Creating videos involves quite a bit of work as it takes time, effort and resources to plan, produce and publish any marketing video. Considering the work involved it would make sense to not just use your marketing videos once – but rather reuse it in other forms. Simply put that is what repurposing marketing videos is all about – taking a video (be it old or new) and repackaging it for a different purpose. If you’re not convinced that is a good idea, you should know that it can help to:
- Tailor marketing video content for different platforms
- Improve videos that are underperforming
- Produce more videos at less overall cost
In short, you should seriously consider repurposing your marketing videos as it will help to improve your distribution. But before you can do that, you first need to know how.
Break Videos Down into Clips
As you may be aware different distribution platforms tend to be frequented by different demographics, and their tastes vary in terms of the types of video content that they prefer. One of the best examples of this is the fact that YouTube videos can be long and 2 to 5 minutes works well, whereas Facebook videos should be a minute long at most.
Because of that one of the main ways to repurpose marketing videos is to create longer videos (as if for YouTube) and then break them down into clips for social media. By doing so you’ll essentially be creating ‘versions’ of the same content, each of which should be optimized in duration for the platform it will be published on.
Ideally, you should consider this method of repurposing right from the onset, so that you can plan your video accordingly. However, if you’re repurposing older content that wasn’t planned, you can still do so – it may just require some intelligent cuts and perhaps a new voiceover.
Just remember that when you’re breaking a video down and turning it into a shorter video, the core message still has to be put across effectively. As such if you’re cutting out part of the video that has important information, it will have to be re-inserted somehow using the voiceover, text, or images.
It is worth nothing that this method can extend beyond just producing bite-sized clips, and can be used to break down longer content into a video series for email marketing or to publish gradually on social media. Needless to say, it is one of the most common ways to repurpose marketing videos, and if done right could help you to expand your video distribution and improve its effectiveness at the same time.
Transcribe Marketing Videos
One of the more interesting methods of repurposing videos is to transcribe them. It is a method that has grown in popularity not only because it can be used in multiple ways but there’s also value to it in terms of SEO.
Normally when a video is transcribed the transcription is then published along with the video (right below it) to provide a text-based alternative that search engines can crawl. Needless to say, this will provide a decent boost in SEO, which is the reason why it is done.
Another alternative along similar veins is to use the transcription to create closed captions or some other form of subtitles. By doing so you could create versions of your video that are able to put across their message even when muted – which is important to cater to mobile devices and an increasing number of social media platforms.
Arguably the most comprehensive way to repurpose marketing videos by transcribing them, however, is to spin the transcription off into a blog post or article. By doing so you can use it in an entirely different avenue of distribution. By taking stills from the video, you will even have images that you can use to accompany that content.
Extract the Audio from Videos
In addition to using marketing videos to create text-based content, you could also use them to create audio content by extracting the audio from your videos. As you can imagine for this to work the video should be the type of content that can deliver its message effectively via audio, such as a how-to guide, discussion, interview, or something else of that nature.
The main reason why extracting the audio from videos is useful as a method of repurposing videos is because it will let you create podcasts out of your content. That, in turn, will help you expand your distribution further and on various audio platforms.
Generally, the main challenge with repurposing content in this way is the suitability of the video in the first place. Many how-to guides leverage their visual elements significantly, so spinning them off in an audio-only form may not be suitable. However, it may be easier to do with other types of content such as interviews or discussions.
It is easy enough to find software that will let you extract the audio from videos, but if you want an easy way to get started you can use Movavi Video Converter. With it, you can extract the audio track from a video by adding the video, choosing an audio format, and clicking ‘Convert’.
Additionally, you can use the same process to convert M4A to MP3 or to other formats as well, to publish it on different platforms. Within Movavi Video Converter you’ll also find some editing tools or other features that may prove useful too.
All in all, you should now know how to repurpose your marketing videos and improve distribution in several different ways. Assuming you already have some marketing videos that you’ve published in the past, you may want to evaluate them one by one and consider how you may want to repurpose them.
When you do repurpose any marketing videos just remember to optimize it for the platform it will be used on, and to always make sure that the core message of the video is clear.