How to Repurpose Video Content

Modern marketers have their work cut out for them when it comes to hitting their goals. Whether they’re focused on demand generation, brand awareness, or other core marketing responsibilities, marketers are contending with a crowded, noisy digital landscape.

Numerous tools can help marketers elevate their messages and break through the noise, but video is one of the most effective.

For years, digital video consumption has continued to rise. During the pandemic, that gradual increase in viewership accelerated. A few years later, the appetite for video has not waned. And that appetite, as it pertains to marketers, spans all industries and audience segments.

While it’s great for marketers to have proven resources like video content to project their messages, that effectiveness also increases demand. Companies and teams now want a video for nearly everything, from social media posts and video ads to videos in email outreach and video blogs. All these requests for videos put a hefty strain on teams that may already be dealing with limited resources and budgets.

Keeping up with the demand for video means managing all the resources you have available, including current video content, old content, and even content from other teams.

Cut Long Videos into Short Clips

A common question marketers ask is, “How do I create more video content without drastically increasing my budget?” When facing resource and budget pressures, it makes sense that many marketers want to optimize.

One of the first places to start is your existing media library. Webinars, recorded presentations, customer case studies, and other long-form videos can be repurposed in several different ways.

• Social media clips. Clip brief segments that can be used in social media posts or quotable snippets that can be used for a variety of promotional purposes.
• Highlight reels. Cut highlights and use them to tease the full-length video on your resources page or on a landing page.
• Video Ads. Pull short clips that can be used to promote your brand, like product announcements or customer quotes.
• Immersive Blogs. Clip sections that can be embedded in a blog post to deliver a more immersive, interactive video experience.

Anytime you create a long-form video, look for opportunities to pull shorter clips. A single feature-length piece could turn into a dozen snackable shorts used in a variety of applications.

Promote Old Videos in New Ways

The most effective content is fit for purpose: customized to its promoting channel and personalized to its target audience. However, this content best practice runs the risk of limiting your video assets to single-use applications and diluting their long-term value.

Just think about all the videos and content you’ve created for a specific event or project. What happened to those videos afterward? Were they forgotten in the depths of your media library? Perhaps they’re buried somewhere on your corporate resources page on your website?

Chances are you’re sitting on a wealth of materials that can be used with a minimal amount of effort, using the right tactics.

• Refresh old topics. Webinars get stale and their data outdated, but their themes often remain relevant. Perhaps the presentation featured customers, partners, or team members who have moved on, but the substance of what was covered is still sound. It can be a quick and relatively painless process to update the supporting assets and re-record the video.
• Test new channels. Knowing where an audience will engage your content isn’t the same as knowing where they won’t. After publishing your video to its primary destination, get creative and try publishing on new channels to see if those audiences engage. For example, embed brand story videos on product pages to build buyer confidence, or include videos in sales pitch decks to make them more dynamic.

When you create videos, think about how you can maximize efficiency by meeting a variety of audience needs. Are they trying to understand your brand, researching your products, or looking to make a purchase? Audiences expect content that addresses these things along their journey, so think through the touchpoints you have and what your audience wants at each stage.

Leverage Videos Outside Your Team

Increasingly, teams outside marketing are tasked with creating, managing, and publishing video content. Whether that’s human resources, talent acquisition, product, customer support, sales, or others, everyone is looking to capitalize on the benefits of video.

The upside for marketers is that they can often lean on the materials these teams create to supplement their own video needs. Depending on your business, there may be multiple resources you can tap into for video content.

• Brand. Brand-centric storytelling produces great content that can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, employee testimonials sourced by corporate comms can be incorporated into brand stories that marketing promotes on social media and the website. They can also be shared with HR to use for other purposes like new-hire orientation and welcome videos. By sharing resources, many teams can maximize their video output.
• Customer Success. In the B2C space, brands often create content that resellers can use on product listing pages, such as customer testimonials sourced by customer success teams.
• Training. In B2B, there may be internal teams producing content focused on training or educating customers or users. With some minor edits, that content could be used externally for marketing purposes if it aligns with what a viewer is looking for along their journey.

Think outside your team’s library of videos when looking to repurpose content. With the barrier to video creation dropping as new tools and technologies make it easier, more teams are incorporating video into their workflows. By reaching out across the organization, you may find plenty of content you can reuse and repurpose to advance your team’s video initiatives.

Get Creative with Repurposing Video

As you start to consider how to repurpose your video content and apply it to your campaigns or projects, you’ll think of other creative ways to get more out of your videos. You may even start to approach the video creation process with a new view of how you’ll use that asset for multiple projects well into the future. By adopting some of the tips above, you’ll uncover your own methods for optimizing video.