In some ways, knowing which direction to take your business has never been easier, but in other ways, it's never been harder. Sure, we have access to an unprecedented amount of information (much of it free) but that amount of information can be overwhelming. When it comes to marketing strategies, there are dozens of ways you can spend that budget of yours, and there's no one answer to how you should do it.
But, since we are a digital agency with a focus on inbound content marketing, then that's the path we'll follow for the sake of today's article. As an agency, our job is to take tasks off your plate, drive your business forward, and make your life easier as a business owner. One of the ways we do that is by maximizing the efficiency of your marketing budget. And as the online landscape continuously shifts toward favoring video content, what we want to explore with you is how to repurpose video content. Let's take a look.
First, let's dispel the myth that in order to create video content, you actually have to shoot the video yourself (or even have an agency do it for you). There are online tools (some even free) that can help you produce videos without ever touching a camera. These tools utilize graphics, effects, stock footage and imagery, and more, and you can create compelling content in minutes if you were ever in a pinch.
We use Canva in cases like these. If you've never heard of Canva, then you likely aren't in marketing, because it has nearly revolutionized design and content creation. It basically makes it easy for people with little to no design or video background to produce professional-looking media. It's not ideal for everything, and we don't use it for our more intricate or complex projects, but it gets the job done for a good chunk of tasks.
So, the easiest way to explain how to repurpose video content for your business is by going through an example scenario. In this case, let's say you have hired THAT Agency to shoot a live interview with you and a client.
Let's say that all of the planning was taken care of, a shot list created, etc. ahead of time and we now have all of the raw video footage from the interview. The first thing we might do is put together a three-to-five-minute-long video meant to be uploaded to one of the pages on your website. Great, now that's done and it looks great. But how can you squeeze everything out of that video?
Without much more effort, you could simply upload the video to your social media channels. That might be ok, but we don't recommend stopping there. For YouTube, you can upload the full video and then optimize your description. For the other social media channels, we dive further.
These social media channels prefer vertical video, since most of their users are using their phones, and holding those phones vertically as they scroll through feeds. So, we can quickly snip some clips from that longer video, and reframe them so that they are optimized for social media. The beauty of this step is that we can take multiple snippets and use them for many different posts.
If we have seemingly used the video in as many ways as we can think of, then let's keep it on the shelf for future reference and use. Weeks, months, or quarters later, when we are looking to cut together a piece that might be somewhat related, we can pull from these clips again, even if just in a quick-cut fashion where we don't even use any of the sound/dialogue.
Knowing how to repurpose video going forward will not only save you time and money, but it will give you a strategic advantage over your competitors that aren't learning how to do this now. It's never too late to start, and in five or ten years, you'll wish that you had started creating a bank of video content earlier. There's no power in business quite like compounding, but we know it can be a lot to take that first step. That's why we offer video marketing as one of our services. We aren't the agency that is going to go out and shoot a Hollywood-style commercial for you. We are the agency that is going to take your modest marketing budget and maximize your reach. Reach out to us today if you want to get started creating content, boosting your presence online, and driving more traffic to your website.