Whether you’re a large or small company, you’re constantly trying to spend your budget wisely, while still doing all you can to stay relevant and attract new clients. And one of the best things you can do to get great results with minimal investment is to recycle and repurpose your existing video content.
You may think you don't need to bother with it because you have plenty of fresh stuff, but eventually the following could happen:
• you will eventually run out of refreshing ideas • OR your marketing budget could tighten up • OR your video content just gets old and needs updating
So when you reach that point, you too should consider repurposing content. And I’m gonna share with you several ways you can approach this.
For those who don’t know, repurposing content simply means finding new ways to recycle your existing content, and it has a number of benefits.
Reach a New Audience
Some users prefer visual infographics over text statistics. Some choose podcasts over ebooks. Reformatting your content for different mediums means appealing to more audiences and extending your reach.
Dust Off the Forgotten Tales
We all have that movie or book that’s an old favorite, and when you eventually come across it, you might think to yourself “Hey, I should really dig into that again. I loved it.” It might be months or even years before you stumble on that old treasure. Repurposing your old content can put an old favorite up front and center, ensuring that great content is never forgotten.
Make the Most of Your Efforts
When you put a ton of effort into a piece of content, you’re immensely proud. But quality and pride aren’t all that’s required for success. There are all kinds of unseen factors that affect how well a content piece performs. Repurposing content ensures that users who missed your epic video the first time around have another chance at seeing it. It’s a second chance at content promotion.
Important!
Only repurpose content that’s evergreen in nature, and by “evergreen”, I mean content that continues to be valuable and relevant many months or even years later. Refreshing some forgotten content can help you stay relevant and I recommend only considering your most popular videos to ensure better traffic and engagement.
Another thing to consider, videos are not limited to Youtube and Vimeo. There’s Instagram, IGTV, LinkedIn, Facebook, Brightcove, Vidyard, and many more. These videos can also be edited by an experienced video editor, formatted for different diameters if you wish, or even repurposed into different formats such as podcasts for more solid branding.
Remember that not every video can be recycled and repurposed. You need to ask yourself about your target audience and what you hope to accomplish before you begin revamping your video content.
I’m going to include several links throughout the remainder of this blog post, so if I mention something relative that’s underlined, click the text and a new tab should open up that will give you some guidance on how to accomplish that.
1. Turn the Video Into a Blog or infographic Create a blog post based on the video’s transcript. The greatest advantage of doing this is that you have a lot more room to explain the information in depth. You can transcribe it yourself, or hire an intern or outsource that task to someone.
Take a look at your most popular 2-minute videos, then build a 2,500 word blog post and discuss the subject in greater detail using stats, facts, figures or trends that you didn’t have enough time to cover in the video.
Or, you could turn your video into an infographic and re-share it with your audience. 65% of people are visual learners so using infographics or videos will reinforce the knowledge and help people memorize your message faster and longer.
2. Recycle a webinar or other live presentation If you hosted an awesome webinar that had a lot of attendees, a few people still didn’t get to see it. And, months after the event, you’ll have new site visitors and leads who don’t even know what they missed out on in the first place.
Don’t let it go to waste. Convert that webinar into a YouTube video, and your great content will live on forever. These can be great assets to your website.
3. Turn a Video Into a Podcast More and more people are listening to podcasts every year. According to a recent study, 50% of all US homes are podcast fans, and according to Nielsen, 144 million people in the US has listened to a podcast, that’s 20 million more than in 2018. And also, according to Nielsen’s latest polling 16 million people in the US are “avid podcast fans”. With a podcast, you can reach a larger audience. People consume podcasts while driving, jogging, running, working out, eating, even sleeping or showering!
Not every video is going to be perfect for a podcast, in fact, many won’t, but interviews, presentations, and several other types of videos will easily transition to a listening audience.
So if you have any informative, interviews, or educational videos, turn them into an iTunes podcast. The content can either be of the same length or altered to fit the new format.
Pro tips: Everything benefits from a bit of an edit. A podcast exists to tell a story or convey an idea. Unlike radio or TV, it doesn’t have to be any specific duration to fit a schedule. But the average is between 30 minutes and an hour. Remember this before you just automatically convert your videos. Another thing to remember; editing can be boring and dull; but it’s important to do, because your number one job is to delight and inform your listeners. If you don’t, they’ll go away and won’t return. Be prepared to delete the fluff and the things that don’t really matter, no matter if its 20 minutes long or 3 hours long. Tell the story and get out of there.
4. Add Closed Captions & Multilingual Subtitles Nearly 5% of the world’s population are deaf and hard of hearing. So there are many YouTube users who are often prevented from fully experiencing videos because of a lack of captioning. Facebook reported that captioned videos also see an increase of 12% in view time, compared to non-captioned ones.
And even though English is considered the business language for most markets, a whopping 60% of Youtube audience is from non-English countries. So personalizing your audience’s experience with multilingual subtitles can be a great technique to increase traffic.
By translating your video content into the languages that your audience speaks, you’re able to boost the number of views, increase retention, watch time and even search engine rankings.
Pro tips: To increase engagement with your audience, consider turning on the “community contribution” feature when you upload your video to Youtube. You can also get captions added automatically on Youtube and edit them for corrections after the process is done. You can also grab that captions file and use it on other platforms or have it translated. If you need to convert the SBC file to an SRT file for Facebook, there's a way to do that too.
Another way to refresh videos while you’re captioning is to create teasers from your ‘hero’ videos. Consider cutting some parts from the video and throw them into a clip of 10 to 30 seconds. Use these to tease your new product, latest feature update, and so on, sharing these on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
You can also use open captions which are always visible and eliminate the need to even have the sound up to get your message. This will take a bit more work, but you never know when some potential customer may just scroll right past your important video if there aren’t any captions on their social media.
5. Show Your Bloopers! Most people put their behind the scenes and #epicfail moments at the end of their sales meeting videos, but nowadays, behind-the-scenes (bts) clips are a fun way to humanize your brand and a great way to engage with your audience, and remember to use hashtags like #bloopers in the video description for better branding on social media. People do search for those keywords and could easily get hooked with your brand after seeing your bloopers!
BONUS Now, you may be saying to yourself that you don’t have ANY videos to repurpose, or all the ones you have are not evergreen and can’t work in any of the above scenarios. Well here are a couple of additional ideas that might give you some content to repurpose without having to use your video library.
Remember that exceptional PowerPoint or Keynote presentation you prepared at the last big meeting? The presentation may be over, but why let it go to waste? These can often be repurposed into a video by simply exporting the video from within PowerPoint (PC or Mac). Or if you’re on a Mac, you could simply import your slides into that software. Just edit your slides for a consumer audience, then if you have a microphone built in to your system, consider adding some voiceover narration and upload it. You can easily convert a Keynote presentation to a video also, and even add your own narration (or hiring a professional to do this). Or you might just want to convert it to a slide deck with the help of SlideShare, and embed the presentation in one of your web pages. Now you have a new piece of content you barely had to work for!
Recycling and repurposing video content is a great way to breathe new life into your old content, save your money, drive more traffic and engage your audience. So bookmark this page and keep these tips in mind and give your future video content a new lease on life with minimal fuss and get the most value out of your content efforts. Do you have any other methods you’d like to share for repurposing content? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments!
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