When it comes to high-performing marketing content, video wins hands-down. A recent Wyzowl poll found that consumers are twice as likely to share a video with a friend than they are to share any other type of content. Some 84 percent said that video had convinced them to purchase a product, and 79 percent believe that video has convinced them to download an app or a piece of software.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed video consumption even higher, as people stuck at home have turned to online video for entertainment. During 2020, Wyzowl found that consumers enjoyed an average of 18 hours per week of online video, which is two more hours per week than 2019 and nearly eight more hours per week than 2017.
Marketers are already aware of the power of video, with 68 percent saying that visual content is either very important or crucial to their brand, according to a Venngage report. As ROI from video continues to rise, even businesses that previously neglected it are jumping on the video bandwagon. But with so many brands publishing video, the noise is deafening.
Producing new content that can cut through the chaos sucks up both time and resources. Some 65 percent of the marketing teams surveyed by Venngage said that they regularly spend more than two hours per week producing visual content, and 20 percent said that they invest more than 10 hours. At the same time, close to a third say that less than 10 percent of their marketing budget is available for this purpose.
With marketing teams under pressure to produce appealing and engaging video content with limited resources, it’s crucial to find low-cost and smart ways to punch above your weight. Here are five tips to help you get more mileage out of existing content by repurposing it in video format.
1. Convert Blog Posts Into Slideshows
For most of human history, we’ve been in love with hearing a good story. Slideshow video is a medium in which the narrative reigns supreme. It’s like turning an illustrated book into an audio-video format so that the viewer hears your tale while watching a shifting series of images that illustrate and add depth to the narrative.
Brand storytelling is marketers’ favorite way to use video, so this is an ideal way to repurpose top-performing blog posts that tell the story of your brand and your value proposition.
Most of the work in this format involves coming up with a great script, but you’ll already have all the content, style and information at your fingertips. Just don’t convert top blog posts too soon – allow some time for them to drive traffic in text format first, so you know for sure that you’ve got a video-worthy asset on your hands.
2. Cut Long-Form Webinars Into Short-Form Video
Webinar recordings are powerful assets that you can use as gated content for lead generation and nurturing purposes, but their usefulness doesn’t have to end there. You can also put them to work higher up your funnel by chopping them into shorter video excerpts.
An Animoto survey found that 59.9 percent of consumers would be less likely to watch a video that’s too long, so cutting down your long-form vids can open them up to a wider audience without denting the appeal of their original form. You can also share shorter videos more widely on social media and as ephemeral content like Stories on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all of which need to be below a certain length. With Facebook Ads, you can also build retargeting audiences based on the duration of video views for complex multi-ad engagement funnels.
Available for iOS, Videoleap makes it easy to slice up your footage, add cool transition effects, branded bumpers, soundtracks and more to tweak your in-depth content to be more lightweight and entertaining without obscuring the message.
3. Turn Audience Empowerment Articles Into Thought Leadership Clips
You know those articles and tutorials you publish to keep people thinking about use cases for your product and how it improves peoples’ lives? Also great material for repurposing! Converting audience empowerment content into video is a great way to raise your authority as a thought leader and put short posts and listicles on double duty.
For your video, you can skip the actionable, product-specific advice included in the original content in favor of a product-agnostic, “inspirational” approach, or just shift the perspective to emphasize your core idea.
If you prefer, you can turn a single listicle into a series of short motivational videos, with one video for each point in the listicle. Release one a day on Instagram or other social media channel of your choice, and/or host them all on your website. Each video can direct the visitor to the next in the list, in order to increase your time-on-site metrics.
4. Repurpose Infographics as Animated Video
Everybody loves a good data visualization, which will become even more mesmerizing when you animate it. Moving graphs, charts and maps allow you to display data in ways that make the information easier to consume, which is especially great if you have a lot of complicated stuff to share.
Use a tool like MotionDen’s kinetic typography video maker to painlessly turn static images into animated cartoons that grab and hold your audience’s attention. You can include graphs with bars or lines that appear on hover, cluster graphs that expand as the viewer moves the mouse, relief and heat maps that open up more detail when you click and much more.
These animated data videos also make great teasers to direct people to longer, related blog posts.
5. Turn Support Resources Into Tutorial Videos
Your customer support content might be out of this world, but some people are visual learners and struggle to find answers from written texts. Plus, if you have a more complex product that is hard to pick up using only text and still images, text-based information might not be enough.
So, use your customer support content as the backbone for onboarding videos, troubleshooting videos, videos of expert tips for using your product and so forth. Approximately 43 percent of Wyzowl’s respondents said that video has reduced the number of support calls they received.
If your video tutorials are short enough, you can use them as marketing content on TikTok as well as YouTube. Just look to see which issues appear the most frequently in customer support conversations, and then repurpose the answers into animated or live-action video.
Effective Video Content Doesn’t Have to Be All-Consuming
Video content ramps up sales and marketing campaigns, but many companies still struggle to produce it consistently.
Repurposing content from infographics, audience empowerment and top-performing blog posts, webinars, and customer support interactions into compelling animated, short-form, slideshow, and/or tutorial or thought leadership video is an excellent way to produce more high-quality video without letting it take over all your marketing energies.
