Creating Smart Video Content that Works Hard for Your B2B Brand

I am a big believer in “a little goes a long way.” And when it comes to producing video for your B2B brand, the same principle applies!

Your time is valuable and limited — yet the demand for you to invest more effort into your video content right now is evident. Since COVID-19 has us all quarantined in our homes, people are looking for brands to stay relevant on social — that accessible and powerful medium that tells who your brand is and what your brand represents.

It’s easy to burn through time and money to feed the pressure to produce constant video content for our social channels. How can one elevate video production without breaking the bank?

I hope these tips inspire you to work smart, so that your video content can work hard!

Rediscover, Recycle, and Reuse

It’s clear that video content is now king. 80% of marketers say video helps increase sales, according to the Demand Gen Content Preferences Survey.

While recording new content is a great way to keep your social channels fresh, you can also find creative ways to rediscover, recycle, and reuse existing content in new and exciting ways.

Tip #1 Recycle old footage or photos

Say you have a one year work anniversary coming up with one of your executives. Try creating a slideshow of their past year’s speaking engagements and product releases in a playful and celebratory video, brought to life with motion graphics.

To celebrate our upcoming office opening, we did something similar, compiling footage we captured previously into a video that gives a fun, behind-the-scenes looks at our company and culture.

Tip #2 Refresh your company’s portfolio page

If your company has seen an increase in clientele, why not celebrate by making an engaging video that includes the animations of your new client’s logos supplemented by some footage you shot in the past year?

Tip #3 Refresh your product demo

If you have a product demo, but your platform has undergone a “refresh” and some of the features are outdated, why not use the intro and outro from the original demo, but capture new footage of the updated interface? Being resourceful can set the tone for a modest input, but big result approach to producing content more frequently.

Tip #4 Repurpose blog content

Recently at Beacon Digital, we wanted to give our friends at HubSpot a shout out to celebrate the launch of the very powerful new CMS Hub software update. In doing so, we created a short product overview video on the “Top 10 Features of HubSpots’ new CMS Hub” by using only existing assets!

Getting Practical: Tools for In-House Video Production

Now that you have some creative juices flowing, how can you go about putting them into action?

While Beacon Digital offers full production services, ranging from scripting to post production, we know that sometimes budgets are tight and deadlines are slim.

Fortunately, there are plenty of free and inexpensive apps and tools that businesses of any size can use to create compelling videos for all social channels.

We recommend these four social video tools that empower you to create your marketing video before the end of the day!

4 social media video tools for marketers

Biteable

Biteable bills itself as “the world’s simplest video maker.” It features a library of pre-built scenes, including animations and real video footage, so creating a video is as easy as dragging and dropping and adding some text. There are templates to get you started and you can also upload your own footage or images to add that personalized touch. Biteable is also free to get started! If you find you need more features, you can upgrade to the Pro version.

Animoto

Animoto allows you to choose a pre-built storyboard and start adding photos and video clips on your browser, ioS or Android. What we like about this platform is that you can use the collage and split screen tools to show multiple photos or videos alongside one another.

Add your voiceover, or choose from a library compiled of thousands of song options. Then, add some text and share or embed directly from the Animoto interface. This particular platform has professionally designed templates to create posts for:

• Instagram and Facebook stories
• Instagram and Facebook ads
• Whatsapp

As the user, you have the option to choose from two premium subscription options - here’s how you can create your first video with Animoto.

Vyond

Vyond, formally GoAnimate, is different from Biteable in that it allows you to create your own scenes. This online animation software allows your business to easily create professional, animated videos for all industries in jobs roles like marketing, training, and eLearning. It has a number of useful features: “Performance comes in the form of high resolution (1080p), font imports, video collaboration and countless other useful features. Vyond also has a number of features that are exclusive to its marketing video builder, including automatic character lip sync and one-click complex actions and motion paths.”

iMovie

iMovie is a classic video editing app that you’ve likely tried your hand at if you’re an Apple user. If you don’t have access to a robust editing platform, it can be a great tool for getting started with video editing. For iOS and macOS, you can edit and create across multiple devices such as your iPhone, iPad or Mac. You can also post directly to YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook, or export a file to upload to other social channels.

And that’s a wrap! Get out there and start creating.

Interested in getting a larger scale video project rolling? We specialize in telling your brand’s story in a visual way, whether through animated, easy-to-consume explainer videos or live action spots that feature your people and their expertise. We can also assist with ad-hoc post-production of your own footage, like adding motion graphics and professional packaging. Feel free to give us a call or send us an email and we’ll help you cross that finish line.