How to repurpose video content

Recalibrate and optimize: these are the keywords that we want to use to open this post, which is devoted to the topic of how to repurpose video content.

But let’s proceed in order. When designing a video marketing campaign (or any business process) the goal is the first thing to have in mind. It’s like starting a journey: without knowing where you’re going, it’s easy to get lost and waste time.

For example, you can start building a campaign with the goal of winning new customers. Or customer retention may be the goal. Again, improving brand awareness or a particular upselling or cross-selling action. But that’s not all.

In fact, in any video marketing campaign, there are always two decisive elements that you must take into consideration:

1) The channel: a video can be built specifically for social networks (with all the differences between different social media channels); for an email marketing campaign; to be distributed through dedicated apps or to end up on YouTube and much more.

2) The target audience: This is a crucial point. When creating a video, you should always have the target audience you’re addressing in mind. This is something very intuitive: there is a big difference between an audience composed of teenagers versus one of retirees, or when your primary audience is male instead of female. Geographical, behavioral, and psycho-social differences are also important to consider. The good news is that—now more than ever—you can have a very high-resolution snapshot of the audience you’re targeting, thanks to data analytics tools (we will come back to this later in the post).

So, in summary, we are faced with these three fundamental elements when we design our video marketing strategy: the specific objectives, the channels through which it will be distributed, and the target to which it will be addressed. The secret of a campaign’s effectiveness, then, lies in finding the right combination of these three elements.

Sometimes, however, companies may need to recalibrate their objectives, channels, or targets. And here, we come to the topic of our post: how to repurpose video content.

Content repurposing is, quite simply, the practice of reusing previously produced content, appropriately recalibrated, with the goal of optimizing campaign performance.

And already, this is where one of the first and most intuitive benefits of this strategy emerges: savings of time and resources. That’s because it’s much more convenient to modify or expand existing content than to create new content from scratch. But that’s not all.

Changing the purpose of a piece of content also means updating it: here, the immediate benefit is to make it more in line with the times and sentiment, for example (and we know how sentiment can change quickly). A benefit that is less immediate, but no less decisive, is SEO. In fact, it’s well known that search engines tend to reward the most recent and updated content. Keeping SEO in mind is most important when it comes to digital marketing.

Another crucial benefit of content repurposing? Hitting a different target audience, that is, reaching new parts of the audience without spending time and money building a new campaign from scratch. In short, pulling the strings to make your online presence more substantial and widespread, reinforcing your branding, and growing the audience, but not indiscriminately.

And, last but not least, the data at your disposal to analyze the effectiveness of your strategies are multiplying and becoming more in depth. Now that we understand the concept of content repurposing and its main benefits (which reinforce each other), let’s further tighten the circle.  We will move to a more practical front and see how to repurpose video content with 6 concrete insights.

First, a short preamble: content repurposing works well even when the transformation concerns the media itself. Just think of the transformation—now very common—of a written article into a podcast, an infographic or, indeed, a video. There are many examples of this transformation. However, we want to focus on different types of content repurposing that all start as a video. Let’s proceed.

The first type is very immediate and it has to do with the length of the videos themselves but not only. This is exactly what happens with movies at the cinema. In fact, promotional teasers almost always consist of a set of scenes from the film, chosen for their particular attractiveness and remixed into a micro-narrative that is capable of grabbing the audience’s attention, creating anticipation and suspense. You can do the same thing when it comes to your video marketing campaigns. To learn more about best practices for producing teaser videos, especially on social networks, check out this post from our blog.

For this second category, it’s about taking content that a company would typically feature on their YouTube channel and using it for email marketing. What kind of content are we referring to?

We’re talking about explainer videos and how-to videos (which have very similar dynamics). Both of these types of content have been very successful on YouTube. It’s the kind of content that can be easily and effectively redirected for email marketing campaigns. The secret? Their usefulness. And thus the recipient’s perception of receiving added value from the brand, which also represents a very real value.

In this regard, consider these two facts:

• Studies have shown that simply including the word “video” in the subject line of an email can increase the open rate by 6%. While this may seem like a small percentage, those in email marketing know that such a figure can make a big difference (source: superoffice.com).
• If we narrow the focus to B2B, emails that include videos have a 5-fold higher open rate and an 8-fold higher response rate, compared to text-only emails (source: hubspot.com).

Here is a very useful tip that is especially effective for the social media ecosystem. Imagine that you have a long video on your hands, one that was built to be posted directly on the company website or on YouTube. In these cases, you can split a single video into several short videos, each focused on a specific point. As we know, social networks reward video in terms of visibility and interactions. But – almost always – it has to be a short video. In addition, this type of content becomes a perfect place to insert calls to action.

With the pandemic emergency, the world of trade shows, conferences, and in-person events in general has suffered an inevitable setback. But, finally, this whole sphere is getting back on track.

And if there is one lesson we have learned over this very difficult period, it’s about the importance of integrating the “physical world” and the “digital world.” Video plays a decisive role here, in so many ways. You can recalibrate your corporate videos—even different types of videos—for example, to build excitement for a conference or to make a booth more enticing.

In short, we’re not talking about anything new. However, within organizations, video has never been more widely available than ever before.

There are some videos that work just fine without the images (but clearly, not all of them). Well, these videos can easily be turned into podcasts that can be distributed through a wide variety of platforms. Why do this?

Just take a look at the numbers on the growth of the podcast market (source: buzzsprout.com):

• In 2022, 62% of the U.S. population aged 12 and older listened to at least one podcast. And 79% of people are familiar with the medium.
• In the 3 years before 2021, the podcast audience grew by as much as 29.5%.
• According to the most recent estimates, the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. is expected to grow from the current 75.9 million to over 100 million.

Today’s data-driven and personalization dynamics make this possible. What are we talking about?

We’re talking about the ability, offered by data analytics, to know each recipient of your video marketing campaigns. And based on this knowledge, companies can create tailor-made videos for each recipient, with opportunities for adding interactive inserts and personalized calls to actions. All, of course, in an automated manner. In this way, a generic one-size-fits-all video is transformed into a true one-to-one dialog. And it almost goes without saying how powerful and how effective this type of communication becomes.

To learn more about the possibilities of personalized videos by Babelee, see our website.