Video has now become an intrinsic component of the marketing mix. Research suggests that video marketers gain 66% more leads with a 54% increase in brand engagement with quality video content.
The problem with video is that it’s relatively time consuming to create and often doesn’t have the super-long term mileage of the highest quality long forms posts.
If you’re looking to get the most out of your videos then this guide will explain how you can use repurpose one video into a plethora of other content that can populate your social media, podcast and blog. It’s all pretty simple but most importantly, it’s effective.
So whether you’re repurposing your video content to be used into an innovative marketing medium such as video books or simply looking to expand the reach of your existing video content piece into textual formats, we’ve got you covered.
Repurposing – A Quick Route to More Quality Video Content
The internet is becoming increasingly overloaded with video content and the term “content shock” has truly been coined. Content shock suggests that the amount of content brands and businesses produce far outweighs the amount that people will actually read.
Whilst the quality over quantity rings true in this context, the reality is that only a small amount of your content is likely to become read by your audience. No matter how much effort you put into some pieces, certain content has an expiration date and only a few posts are ever destined to reach page one of Google’s SERPS.
It’s tough but what’s the secret sauce? Promote your content to those that would actually like to consume it. Consider the internet as a series of hives, networks and communities of people that congregate together. There’s no better way to get extra mileage out of your content by simply repurposing it, you’ll be able to show it to additional audiences that were previously unreachable.
When it comes to making content, the Pareto principle is a useful approach to understanding the input and output of content creation. Also known as the 80:20 rule, the Pareto principle suggests that 80% of your results comes from 20% of your input. Whilst the actual figures will vary, the result is that roughly
80% of your social or site visitors are channelled through roughly 20% of your social or site posts, and so on and so forth.
In light of this data, a sensible approach to take to creating content is via repurposing. This still allows you to increase your level of content numerically but it also ensures maximum coverage for the pieces which are providing you with traffic.
By repurposing existing content, you can quickly cover a wide range of channels without the need to go through the entire creation process from scratch.
So, let’s look at an effective way of repurposing content:
1. Start With a Video
Video is the most impactful content around but is also one of the most expensive and complex content formats to produce. Video generally aids your brand’s human image by providing viewers with a more personal insight into your company. It’s valuable, effective and stimulating.
However, by starting with video, you’re provided with the luxury of distilling your content into a wide range of other content forms, including audio podcasts, infographics and long form blog posts.
Video engagement far exceeds that of text, audio or image based content. YouTube now has an average session duration of 40 minutes and more than 500 million hours of video is watched daily, which is pretty spectacular.
What we’re concentrating on here, though, is the fact that video is the most flexible form of content given the fact it can be repurposed for multi channel marketing.
2. Create a Text Transcription from your Video
Audio transcription is harder than you think so it’s probably worth using a paid tool like Rev. An alternative would be paying for an audio transcriber on Upwork or Fiverr. Rev is ideal for creating surprisingly accurate text transcriptions and costs just $1 per minute of video. The turnaround time is often less than 24 hours, providing that your video is less than 30 minutes in length.
Rev is easy to use, sign up and upload your video content or copy in the URL.
Rev has a couple of optional choices including timestamping which will sync audio with transcription timestamps and verbatim, which will include common words in natural speech like ‘urm’. You won’t need these. Here’s what a completed transcript from Rev looks like:
It obviously isn’t perfect by any stretch but still, it trumps copying it all out yourself doesn’t it? The great thing about this is that you can easily transcribe video content like interviews or customer testimonials so you can paraphrase them later for use on blogs or social media. Most of the time, it’s still apparent to the reader that this text is from real speech and that adds a degree of legitimacy and authenticity.
3. Use Audacity to Rip Audio From Your Video Content
The best way to extract audio from an MP4 or other video file on your PC is to use Audacity. It’s free and open source and whilst it’s capable of some complex stuff, it is easy to use for anyone.
Once Audacity is installed, install the LAME MP3 encoder add-on. Go Preferences > Libraries and click Download next to LAME MP3 and FFmpeg Library.
