If you work in content marketing then you know just how much time it takes to create high-quality content that is going to help you convert website visitors into leads and eventually customers. Even though it may only take you three to four hours to write a blog post, when you add in all of the time that you spend strategizing, conducting keyword research, finding sources, formatting, publishing, distributing, and then analyzing your performance, you may have spent up to eight hows on that blog post. That’s a full day!
When you are spending so much time creating content, it’s important that you are getting as much value out of that content as possible. You already know that you can supplement your blog posts with video so that they appeal to a wider audience and get more traction, which is great. But it’s only half of the equation when it comes to leveraging the power of video. The other half is to identify your highest performing blog posts and to completely repackage them as video.
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You’ve already put in the time and effort doing your keyword research, finding your sources, and writing your blog post. That was the hard part. Repackaging that content as video is relatively quick and easy. Because the text of the blog post essentially doubles as a script, all you need is a camera and maybe an hour of your time to create a high quality video that you can leverage in other ways.
Below are two ways that you can repackage your blog posts as video to squeeze even more value out of them.
1. Create a short video to share on Social.
Unless you live under a rock, you know that social media is an incredibly important channel for you to master. Your customers are on social, your competitors are on social, and if you aren’t on social, you need to be.
Social media is important for a number of reasons, but for content marketers the primary reason is this: It is a built-in distribution channel for the content you create.
Unfortunately, text (i.e., blog posts) just don’t perform ass well on social media as they used to. Yes, you should continue to share links to your blog posts, but you can’t afford to stop there. To really get the value out of your content on social, you’ve got to repackage it into the forms that your customers want to consume. Today, more than ever before, that format is video.
If you log into Facebook and scroll down your feed, you’re going to see video in some form or another, and over the next few years you are going to begin to see more and more video in newer and different forms. People like video. It’s easy to consume and it’s easy to share. And that offers marketers a great opportunity to get content in front of a wider audience.
When it comes to repurposing your text content as video for social, you can go a number of different routes. But there are a few best practices that you should follow to make your video appeal better to a social media audience:
- Keep it short: Shorter video that is easier to digest is more likely to be shared on social (and is easier to produce!). Try to boil down your blog post into its key points by cutting out the fluff.
- Consider text-over-video: Think about where and when you find yourself on social media. It tends to be on your mobile device, when you are out and about in public. Often, this means that you can’t listen to audio without being rude and disrupting the people around you. How does this impact video? Well, if you can’t hear the information being relayed, you need to be able to consume it some other way. More and more often, this is through a text overlay, which either captures the video’s main points or acts in a way similar to captions. When making video for social, this is almost a requirement for success. Check out Adobe Spark for an easy way to make video with text-over-images.
- Include a link: You don’t just w ant your audience on social to watch your video. You want them to act in some way: Subscribe, download an offer, make a purchase. That means that you need to include a link with your video. Otherwise, you’re creating content that just doesn’t actually impact your bottom line.
2. Repackage as an on-demand webinar to capture leads.
Repackaging a blog post as an on-demand webinar is a great way for you to get double the value out of it. How? Well, the original blog post will rank for keywords and organic search (as long as it is optimized), while the webinar becomes a lead-generating content offer.
Webinars (and other content offers like ebooks) work as lead-generation tools because they carry a higher perceived value than a blog post does. This perception comes from the fact that it is gated behind a form: If a company is making you submit a form to access content, then that content better damn well be high quality. Once they submit that form to view the content, you can begin nurturing them from lead to customer.
Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way: You don’t want to create a webinar based off of every single blog post that you write. You should reserve this option only for your blog posts that are particularly valuable to your audience. First, because this will require some additional work from you (creating a landing page, thank you page, and auto-response email, for starters) but also because your audience isn’t going to sign up for a webinar if it doesn’t address some kind of pressing need. They just won’t.
So, your first step here is to identify the blog posts that you have written (or are writing) that would actually make for interesting or valuable webinar content. If you focus in on this high-value content, then you increase the chances that it will perform exceptionally well once you push it live.
Some best practices to consider when turning your blog post into an on-demand webinar:
- Supplement the original content in some way. You can’t just take your blog text and read it to a camera and call it a webinar. You need to supplement it in some way. This could be with a slide deck, with images, with a demo, with countless things. But you need something. Otherwise, the webinar isn’t of higher value than the blog post, and you’re just not going to get any audience engagement out of it.
- Keep length in mind. A webinar needs to be longer than a video created for social sharing, or else someone won’t be willing to trade their contact information for it. But it can’t drone on and on, either. Try to keep your webinar to either 30 minutes or 60 minutes: The length of a typical lunch break.
- Build a connection. Video is great because it helps your customer put a face and a voice to your name. This gives you the opportunity to begin building a relationship with that potential customer. Do your best to be confident, direct, and organized when speaking, and you will go a long way in establishing a groundwork of trust.
The Bottom Line
If you are going to spend so much time creating valuable and compelling blog posts and text content, it only makes sense for you to spend a little more time to also convert that content into video that can be leveraged in new and different ways. Your audience likes to consume content in different ways and through different channels; by repackaging your high-value text as video, you are increasing the likelihood that you are getting in front of the right audience.
Looking for some tools to make making video easier? In addition to the tools mentioned above, check out these tools that’ll make your content marketing job easier (including for video!).
