If you repurpose video instead of discarding it, you can save time and money. Refresh outdated content, improve SEO, target your audience more effectively, distribute it more widely and get more views. You should be getting as much mileage as possible out of these costly assets into which you’ve put much time and effort.
Transcribe your videos
The easiest way to start repurposing old video content is by transcribing your videos. Releasing your video with the transcript below helps to engage your audience.
Your transcription can also be used to add subtitles to your videos and thus to improve you video SEO. A video with subtitles can work well in situations such as a trade show where it may be difficult to hear.
Turn your videos into blog posts
It makes sense to take transcripts of old videos and tweak the content a little to publish as a blog post.
The team at Moz creates WhiteBoard Friday videos to engage with their audience. They distribute these videos and then also turn them into blog posts with video transcriptions. That’s an excellent recipe for organic traffic and optimization.
You could include closed captions with videos to reach those who watch without audio. Google cannot read visual content, but it can index the closed captions. This optimizes your content for search engines.
When repurposing video transcripts into blog content, you can change the title and copy in ways and then post both written content and the video together as a blog.
Turn your videos into other written content
- Convert text from an explainer video into a “how it works” page.
- Compile transcripts to produce a series of tutorials on a specific topic. With a little editing and formatting, you may even have enough material for an ebook.
- Take the transcript of an interview-style video and turn it into an FAQ or Q&A page.
- Use the transcript of a corporate video featuring the senior leadership team and use some direct quotes for an About/Our Story page.
Break videos down into shorter clips
- Video length should be customized for different social media platforms. Twitter, for instance, allows videos of 30 seconds. Video engagement of viewers with short clips can be used to lead them back to your website or YouTube channel to watch the full-length version.
- Instagram allows only one minute of video. Choose an interesting thumbnail to share as a trailer and draw people in by telling them how they’ll benefit from watching the whole video.
- Use clips from a corporate video to make a behind-the-scenes office our or to showcase elements of your company culture.
- Take clips from different customer testimonial videos and put them together based on a theme for a highly impressive video.
- Businesses often put some of their best content into webinars, but this type of material usually has a short lifespan. Breaking webinars into smaller video clips is a way to repurpose them. The most webinar hosting software allows you to export webinars into video files on your computer.
- Take various clips and creatively combine them with a voice-over to make a new long-form video.
Distribute Differently
Sometimes even a quality video may not do as expected. This can be entirely based on its distribution. Customizing it appropriately for each platform by using best practices for each distribution channel may be enough to create more video engagement.
If your video has a longer duration, posting it on YouTube is considered as a better option than on Facebook. It is so because the optimal run time on YouTube is ten times longer. There have been many studies to determine the ideal length of videos on social media. Post short clips of 45 seconds on Twitter and slightly longer ones of 30 seconds on Instagram. Posting your video natively on social networks also generates greater video engagement.
Update video content
Some video content must be updated to remain relevant. You can update product shots, logos, employees and CTAs.
- Product shots need to be updated because products are always changing.
- Research also turns all the time. Rather than scrapping a research video, you can continually update a statistic or add in a new one.
- For a video on a specific topic where information needs to be updated, you can add a quick update at the beginning or end, rather than scrapping it and starting all over.
- In a culture video, you could consider replacing an interview with a person who no longer works at the company with a new interviewee snippet.
Turn old videos into podcasts
Think about turning old videos into podcasts. You can export just the audio of your video using the video-editing software. It makes sense to do this if the material works well on its own without the visual content. This usually works well with speeches, interviews, presentations, and educational content. You can then publish it on podcast sites and iTunes.
Rather than trying to monetize old videos, you can monetize this new material instead. Podcasts provide a great way to reach a new audience, share your expertise with potential clients and existing customers, and improve your bottom line.
Turn internal videos into educational videos
From customer support to sales, teams often spend time teaching customers how to do things in various ways, such as using personalized webcams. If this content is of a high quality, it can be used to provide valuable education to your audience through YouTube and social media or blogs.
Build repurposing into your workflow
Each time you make a new video, you should think about all the ways it could be repurposed in other formats and on other platforms. If you build those ideas into its creation, you could extend your video marketing budget, give your customers a more luxurious experience and generate more material with less effort.
For instance, you could write a blog post and use it to create talking points for a video. Once the video is done, you could extract audio from it to create a podcast. After the blog post is published, you upload the video and the podcast to reach a wider audience.
More ideas
- Use your old videos as a silent background videos for trade show displays.
- If you’ve messed up while making a video, take these bloopers and slice them together for a comedy piece if this suits your brand image. There’s something about watching other people making mistakes that creates compelling viewing.
- When shooting a new video, take some film from behind the scenes and create a short preview to give the audience a glimpse of what to expect.
- Take still images from video content to use on your website, social media profiles and other content pieces.
Conclusion
When it comes to video content management, it makes sense to leverage videos you’ve already created as much as possible. Don’t try to start from scratch every time as this wastes time and money.
Reusing and repurposing old video content will help you to use your video marketing budget more effectively. Finding your best-performing content and making it work in many ways will increase your organic traffic. It’s all about keeping your content fresh and building on what you share with your audience through different mediums.
