Video marketing is on the rise for many reasons. Both B2C and B2B consumers find videos easy to engage with and understand, but many companies are still not using video in their marketing. The main reason? Video seems hard to produce. In this video, I’ll teach you how to transform content you’ve already created into an engaging marketing video.

Check out the finished video product here: https://www.smamarketing.net/blog/the-history-of-website-design

Why is video important

  • 53% of consumers engage with a brand after viewing a video on social media. – (Brightcove)
  • 72% prefer video over text when learning about a product or service (WYZOwl)
  • 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television. (Google)
  • 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day. (HubSpot)
  • 59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than read text. (Wordstream)

Why is YouTube is the best platform

  • YouTube is the second most popular website after Google. (Alexa)
  • Users view more than 1 billion hours of video each day on YouTube. (YouTube)
  • 65% of people use YouTube to help them solve a problem. Want to build a house or remove weird parasites from your eye? YouTube might have the answer. (Google)
  • YouTube has 23,946,561 subscribers (and counting!) (SocialBlade)

Tools to help make it easier

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s up, and welcome to Hack My Growth. Today I’m going to be showing you how to create videos from old blog posts. All right, let’s go.

Are you looking to grow your business, but you’re not sure where to start? That’s where we come in.

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Like I said in the quick intro, we’re going to be showing you how to create videos from old blog posts. And if you’ve been in marketing, if you’re a business owner who’s been trying to market online, you’ve probably heard this for a number of years, that this is the year of video marketing. Well, the reality is, it’s only the year of video marketing if you actually get started using video, and a lot of times people don’t use video because either they think it’s too expensive or they think it’s too difficult to get started. So I’m going to show you how to get started quick and easy, and create videos that your audience wants to watch.

So before we get into that, let’s talk about why video is important. Now there’s a number of statistics out there that talk about marketers using videos. From a business standpoint, I don’t think that really matters. If marketers are doing something more than something else, maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. But these are statistics that I think matter when it comes to video marketing. So 53% of consumers engage with a brand after watching a video on social media. This means that that video they saw moved that person to maybe click on the link or take that next step in pursuing a conversation about that company.

Now, 72% prefer video over text when learning about a product or service. It makes it a lot easier for somebody to engage. It allows them to see the product working. Text is still important, it can be very helpful, but people like to see products or services in the works.

So from Google, six out of 10 people would rather watch online videos and television. As we know, more and more things are moving online. People are going online to watch videos to see content. 78% of people watch online videos every single week, and 55% view them every single day. Again, people are watching videos, and this is a lot of B2C, and also very B2B.

59% of business executives say that they would rather watch video online than read text. So they’d rather watch about a product, about a service, than they would read a blog post. So we need to be using video, whether we’re in the B2C, whether into B2B, video is important. It’s a great way to transfer information, authority, and really build that conversation with our end users.

Now there’s a lot of platforms. We’ve got different platforms where you can track analytics and embed videos onto your website and all of that. And there’s a number of great platforms out there. But really I’m going to make a pitch for YouTube, and the reason why is pretty simple. I’ve got some statistics here. YouTube is the second most popular website after Google. This is in the entire world. More people are going there. Users view more than 1 billion hours of video each day on YouTube. 65% of people on YouTube, they use it to help them solve a problem. Whether it’s how to build a house, or how to remove a weird parasite over here, YouTube has got the answers to all these different questions, how to do this, how to do that.

You’re watching this video on YouTube. This is the source. This is the platform that people go to when they want to learn about a product or service or how to achieve something. And if you’re going to get visibility, why not go where everybody is. If you want to use a different tool to embed in your site, you can do that. Again, I highly recommend using YouTube, building out your channel, optimizing your channel. YouTube has 23 million subscribers and counting, so it’s a great platform. It’s got tons of people on the platform and people that engage. It’s my number one social source as far as engagement and starting to meet people. I’ve met some of you based on you watching a video on YouTube.

Now you’re probably saying, “This is great, Ryan, but I don’t have cameras. I don’t have good stage presence.” All of these different reasons why we don’t do something. Well, video, the best way to get started is taking content you’ve already created and turning that text content now into video content. There’s a lot of cool tools out there. These are just four tools that I’ve personally used a number of times to create videos.

