Editing and Strategizing Instagram Reels for Effective Campaigns

So I'm going to show you again on my app. This is a reel from my little cousin's wedding a couple of months back. Right, so it already has music on it from the wedding.

It's dense, but I can add a capture and a sticker, right? And he loved the stickers here, some of which, you know, just sort of enhance the look. Others are, you know, clicking through, clickable through. If I want to change the music, I can add shapes to the music.

If I want to add another picture or video to the reel, I can do that as well. And I could do the effects. We're discussing various effects.

So if I click dazzling, now you see how it sort of changes that. If I were to pick teal and tangerine, it gives that effect, soft nature, right? So just go with dazzling. And then I can clip this, right? I just adjusted this to say which part of it I want to clip from the beginning to the, you know, I want to clip the beginning portions of it or any portion of it.

I would just set it up to par to that point and then cut it, right? I crop it. Anytime you do something that you're not okay with, you can always reset it or cancel it, right? The speed, make it faster. It's not appropriate for this particular video, but in some cases, that might make sense.

I can split it. I can take off audio, which is important to do if you are using audio that is not copyrighted, right? So this is where you go, you know, to shorten, add elements to it, change the music, take out the music, speed it up, slow it down, edit effect, the camera effect with the stars there, crop it, right? Or cut out sequences of it, right? Cut, for example, cut silences. If this were a video with, you know, if music is coming down, if there are any silence points, it will automatically, it's a new feature that will take out silence points for the video automatically.

You can also adjust the volume of the video right here or the reel, I should say, on the bottom, right? So all of these features are available to you, right? So that is how you edit a reel. And additionally, how to create a post, how to create a story, how to create a reel, and how to edit your reel. Now let's close out this section with a couple more points.

First of all, when you do a campaign on Instagram or any platform, you want to have goals, right? So if you're conducting a content marketing campaign or later, when we discuss advertisements, before you decide on your content campaign, you know, before you launch it or launch your advertising campaign, you want to have goals. You want to have a way of measuring your success or lack of success. And it's important that these goals follow this acronym, that they are SMART goals.

Specific, right? Measurable. So specific, if you want to increase brand awareness through your campaign, well, that's brand awareness. Whereas in another campaign, your goal might be to drive the audience to your website.

Another campaign might be to create leads to a form that you're going to drive people to a landing page where there's a form. Or you might drive people to your product store to purchase something. Those are all different goals.

You have to have a specific goal for your campaign. And that goal must be measurable. It's not enough to say, I want to increase sales, but by how much, right? You might have increased sales by five units and spent a thousand dollars to do it.

And the numbers just don't make sense, right? You want to spend an amount of money. You might expect a greater amount of sales. So how much, right? So I want to increase sales either by a hundred units or by 20%, a number.

And it should be achievable and realistic. I'll take those together. Achievable, something that's possible in the timeframe that you're allocated for and the budget that you're willing to spend.

So, based upon the time you have, the budget you're spending, and your past history on this platform, as you begin to develop a history, you want to come up with something that's realistic within that time and for that money, for that budget. And finally, something that's timely, right? It has to be time-based. You can't say, I want to increase sales without saying within what period of time, right? So we want to always set goals that are SMART, S-M-A-R-T.

And finally, there are instances where you do have a goal like brand awareness, and you want to make it specific, right? You want it to be a smart goal. You want to make it specific and measurable. However, how do you measure brand awareness, right? It's not as straightforward a metric as sales is, right? You can track the amount of sales that your brand achieves over a certain period of time; you know, it's tracked on your website.

You can also track if your goal is to drive traffic to your website; you can measure that. Google Analytics will measure that for you, right? But what if it's brand awareness, right? So if you're a huge brand, you could potentially do a research study and see, well, before we started this campaign, we took a sample of our target audience, and we had 60% awareness. And after the campaign, you raised it to 65.

But that takes time and takes money, right? The way to do it in the context of digital marketing campaigns is to create a proxy for the goals that are not as easy to measure, right? So if your goal is brand awareness, well, what are proxies for brand awareness? Well, how about you've increased your followers by a thousand in three months, but everyone who's now following you is aware of your brand, right? If you know, if they're following you, there's at least that level of, there's some level of awareness. You can also use website visits, right? Because if someone's visiting your website on the basis of your content or an ad, they're now aware of you. And finally, you know, how about video views? Let's say you have a video that introduces your product, and you're promoting that video and your content.

Well, if they've viewed that video, they are aware of your brand, right? So those are along the lines of coming up with success metrics that are always going to be smart. In some cases, they'll be straightforward, and in other cases, you'll have to use a proxy. Okay.

So that concludes section three on Instagram content. In the next section, we'll talk about how to create a content theme in section four.