If you only have time to do one marketing thing this month, try this out.
Record one long video answering the questions your customers usually ask you, cut it into pieces for every platform you own, and track the results in one place so you know whether it worked.
That's the whole system. One recording, six or seven channels, one dashboard.
I'm running it on my own business right now and posting the numbers publicly, good or bad. More on that at the bottom. First, here's how to do it.
Table of Contents
What should a small business record a video about?
Record a video of yourself going over the questions and answers people ask you right before they decide to hire you.
These are what people are searching for online, and you want to get in front of them so they find YOU.
Two examples.
If you run a law firm: record yourself answering the questions potential clients ask on a consult call.
- What does this cost?
- How long does it take?
- What happens if we lose?
- Do I have to go to court?
Make each question its own section. That single recording becomes a clip for every question, a blog post, a LinkedIn article, and copy for your website's FAQ page.
If you own a pizza shop: record how a pizza actually gets made, from the order coming in to the box going out the door. Five minutes gives you five clips.
Every one of those videos does three jobs at once.
- It shows people what working with you is like.
- It answers their questions before they ever call.
- And it makes you look active and legitimate to real people and to search engines at the same time.
That last part matters more than it used to. When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a business in their area, the answer gets built out of content that already exists about you.
If nothing exists, you're not in the answer.
How do you turn one video into seven pieces of content?
Start with the long version and work down.
- Record one long-form video, five to fifteen minutes.
- Post it to YouTube.
- Cut three to five short clips for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. (try https://www.opus.pro/ for this)
- Turn the transcript into a blog post for your site.
- Reshape that same post into a LinkedIn article.
- Send the highlights to your email list.
- Pull two or three lines out as text-only quote graphics.
That's seven pieces from one sitting. The recording is the hard part. Everything after it is editing.
Ai tools handle most of the grunt work here. They'll write the first draft of the script, pull the clips, write captions and hashtags, and draft the article from your transcript. Use them for the first pass, then put your own voice back in so it sounds like a person when you say it out loud. The draft is a starting point, not the finished thing.
Where should you post all of it?
Everywhere, at least at first.
You will not know which platform brings you views, conversations, and actual paying customers until you've tested all of them. Your customers don't all sit on one app. Neither do your competitors' customers.
There's a second reason too...
Ai answer engines don't pull their answers from your website alone. Community and media platforms account for a little over half of the sources Ai engines cite, with Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn near the top of the list.
Your own site is one voice. Being present in several places is what makes you look like an established answer instead of a single self-interested page.
So posting the same message across YouTube, LinkedIn, and your blog isn't repetitive. It's how you get picked up in the first place.
How do you know if any of it is working?
Build yourself a simple dashboard and update it once a month. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the step that decides whether you stick with this long enough to see results.
Ask ChatGPT or Claude to build you a tracking dashboard. Tell it what you want on it and it will assemble the whole thing for you. Mine tracks three things:
- Website analytics. Visitors, where they came from, which pages they land on.
- Social analytics. Views, follower counts, and click-throughs for every platform I post on.
- What I actually did that month. How many pieces I published and what I built or fixed.
Line charts, nothing fancy. Month over month so I can see the direction.
Here's the one that surprises people. You can see when Ai is mentioning your business. Google Search Console added reporting for it. Log in, click the dropdown on the Performance tab, and you can see how your site performs in Ai-driven search results. If you've never set up Search Console, do that first. It's free and it takes about ten minutes.
Track it monthly, not daily. Daily numbers will make you crazy and tell you nothing.
Copy and paste this prompt into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account:
I want you to build and maintain a monthly growth tracker for my website and social media, and help me keep it updated. PLATFORMS TO TRACK: Website (WordPress), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn METRICS PER PLATFORM:
- Website: sessions, users, page views, bounce rate, engagement rate, avg session duration, top traffic source, and form submissions/leads (this is the number that actually matters, not the vanity ones)
- Facebook / Instagram: follower count, engagement rate (not just likes), reach or impressions
- TikTok: follower count, views, engagement rate
- YouTube: subscriber count, views, watch time
- LinkedIn: follower count, impressions, engagement rate
HOW TO SET IT UP: 1. Build a table with one row per month and one column per metric, grouped by platform. 2. Every month, calculate month-over-month change in both raw numbers and percent for each metric. 3. Flag any metric that moved more than 15% in either direction and ask me if I know why, so we can note the cause next to the number. 4. Keep a running history so I can see the trend over 3, 6, and 12 months, not just this month vs last month. 5. Call out clearly which numbers are vanity (follower counts, views) versus which ones tie to actual business results (leads, form submissions), and don't let the vanity numbers dominate the summary. HOW TO RUN IT:
- Right now, ask me for this month's number on every metric above and save it as the baseline.
- Every time I come back and say "update my tracker," ask only for the new numbers, do the math, and give me a short summary of what moved and why it matters.
- If you support scheduled or recurring tasks, set one up for the 1st of every month that asks me for these numbers. If you don't support scheduling, tell me that directly, and instead check in at the start of my first conversation with you each month if I haven't given you numbers yet.
What this looks like when you actually run it
I'm doing this on my own business in public so I can report back with real numbers instead of theory. I've told clients for years to post consistently and repurpose, and most of them either never start or never tell me what happened. So I'm being my own test case.
Month one looked like this:
- 35 pieces of content published across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and email
- $200 spent on Meta ads
- Over 10,000 views across all platforms
- About 200 clicks to my website
- Average Google ranking up 10 spots
- 99 mentions by Google's Ai
- I show you how to find this in my YouTube video here.
Direct leads from all that online activity in month one: none yet.
I'm telling you that because you should know what month one actually looks like before you start. This is a slow build. My honest expectation is that the website starts producing inquiries somewhere around the end of month two or the middle of month three. Everything in month one is groundwork.
What it does do immediately is close the leads you already have. When someone hears about you from a friend and then looks you up, everything they find is working for you or against you. A month of content makes that search go your way.
What to do this week
- Write down the five questions customers ask you most. Those are your video.
- Record it once. Phone camera is fine.
- Post the long version to YouTube, cut three clips, and put the transcript on your site as a blog post.
- Set up Google Search Console if you haven't.
- Build your dashboard and write down where you're starting from.
Then do it again next month. The compounding is the whole point.
Shane Vigeant owns Tonewood Marketing in Boise, Idaho. Tonewood builds websites and online marketing systems for local service businesses. If you want to talk through what you've tried so far, reach out today.
