With the undeniable growth of video production for marketing, the need to allocate promotional resources effectively becomes evident: video production takes a lot of time, you use the video once or twice for a couple of campaigns and then what?

You create another video and the process repeats.

Or… you repurpose your videos and reap the rewards of this effortless yet effective strategy.

In our post on video marketing trends in 2019, Ian Anderson Gray called this “intelligent repurposing”. That’s where we came with the idea of describing this concept, as we often implement this in our own marketing.

Although repurposing is easier than the creation of videos from scratch, there are a couple of things you need to bear in mind to get the best results from it.

The one challenge is sticking to the specifications of different platforms. It might take time. You might also need to change the element sizes or reposition them in your video.

Another thing that might slow down the process is adding extra visuals to the video, such as intro or stickers. Luckily, in Wave.video you can do both cropping and visual improvements in seconds.

How can you reuse your video?

So, how can you repurpose your video?

There are a lot of ways, we’ll try to cover all of them.

Let’s say you had a live translation, for example, a webinar or an interview with some experts in your niche. The first thing that pops to our minds is a YouTube video.

1. YouTube video

From your lengthy live video, you can create a shorter version adapted for YouTube. Certainly, you can upload the original version of your live, but why not change it a little to fit the more demanding and less loyal audiences on YouTube who weren’t able to watch the live in real-time?

Just cut off some pauses in talks or less informative parts of the video. This way, you will bring the same value in shorter timing.

You can also record an additional one-minute video with a short intro to paste in the beginning. Maybe you have your own branded one already, don’t forget to include it.

How to do it in Wave.video: crop, paste intro in the editor, export directly to YouTube.

Now that you have a shorter version of your original video adapted to YouTube, what’s next?

2. Embed the video in a blog post.

Featuring videos in the blog posts is beneficial for your SEO and entices people to stay longer on the page. There are two possible ways to include videos in your posts:

1. paste the YouTube video in a relevant blog post or
2. make several parts out of it and insert in those parts of the post where they fit.

Both ways work, but the second one is more time-consuming. The choice is yours.

Example of how SEMrush embed video in their blog posts

How to do it in Wave.video: crop your video in the editor, upload to hosting, publish on your website.

Another thing you can do with your YouTube video is to feature it on your landing page.

3. Add your video on a landing page.

As more and more people prefer to absorb information from the video content, having videos on your landing pages can be critical. Especially if it is an explainer video that you made for your YouTube. Inserting it on the landing page will help people get to know your product better.

Embedding video on a landing page will help people get to know your product better.

For example, if your video is a talk with a famous expert on your product, it might be useful to include it on your landing page as well. This will complement your brand identity and trust, as your prospects will see that well-known people partner up with you!

Be cautious: the video you include on the landing page should be of high quality and look professional and attractive. And don’t forget to ask permission from the influencer, you don’t want the inconvenience, right?

An example of how Autopilot embeds a video on their landing page to build trust

How to do it in Wave.video: just crop in the editor, upload to a hosting platform or YouTube and embed on a landing page.

Now comes the most exciting part: repurposing for social media.

4. Social Media videos in Feed and Stories

You can create tons of video content for your social media from your live or YouTube video. Cut the most interesting 30-second or 1-minute parts and post them in your social media communities to increase reach and gain engagement.

Or better yet: announce your next live video or remind about a full version of the video on YouTube.

A webinar invitation from Donna Moritz of Socially Sorted

Feature your video with stickers, text and color effects to match the loose character of social media posting. Also, add subtitles to your video – a significant portion of users watch videos with the sound off.

Don’t forget to resize the videos: for Facebook and Instagram Feeds we recommend using square format; for Instagram Stories this will be 16:9.

Social Media post with a repurposed video from YouTube by Google

How to do it in Wave.video: cut, resize to the needed format, apply stickers and effects, export directly to social media platforms.

So, you’ve cut the large live video in short parts to post on social, but don’t think that the game is over. Now comes the fun part – video promotion.

Video promotion as part of intelligent repurposing

5. Promote your video with social media ads

You can boost your social media posts to gain more impressions, but there is a better option. Make just one little adjustment and use this new version for increasing conversions. Add your logo and include CTA at the end of the video.

Your logo will make sure users understand that it’s a branded content, while CTA will entice them to buy/sign up/send you a message, depending on what the campaign goal is.

How to do it in Wave.video: just add the logo and CTA, download and use in Ads Manager.

Another thing you can do with your video is to create a Facebook video cover out of your video.

6. Facebook video cover

Save your time on creating an additional video for your Facebook page cover by just repurposing some of your existing footage. Perhaps, your live videos won’t work perfectly here, but your YouTube or even social videos definitely will.

