two different shades of red.
Find the right colors in the brand styling guide and add them into Canva inside of your Brand Kit. The same goes for Brand Fonts, and Font Size. You want a minimum 32 font size, especially since many customers will be viewing your graphics and videos from a mobile device.
#2 Create Your Templates in Canva
When you build out virtual background images or videos, you need to think about what question the customer has, how you help them visualize the answer with a supporting image or video, and the text that summarizes the background.
Make a list of these scenarios before you start designing the templates in Canva so you can focus on higher priority scenes instead of those you will use in unique circumstances.
If you are building virtual background templates for your brand, the pixel size dimensions are 1920 x 1080. After you build the best template, you can resize them to be used into different social media channels.
The picture above is a video background template with containers for the logo, headline, sub-headline, call to action URL.
#3 Steps to editing Canva assets
- Open Canva.
- Open existing design templates for virtual camera scenes.
- Copy design template as a new editable file.
- Rename the file as the name of the scene.
- Swap existing headline with a new headline.
- Swap existing sub headline with new sub-headline.
- Swap existing call-to-action URL with a new call-to-action URL.
- Swap existing photo/video with new photo/video.
- Check design for spelling or grammar errors.
- Adjust text or photo/video positioning only if absolutely necessary.
- Change the font size of the text for the headline, sub-headline, or call to action URL instead of changing the font placement.
- Check design one last time for accuracy, brand consistency, and overall look.
- Download the file to the computer using the appropriate file format for the scene in the virtual camera.
- Add the newly created file into the assets folder.
There’s a chance you might delegate these tasks to someone else on your team. If so, record a video using Loom to show the tasks performed in real-time so your team members know exactly what must be done in the right order. Instructions on how to create a Loom video appear later in this post.
Do you make videos for Facebook Live? If so you might need a Countdown video. If you are a Canva Pro user you can select from pre-made countdowns.
Here is an example Countdown Video with music to help increase the anticipation for what others will see next.
All of your designs in Canva appear in the All Your Designs tab on the left side. It’s important to start creating folders to better organize your Canva designs so you can find them faster and share specific folders for team members to edit on their own.
Once you finish building out your design templates and designs, download each one of them into a separate asset folder stored in the cloud (Dropbox Google Drive, iCloud Drive). This will become particularly useful for when you want to transfer them to another computer.
#4 Create Screen Capture Video Training Videos
Loom is one of the easiest tools used to create screen capture videos. They are perfect for creating training videos on how to use web-based tools and short snippets to be sent to customers to receive a visual representation of your answer.
Read more about Loom here.
#5 Program Your Stream Deck Console
Stream Deck is the secret weapon. Most people don’t have one yet because they have the wrong digital media coach, haven’t taken Stream Deck out of the box, or have not been training properly on how to use it for the optimum time to task execution when transitioning between multiple virtual experiences.
Stream Deck offers a 32 button console, a 15 button console, or you can use their mobile app. My personal preference is the 32 button console (even though you can add folders and create multiple Stream Deck profiles.
It can be intimidating to know where to start so I suggest grabbing a piece of paper, drawing a big rectangle, and dividing the rectangle into the appropriate amount of squares. Each square represents a button you press on the Stream Deck console.
Write the name of each image or video background, camera number (if using multiple), website (if using screen share), or music you want to be played.
Once you have drafted your best environment, then use the Stream Deck software to begin mapping the buttons to each scene or multi-action sequence you want performed.
#6 Airtable Asset Management
Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive are great online storage alternatives however Airtable is the best. Over time. Think of Airtable as the intersection between Microsoft Excel, Dropbox, customizable database that allows attachments, SurveyMonkey, and programmatic capabilities.
The biggest benefit of using Airtable to build out your assets is that you can define rules for sharing each database as a project, each tab, and assign access to different team members who do not need to be tech-savvy. Each column is a field type. Each row is an entry. The column field types are 100% customizable.
#7 Additional Tech Tools for Your In-Home Studio
Desk light stands. You need two.
LED lights for desk. You need two.
Ecamm virtual camera for Macbook
What Keller Williams Operating Principal and Rainmaker Macarena Rose is saying about her new virtual marketing makeover…
Hello Doug. I just needed to stop in and say thank you. What you have done is nothing short of a miracle. You’ve taken someone like myself that’s not very techie and certainly doesn’t have an eye for creativity or vision or anything like that. And certainly what you’ve done is prove that I’m wrong.
You’ve shown me the tools and the manner in which to put these things together. So I don’t have to send something off, wait for it to come back in a day or two or longer. God forbid and then I can manage it myself and actually do these things. So I just want to say thank you because I know that if you are able to help me, you’re going to be able to help other people.
It has a lot to do with how incredibly talented you are, but also how wonderful you are because you listen. You solve the problem and absolutely make it something seamless that someone like myself. You know I’m just like all the other REALTORS and agents. I just happen to manage, and working belief central America, right?
So that’s the only difference. But I still need to make sure I’m doing marketing. I need to make sure that I can handle all these different kinds of assets and media things and figure it all out and make it just seamless and you have made this possible in such a short quick time.
So I just want to let you know if anyone’s asking you a question or if they want any kind of testimonial or if they want to just talk to someone that did it. I’m here. You can count on me for certain because again if I can do it, I know it’s going to help so many people just like myself that really need to make sure they get out there and you know how to do that. Talk to you soon. Thank you so much.
Macarena Rose, CIPS, Operating Principal, Keller Williams Belize
How you can get started with a massive virtual marketing makeover
There are a limited number of spots available for organizations and businesses since there is a high-level of hand-holding that needs to happen, sometimes with multiple team members. Please schedule an appointment to see if this is a good fit, how long it will take, and the budget you will need to support this initiative.
