As online video grows in popularity, many businesses have embraced the visual trend as part of their content marketing initiatives, but as the hype and excitement around video starts to cool, many marketing teams are left with expensive videos just sitting on their servers. However, just because the initial promotion of a video is over doesn’t mean a business should just let the asset sit alone. Because of video’s ability to grab attention, savvy marketers can take what they already have, repurpose it for a fraction of the cost and use the asset as new advertising material.
The Type of Video That Does Well
Just like the initial production of a video needs a lot of forethought, businesses need to be very careful when repurposing a video to create an engaging ad. Businesses will want to look for scenes that are…
- Visually appealing
- Don’t require a lot of explanation
- Can get the message across without needing sound
Tip: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn play video ads without sound as platform users scroll through their feeds. A good video ad will take this variable into consideration when deciding the visual punch of the ad’s first few seconds.
Businesses will need to realize that not all videos will be able to be used in this particular way. Videos that act more as informative assets—interviews, webinars, etc.—may just not have the visual “meat” to be used in this way. Instead, they will need to find the scenes in videos that have the most visual appeal and start to think outside the box to find ways they can be reused to communicate a message (or an entirely different message than what the original video intended) in a much more limited time.
How to Repurpose Video for Ads
A business’s reason for repurposing depends entirely on its goals, but it may want to try some of these ideas.
- Take a three-minute video and break it into 10- to 20-second chunks. If a business has great source material, it can create 10+ Twitter ads without having to pull out a video camera!
- Make a gif out of some of video snippets and sponsor the post on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. (Don’t know how to make a gif? Try Make a Gif, Gif Maker or Gif Generator.)
- The one thing that all video productions have in common is the creation of more footage than a shoot actually needs. A business can dig through some of that unused tape to find great scenes that may not have made the final cut and consider how it can be used to create a video ad.
Blogs and Landing Pages
Just because the first wave of promotion may have ended doesn’t mean a business can’t push a second wave. Sometimes, marketers can rewrite entirely new blogs, Pulse posts or articles around a particular video and just embed the video in question in the post to gain more views. Furthermore, blogs and articles can be promoted through social platforms.
Depending on potential trends, savvy content marketers may even be able to write a blog around an entirely different topic than the video was originally created for. All they need to do is create a new (yet compelling) reason for someone to watch the video for a different reason than intended. That may require some serious head scratching, but the benefits of more views on a piece of content that already took so much time and money to produce in the first place may be worth the extra time needed to brainstorm how to use the video for new promotion efforts.
Video can be a very expensive venture and depending on the footage a business has created and what its audience craves, marketers could repurpose that investment into many more video advertising assets for its lead-gen benefits.