Biteable, Biteable’s really cool if you want to make logo spins. It also has some cool animations in there. You can use a free account. They also have paid versions. Lumen5 has some great options as well, some good stock video. Again, some cool logo spin stuff. Also does some automation of video creation for you. The same with Raw Shorts. That’s what their push is; using AI technology to help take content and auto-generate videos for you.

But the one I’m going to walk you through today is the one that we have adopted more so at our agency, and that we use for each and every one of our clients as well as ourselves, and that’s Animoto.

Not only can you do the text to video stuff, I think it’s cool because you have a little bit more control over the frame by frame. So when we’re doing things like voice overs, Animoto makes it way easier for us to execute that. Now you don’t have to use voice overs, but it can be really helpful. But Animoto meets all of our needs within one platform.

So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to show you how we go about taking an old piece of content and creating a video out of it. All right, here we go. So this is the Animoto website. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up here. There are paid versions of this tool, like a lot of SAS products online. As you can see, you can do a personal level, you can do professional, or you can do business level. They do give you a free trial.

The reason why it’s good to pay for a tool like this is the amount of stock videos, the tracks that you get for your audio. It allows you to do a lot of really cool stuff. We do this middle one here, the professional account, because we get 1 million videos and photos straight from Getty Images. If you know anything about stock photos, Getty is one of the number one sites. This is where a lot of the AP and some of the bigger media companies get their stock content from. So it allows you to do that as well as do reseller.

For $33 a month, or if you go annually it’s a little bit cheaper. Via monthly, it’s a little bit more expensive, but if you go annually it allows you to do some pretty cool stuff. You get this commercial license, it allows you to leverage, and if you’re going to be doing this frequently, I do recommend that. I don’t work for Animoto. I get no money from Animoto for doing this. I just think it’s a really good platform and it’s helped us be way more effective.

All right, so I’m going to log in and show you how we get started. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see your videos here. To create a new video, as you can see, they’re blurred out because there’s some client projects, but to get started, you hit create. I always like to get set up and get started before I actually start pulling the content down.

Now there’s templates in here. So let’s say you’re not creative, you don’t really know what to do. They can walk you through. You’ve got popular, you’ve got attract an audience, so things like webinar videos, these are, you know, can make those short social videos that you would post on LinkedIn or one of your other social sites to get people to move. Maybe you’re sharing a product or service, so you’re launching something new. Maybe you’re in the real estate world or a how to video. As you can see here, they’ve got templates all ready for you. Or you want to tell your company’s story. All of these things get the ball rolling for you and can be very, very helpful.

I typically like to just start from scratch, but if you’re somebody who wants a little bit more direction, have somebody to build out the storyboard for you, these are all really good options. But I will go ahead and just say start from scratch. Now here you have some options with colors, and the way the text slides in, and the font. Again, you can change all of this once you’re in the project itself. I’m going to go ahead and click one of these and 16 x 9, which is going to be your traditional video format. So if you’re going to upload it to YouTube, 16 x 9. If you’re going to use it on a social channel, maybe like Facebook, LinkedIn, the square format is really cool and really easy to use. So we’ll go ahead and choose this and 16 x 9. Now this is all drag and drop, so we can build our blocks here once we’re in the tool.

Now how do you know which piece of content to use, which one to do first? I like to go and see which content’s performing, and then use that to create video out of it. Now you may be using a marketing platform to do your analytics, which is really cool. I like to use Search Console when doing this because it’s telling me how people are finding my content in search. So what I’ll do is I’ll go over into this performance tab and we will see what’s going on here in the search results. If you don’t have Search Shops set up, it’s a pretty easy process. Just sign up and verify that you own the domain.

As you see here, it tells me the clicks and impressions and all of that of my search results. It’ll tell me the query, so these are the terms that people have used to find my site online. I like to go over to Pages, find out which one of these pages are really producing. Now some of these have videos on them because we use videos quite often here at SMA. So like this one, this is a video about S.M.A.R.T. goals. I’m not going to create another video about that. This history of website design, I think this is a slide deck. Oh yeah, just kind of a long history here. Now this would be a perfect piece of content to create a video off of.

Something, I don’t even really need to have a voice over, but I can just walk through step by step. Now one way to do it is to start plugging things in step by step by step. Now that can end up creating a not very cohesive video. The best way to go about it is start to pull out the different highlights and the pieces of content that you really want to highlight here, because once you post your video online, you’re going to have, hey, if you want to read this whole blog post, put an internal link back to this piece of content. One, it’s going to give you an internal link on your blog that you post a video on back to the text version, and then on the social sites it can drive more people, not just to your video, but also to this blog post that may have not got as much hits lately, or maybe hasn’t got as much visibility, and it’s a great way to get this back out on social again.