How to do it in Wave.video: repurpose to Facebook cover format and export directly to the platform.

You can also use your videos to create other types of content: gifs and screenshots.

7. Turn your video into GIFs and screenshots

When you want to reuse the video content but can’t use such a heavy media file, repurposing to static images and GIFs can be a life-saver.

For example, videos in emails are rarely used, as they load too long and you can lose the attention of the recipients. Try screenshots and GIFs instead!

We recommend applying filters to the image to make it more attractive. For GIFs, it would be useful to add subtitles if the person on the GIF is talking.

How to make GIFs in Wave.video: cut the needed fragment and save as gif to your computer.

How to do screenshots: ‘Prntscrn’ button and you are done 🙂

Of course, your “starting point” can be any type of video, not necessarily a live one. You can start from the social media video and reuse it for your ads, landing pages, and GIFs. Repurposing is about creativity and inventiveness.

Video repurposing is all about creativity and inventiveness.

How we repurpose videos at Wave.video

We create video content every month in large amounts: live videos and webinars, tutorials, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram videos.

Besides creating videos specifically for particular platforms, we also do a lot of repurposing. Let’s take a closer look at two cases.

Case #1: Roundup blog post video repurposing

One of the roundup posts that we did – Video Marketing Trends ’19 – turned out to be a huge source of additional content for us.

We had twenty-five 1-3 minute videos from marketing experts that we published on YouTube with minor improvement – we added thumbnails.

After that, we thought about how else we could repurpose these videos.

The first thing we did was adding these videos to our blog post, as it was the primary destination for traffic. This way we both enhanced the post and got additional traffic from our YouTube where we linked this blog post.

We also created short square versions of the videos with the main highlights to share on our social media (Facebook and Instagram Feeds) and get some more organic traffic. Boosting these social posts increased the traffic to our blog post almost five times!

 

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Have you prepared your video marketing strategy in 2019?🚀 🗨We asked 60 experts to share their video marketing predictions for 2019 [link in the bio] Featuring: @owenvideo @mari_smith @sociallysorted @crestodina @ian.cleary @irespectonline @katairobi @dustinwstout #VideoMarketing #marketingtips #video2019 #socialmediamarketing #socialmarketing #videoideas

A post shared by Wave.videо (@wave.video) on Jan 29, 2019 at 7:41am PST

After the success of the blog post advertising on social, we decided to try these social media videos to promote on Facebook and Instagram for other goals than just blog post promotion.

We just added CTAs to these visuals and started multiple campaigns. Here is one of the videos we used to promote on Facebook:

For the two months of these ads being rolled out, we got an increase of 1.22% in conversions number overall. That’s pretty impressive, assuming that this wasn’t planned to be a promotional video.

This is how we reused this YouTube video:

• Embedded in the blog post with no changes
• Created social media posts with the short square version
• Created social media ads with added CTAs

Case #2: Product Teaser

Here’s a story about the video that became a milestone for our advertising team.

Initially, we created a video teaser about our product for the YouTube channel. We just wanted to describe the main features and show what Wave.video is about.

Then we thought that the video, describing main features in this dynamic way would fit our Facebook Page cover, which we planned to update. A perfect match!

This video you can still see on our Facebook Page cover:

After a while, we were releasing one of the landing pages and were wondering what video we could insert to make a clear picture of the product in short and not to waste time on the production of new visuals.

The answer laid on the surface: we decided to include this new video teaser on the page. We didn’t even have to crop or cut it. This saved the time of our designers and delighted our advertising specialists by making the landing page more informative.

As this video teaser was quite short, we started to use its repurposed square version for advertising on Facebook and Instagram. And at this point, we gained a lot more benefit than we had already: we got a huge number of conversions.

We noticed an increase of 4.82% in conversions from social media, all thanks to video repurposing.

This was because the video was quite universal and, hence, we could use it for many different audiences successfully. Promoting this video on social media gave us an increase of 4.82% in conversions from social media ads in the period of six months. Quite a big number for a video that wasn’t even planned to be promotional.

Here is a wrap-up of the things we did with a single YouTube video in this example:

• Updated Facebook page cover with a resized version
• Featured it in a landing page
• Created social media ads with a square version of the video

Conclusion

Repurposing videos can not only save your time, money, resources but also become a source of additional revenue, as we’ve seen in two cases above. The best thing in reusing your videos is to see great results from a very small effort.

In most cases, you just have to resize the video to meet the requirements of the platform and add some intro or visuals. It is much more convenient than the creation of separate videos for different goals.