An effective video strategy involves sufficient planning to ensure you effectively target your desired audience and utilise repurposing to get the most out of your content. Commissioning and producing video content is a non-negotiable for all modern organisations and businesses. Video can be used to inform, inspire and engage. Whether it is for digital advertising, employee training or crisis communications or video is a powerful tool that increases the effectiveness and impact of your strategy.
While creating with a strategy and clear purpose in mind is essential to creating effective video, there are numerous ways you can repurpose existing content or consider your repurposing opportunities when creating new content.
6 Ways to Repurpose
1. Social Media Cut downs
Creating cut downs for social media helps you get the most out of your content. Video on social media needs to be engaging and the attention span of viewers on social media is often quite short. There are video lengths that have the best click-through rates but it’s important to remember, if your content is engaging, viewers will stay and watch longer. Rather than creating short videos for each platform you can have your ‘hero’ video and create different cut downs of different lengths to test across social platforms.
When optimising for different social media platforms it’s also important to consider the required dimensions and optimal sizes (square vertical, landscape etc).
According to Vimeo the optimal length of video across these social platforms is:
- Facebook = 15 secs – 3 mins
- Instagram = less than 60 secs
- Twitter = 43 – 45 secs
- LinkedIn = less than 30 seconds
2. Create Short GIFs
GIFs are animated images that often appear as short videos (3-6 seconds). Similar to a social media cut down, gifs perform well across social media as they are appealing and engaging.
There are a number of ways to create GIFs, you can ask your video producer to include gifs in a quote if you have anything specific in mind. Another quick and easy way to create gifs from existing is on vimeo.
3. Stills
Your video is made up of so many moments, capturing key moments as still images is a great way of reinforcing your messaging and creating something new from your existing content. Stills are also a great way of creating something that’s different but still closely tied to your original messaging so the viewer will recognise the campaign. Still images can also be a great way to ‘tease’ your audience and generate excitement in your audience before releasing the full content.
4. Animated Stills
From your chosen stills, adding some simple motion graphics or animations can transform them into something new yet again. You can also double down and pull quotes from the video audio and turn them into graphics for your still images.
5. Adding or updating motion graphics
If you can’t create something new you can always look into how you can update existing content you want to reuse. If there are added motion graphics on your footage that looks dated or is out of date you could look at updating this without having to re-film the original content, saving you time and resources. This can be particularly useful if you aren’t able to organise filming as animation can be done anywhere at any time.
6. Translate Subtitles, Voice Overs and Motion Graphics
One key benefit to repurposing content is ensuring you are speaking directly to your target audience. If you have more than one target audience, creating small changes can be beneficial to creating effective communications. In particular there are great benefits to creating translated voice over, subtitles, and motion graphics to communicate to your audience in language. At Laundry Lane we have seen particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic how essential this is to communicate vital health information.
Repurposing content is a great way of creating fresh, engaging content without always having to start from scratch, saving you time and money. Make the most out of your content by utilising it across platforms and taking every opportunity.
Laundry Lane can help you create targeted video communications and get the most out of your content. Don’t put off your business communications, contact us today to get started.