So what I’d like to do again is take the title. This is what we’ll start, right, with our video. So here we go. We’ve got a title here. I just go ahead and use Docs or Word or whatever. 28 Years Building the Web. Now it’s a little bit longer than that. Since this post was published, this was refreshed in July, 2019. We like to refresh our content, but what we’ll do here, 1991, In the Beginning, would be our title. And then we would go through, Welcome to the World of the Web. CERN was the first web, went live, publicly announced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You would not want to put this all in a text video because nobody wants to read that. I would just do, CERN, the first website, went live in 1992.

The web was publicly announced, though, actually on 1991. The very first website is 100% text-based. Again, we don’t have to add all of this in here. We don’t have to go into HTML because we’re not going to be talking about the specifics of how this page was built, like I went to into this site. 1993, we can do the launch of Search, and really just build these down step by step. And once you have your full, your text laced, based and laid out here, then you can put it into the tool, Animoto, and build out the rest of your site. So I’m going to go ahead and build the rest of the script out and then we’ll get into Animoto.

All right, so as you’ve seen, I’ve gone through this entire piece really quickly and started to work out what might look like a good video script. Now obviously this is a blog post that I’m pushing somebody into, hey, come talk to us about your website. Let’s help you redesign it. This original post was done three years ago, but we’ve updated it to be fresh today. So honestly, one of the things we need to probably do in our title here is say, updated for 2019.

Now, another thing you’ll notice is I’m using Google Docs here to to make this happen. And I’m going to pitch another cool tool here, Grammarly. I am not your go-to grammar guy. Honestly, if you are looking for somebody to make stuff look pretty, I can probably help with that. If you need branding, messaging, storytelling, I think that’s probably where my skills lie. As far as grammar goes, not really where I’m going to be a shining star.

So I love Grammarly. I use Grammarly to make my emails not sound stupid, but also make sure that my content is looking good before I hand it to my team. Now as you notice here, it’s going to underline all these things, because when you’re doing a text video, it’s really important that your grammar is correct. People are going to look at that and they’re going to make notes on how your grammar is here online. So I’m going to put this in here and what I’ll do is find out how long this video is, and do the history of website design in less than 60 seconds.

So today’s 2019. We’re talking about 1991. That’s, excuse me, what, 28 years or so of website development. So 28 years of web development, something. I think I’ll stick with this. It’s the history of website design in less than 60 seconds. So now I’m going to start building this video out in Animoto. Now that I’ve got everything done by Grammarly, the next step I would do would send it to my team, say, “Hey, can you guys take a look at this, make sure that it looks pretty, make sure that everything looks correct and then we’ll go from there.” But since I’m doing this video live, not really live, but recording it here, I’m going to trust that Grammarly has me covered.

The first thing I want to do is add block. Now this is going to be text. I’m going to go ahead and add this text in. And as you can see here, they’ve gone ahead and made this thing look pretty cool and I haven’t done anything. Now it’s five seconds long. The reason it’s five seconds long is Animoto saying, “Hey, it takes about five seconds to clearly read this text.” And so that’s something that we really want to do.

Also here, I can do a voice over just on this slide, and this is something that we really like here at our agency, is because sometimes we’ll take this video and we’ll do voice overs. History of website design in less than 60 seconds. And then walk somebody through here. I can also now adjust the text. I can add a subtitle if I want to. And then if I want to do even more, I hit the edit button here. It allows me to adjust the size of the text. And then Animoto is going to give you a suggestion of what they think is best, the color, the accent, that sort of thing.

I can also add in an image, so I can upload media or I can go over here to stock, and this is why we pay for it. And I can go web design, it’s going to start to filter out Getty images, and they’ve got two images here. So we’ll go here and do website design.

You know, I can go ahead and drop this cool image in if I wanted to. And then I can adjust the image and scale the background. I can crop full screen, I can frame to fit, crop left, I can rotate the image. There’s a lot of other things that we can do here. Now you’re not going to get every little design element that you would have if you’d use something like what I typically use doing videos, like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You’re not going to get that complexity, but you are going to be able to build a really cool looking video with just dropping these in here.

