Content marketing has always been and remains the best way to grow your business organically in both the online and offline worlds. From posting on and managing your social media accounts to publishing SEO and high-value articles on your website, all the way to producing video content–good content marketing can take your business forward.
And video content is exactly what we’re talking about today. However, we’re taking a unique perspective–remixing and repurposing existing content to create engaging videos.
Photo by Wahid Khene on Unsplash
Before we discuss some of the cool tips and best practices you should try, let’s talk about the importance of video marketing and why it should be your top priority in 2024. After all, video content is dominating the online and offline realms, and your competitors are already investing in video creation.
Let’s dive in.
Why Is Video Marketing So Powerful?
Video marketing encompasses creating, publishing, and disseminating video content across channels and platforms, both online and offline to achieve various business goals. Some of them include brand building, SEO, social media growth, lead generation, and boosting conversions just to name a few.
When it comes to the power and potential of video marketing to help you achieve all these goals and take your business forward, consider these statistics:
There’s no denying that companies nowadays prioritize video marketing to build more engaging and impactful marketing strategies. While written content will always be king for SEO and a variety of other purposes, video marketing is the best way to complement your efforts and enrich your content offering.
But that doesn’t mean that you need to build your video content from scratch.
Much of your content efforts can stem from repurposing existing video content into different formats or towards different campaigns and strategies. On the other hand, you might not have considered remixing written content into video content before, so let’s take a look at how you can accomplish all of this and more.
Start with Visual Storytelling
When you create written content, whether it’s a long-form article, an eBook, or even a compelling social media status update, you’re trying to achieve some key goals:
- Paint a picture and set a tone
- Deliver a clear message
- Deliver value to the viewer
- Inspire action and engagement
- Include your brand elements
- Personalize the content to your audience
There’s a lot going on here, and all of these elements need to be present in your video content no matter the length, type, or intended goal of the video.
All of this starts with visual storytelling, which means painting a picture and setting a tone and backdrop to improve the digital customer experience for your videos using various visual cues and elements. These can be branded elements like your colors, fonts, and tone of voice, but you should also use various visuals to communicate your values and your brand identity as a whole.
The key is to analyze your existing content, for example, your long-form articles, and extract those elements so that you know exactly how to transform the written story into a visual format.
What is the overarching tone? What is the message you’re trying to get across? What are the actions you want your viewers to take? Be sure to answer these questions.
Sound Quality Should Be a Priority
Before we talk about the other best practices, we need to talk about sound design. Video sound quality design often gets overlooked by many creators in favor of flashy visuals and editing.
While those elements are important, it’s important to remember that the sound defines the overall quality and how much the viewer enjoys the video. To test this yourself, try making a video with excellent visual quality and poor sound design, and a video with 480p video quality and excellent sound design.
Chances are, you will have a much more enjoyable experience watching a video if the sound is crisp, rich, and full. This is why good audio editing is so important; it can make or break the viewing experience. Whether you are remixing old video footage or if you are creating new videos out of written content, audio quality needs to be consistent.
Here are a few tips to always keep in mind:
- Equalize the speaking volume between clips and cuts
- Background music should be very quiet and subtle
- Use an equalizer app to eliminate irregularities
- Use voice isolation to eliminate background noise
- Make use of sound effects do enrich the video
Let’s move on to educational content.
Focus on High-Value Educational Videos
One of the biggest lead generation tactics is to provide high-quality, value-driven content to your audience on every platform. One of the best ways to do this is to mix free educational content with paid content that delves deep into specific topics–content that gives people professional guidance, steps, and tactics to achieve their goals.
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to complement your articles and posts with mini-courses that take an in-depth approach to one topic and provide a lot of value in a short time frame. You can then transform a paid course into a sequence of educational videos, or create a video-based course altogether from the original material.
The long-term possibilities here are endless, however, because if you have any existing educational videos, you can remix them into a new sequence or a new course altogether. You can use existing videos to give some much-needed backstory to a new course you’re promoting.
You can also cut out snippets from your courses and reformat them into vertical videos to publish them on social media, YouTube, and other platforms.
Use Short-Form Videos for Promotions
At this present time, short-form, reel-type videos are booming on all online platforms, and you need to promote your business on all of them.
The quick and snappy editing used to design and create reel-type videos keeps audiences engaged and inspires them to keep watching until the end. With a good call to action, you might even inspire them to click on the link or the button in your video.