Once installation is complete, import your video into Audacity. Go to File > Open > navigate to your file.
Then export it via Export > Export as MP3. You could opt for WAV, which is higher quality, but it’s only advisable if your audio clip is short due to larger file size.
Transcribing From YouTube
If your video is already on YouTube then there is a simpler way to extract the audio. Use a service which converts YouTube to MP3 such as Convert2mp3. Fill in the URL with your video and allow the program to encode your audio then simply download it.
4. Populate Your Social Channels With Content Repurposed From Your Video
So, we’ve just turned a video into both text and audio. You now have:
- Your original video
- Written text
- Audio
This trifecta allows you to cover so many more channels! We can now begin to populate our other marketing channels.
Add Captions to your YouTube Video
Firstly, we can use our text transcription to add subtitles to our YouTube video. Subtitles are great as they can appear in many languages, heightening the value of your video.
In Creator Studio, head to your video and then go to Subtitles/CC.
Click on Add New Subtitles or CC and select the language of your text file. After, click on Transcribe and Auto-sync.
Simply paste your transcript from Rev into the box. YouTube will then add subtitles to your video. This will also positively impact your video’s organic search ranking.
Populate Your Blog
Turning spoken word into text requires a bit more manual work but it ultimately depends on the content. It’s great to turn interviews or testimonials into fairly raw text that encapsulates the essence of the original live video and it provides authenticity to your post.
You can also embed your video in your blog post, which provides substantial SEO benefits by improving user engagement signals such as average session duration and bounce rate.
Additionally you could fuse all 3 content forms into one post by posting the video, the transcript below and a link to the audio clip.
Moz are a top site which create multi-media posts like their Whiteboard Friday series. These are blog posts which feature:
- An embedded video
2. A hi-res image of the whiteboard featured in the video
3. A text transcript of the video
Use your Audio Track for Podcasts
The last thing we can do is use our audio to gain that crucial final bit of content mileage. Our audio can be used for a podcast and can be uploaded to platforms like SoundCloud.
SoundCloud is free and has millions of users, including many from the business and corporate worlds.
Sign up and complete your profile. Make sure to add all you can, not just the bare bones.
After that, use the upload button top right of browser to begin uploading your podcast.
On the following page, drop your file into the box.
Add titles, descriptions, genre, metadata and tags. Don’t skip out on these details. Add your logo or other associated thumbnail. You can also offer up your post for free download.
In the description, you can link back to your video, your site and your blog post as well as other social media channels. More instant and easy SEO benefits.
Natively Upload to Your Facebook Page or Group
Finally, you can post your video natively on social media. Facebook is the primary platform for native video upload and you can include your transcript in the video description.
Instagram can host short 1 minute videos or images. You could either cut a segment of your video and create a video or take still shots using your editing software. More links to more social medias – it’s never a bad thing!
It’s not over yet..tweet your content and associated blog posts to Twitter. You can also embed your SoundCloud post.
Scribd and SlideShare
Lastly, you can make a PDF of your transcript and upload to Scribd and SlideShare with links back to your blog post, video and social medias.
Conclusion
Repurposing content is easy so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it. Creating that interconnected web of cross-platform content will allow you to crank out the mileage from your content.
Because we use video content as a starting point, we are hopefully targeting your most expensive and impactful content for repurposing. This will help us get the most out of the least – 80% out from just 20% in.
Once you’ve made repurposing habit, you can reap the rewards of your vast interconnected content network. Yep, taking care of all of those social medias is time consuming in its own right but you can cut time from scratch building content.
Blog post written by Sam Jeans and edited by James Phoenix from Vidioh, a video brochure marketing company, that combines the impactful nature of video with print advertising.
Our video marketing blogs have been recognised as one of the Top 50 Video Marketing Blogs on the internet. We hope you enjoy reading them and gain valuable insights into what we do here at CMA Video and show that we’re not just another Birmingham video production company but we do more from animation videos to event filming, video strategy to social media video campaigns.