So that’s a title, title one. We can go ahead and close this out, and now we’re going to want to work through the rest of this. I just want to show you a couple of things as I’m building this out. This is a double layered text, so we’re going to have a title as well as a subtitle. So again, moving this in, we would do something like add a block, add text, in the beginning, dot dot dot. Now we need that bottom text, right? We would add this here to the subtitle. 6 am. First website went live.

Did you notice now what they’re doing here, or this thing that make it read easier, subtitle. If I clicked on here, accent, I got my accent colors. I’ve also got this section here. You know they’re making this, they call it out, so it’s going to be easier to separate and distinguish from the background. Now I can go into the design, I can do the video background, I can do the text size, I could do the font that I want to pick. I can do this style, I can change it here. I can change the aspect ratio. So let’s say you make this video on 16 x 9, but then you also want to render one that’s one by one for square. You can do that. Filter, I can do black and white filters, I can do cool filters, I can do darken.

Let’s say I had the image behind here. I might want to do a darkened filter to make it show up a little bit better. Typically what I do is I lay all my text down on my storyboard, and then I go in and start adding in the backgrounds and the music and all of that. So I’m going to go ahead and work through the storyboard and get it all up in here, and then show a couple of how these filters look before I export this and add some music to it as well.

So now I’ve got all of my text in here and not all of it fits. If I post a video like this and just pushed it, I wouldn’t be very happy with it. But the reason why I like doing it this way, other than using one of the tools that pulls just text at random, is I get to think about the process as I go through it.

Now, a couple things here. One, it’s much longer than 60 seconds, so I might have to change the title of the video. Two, there’s a couple of things here, like 2016, social media, and white hat backlinks. I don’t think I want this to be in this video. So in 2016 there’s a number of things that were going on in the history of the web design world. And so let’s maybe change this up a little bit and grow it a little bit. I’m probably going to change some of the text here and make it a little bit thicker. And then this one is way too long, it’s going to look funky. But as you can see, I’ve got at least an outline here of the video to go.

Now what I’ll do is I’ll go in and I’ll add different background images. I’ll then go in, and what I really love is I can pick all of these different musics on background loops. I can change these. Once this is done, I’m going to export this video, which you do through preview. Then I’m going to upload it to YouTube, and then I’m going to embed it into the top of this web post. Here’s the history of the web design, and then I’m going to say, check out this 90 second video that goes over it, but then they can also read the full blog post. I’m also going to take this entire, this is some little extra nuggets for you here, and I’m going to post this into the description in YouTube, so there’s some text description within the video that I’m posting as well.

Now what I’ve done, yes, it’s taken me a little bit of time, maybe 20, 30 minutes to do this, but by the time I’m done, I’m going to have a really good video that I can promote on social, that I can promote on YouTube, that can add to my blog, that I can share with others. I can do this with real estate listings. I can do this with software. I can do this with products. I can do this with e-commerce. You can take any of the content on your website, build out just a short story script, and allow this to play.

Where this works really well are sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where these videos will autoplay, and a lot of times when people aren’t working, they’re on social media, they want other people know that that’s what they’re doing. So when you have the text going, you can describe your product. You can put video loops of your product in the background simply by just dropping and dragging it. I can go here, and I want to do video, and I want to do website. There’s videos here where I can literally drag these, and now if I preview this, see how it’s got a video in the background?

I didn’t have to take my time and try to figure out all of these different scripts, and put it here into my editor, and do graining, and all that stuff that a lot of people don’t have time or energy to learn. But with a tool like Animoto, I can develop a really good video that I can use across the board for my business to help grow my company.

So I hope you guys learned something. I will post a link to the video and the blog and description so you can see the finished product, because I’m going to go in and clean it up a little bit. But honestly, it doesn’t take that long. Anybody can do it. Anybody that has a computer can do it. There’s a lot of free tools out there. Animoto is not that expensive. And like I said, the best part is all the free stock, because that’s what’s going to take you the most time, finding stock videos and stock filters and music that you can legally use to promote your business. Because you want to make sure that the artist gets what’s deserved, the way they put time and energy into them to making their products as well.

So if you guys have any questions about the process or any of the platforms we talked about, please comment below. Also, I’d love to hear how you’re using video. If you’ve got any examples, you want to share those in the comments, please do. We would love to see how you’re using video for your business. And until next time, Happy Marketing.