That’s what makes these types of videos great for sales promotions and fast conversion in general. Some of the best sales promotion examples include seasonal sales, countdowns, last-minute promotions, and holiday sales–all of which are used by the big brands to up their engagement and conversions.
To that end, you can repurpose existing visuals (they can be videos or images) and create dedicated promotional videos with some simple video editing, background music, and voice over. You don’t even need voice overs if you include compelling text overlays in the videos to inspire people to take action.
Speaking of promotions, let’s talk about video ads and how to make them more impactful.
Repurpose Content for Powerful Video Ads
Video-based advertising is all the rage right now, and it’s one of the foundational elements of social selling in a competitive online world where people have a limited attention span. For your ads to be effective and lead people to conversion, you have to make them visually appealing, deliver value, and get your message across in a very narrow time frame.
To do this, pick your most effective, high-quality video and image content. You can analyze the performance of your past ad campaigns with a dedicated ad tracking tool and use your reports to see which ads made the biggest impact. Then, analyze the visual elements of those advertisements and use those visuals to create new, updated video ads.
This ensures that you’re sticking to what works, but that you’re still innovating and making your ads more engaging with each subsequent campaign. Keep in mind that powerful video ads can become evergreen content on your social media pages and website, as well.
Running a successful video campaign allows you to use that sequence of videos and repurpose them towards organic content on social media. You can also repurpose them on your product pages to complement your product images.
Use UGC Content for Video Collages
User-generated content is a marketing goldmine, and you need to focus on UGC in all your marketing efforts across channels and touchpoints. This includes social media, your website, email and direct messaging, third-party platforms, and more.
UGC can take many forms and you’ll find it in images, videos, social posts, tags, mentions, and comments, as well as in reviews and testimonials. When people create their content featuring your brand or one of your products, that’s free advertising for you, but it’s also a way to build social proof organically and instill trust in your target demographic.
With that in mind, UGC is kind in video marketing, but you need to do it right. One of the best ways to improve video engagement across the board is to simply “hand the mic” to your customers and let them talk about your brand and products. Of course, you can also repurpose existing reviews and testimonials and turn them into collages.
A video collage can tie together several reviews and testimonials and feature some of the best experiences your customers had with your brand. With a good CTA at the end and your brand elements scattered throughout, you can convey a strong message and inspire your viewers to take action.
Repurpose Old Videos for Vertical Formats
We mentioned short-form videos in terms of promotions and that vertical videos in particular are very popular nowadays. Now let’s take a look at organic content and how to create vertical videos for regular posting and lead generation.
The key here is to understand that this type of content that’s used for lead generation and brand building doesn’t have to be short or overly edited–but it does need to deliver value. These videos, even though they’re vertical, thrive on longer runtimes of up to two minutes, where you focus on solving a specific problem for your viewers through a step-by-step guide.
You can also run your viewers through your product features or tackle a specific use case–the possibilities for quality content are endless.
Now, the way to do this is to create new videos, yes, but you can also remix your product trailers, guides, and tutorials to create engaging reels. If you have any horizontal footage and explainer videos you used for your website, now’s the time to reframe them and put them in a vertical format.
Use Live Recordings for Video Drip Campaigns
Last but not least, any recordings you have of your live events, online or offline, can serve as amazing material for video-based campaigns.
A good idea is to cut and edit your live recordings and events into shorter segments that focus on the most impactful and value-driven moments. You can then create a sequence of videos or a drip campaign so that you can send them to your leads and customers as a part of your acquisition and retention strategies.
They might be reluctant to read a long educational email, and an infographic you send them might or might not satisfy their needs. But sending a video every week on a specific topic, featuring guests from your live shows, events, and discussions is a great way to engage potential and existing customers.
Use this approach to create video drip campaigns and to keep repurposing live recordings in the future.
Final Thoughts on Content Media
Video marketing is one of the most powerful ways to take your marketing strategy to the next level and engage audiences across platforms–both online and offline. But instead of always trying to come up with new ideas for your videos and shooting new material over and over, you should tap into your existing content for inspiration.
You will quickly find that the other content formats you have published and worked hard on over the years can serve as amazing, engaging videos for the modern audience. It also allows you to revitalize old pieces of content and make them evergreen, while at the same time updating them with new information and adding value.