Sharing your company’s story and addressing your customers’ challenges with video is an effective way to drive greater results from your integrated marketing efforts. However, creating quality, engaging video content can be time-consuming and expensive. Once you sink the initial investment into producing a video, it’s crucial you make the most of that dynamic piece of content.

In this article I’ll show you how to repurpose a single piece of quality video content so it can be utilized across your other marketing channels and campaigns. Employing this strategy will allow your video to act as an anchor for your content strategy and fuel your integrated marketing efforts in the process.

Use Your YouTube Videos As a Content Hub

The basic idea here is to use your most costly and in-depth content as a springboard for creating smaller pieces of content.

We’ll start with a high-quality, relatively long (between three and seven minutes in duration) YouTube video. Once you’ve secured this content, there are many ways you can go about repurposing it. The sample repurposing strategy I’ll be going over is highlighted in this rough diagram below.

This diagram shows that each element maintains its own identity while ultimately stemming from the central piece of video content. Since each piece of subsequent content will be tied to this initial video, you must make sure it’s high quality.

If the source material is not great, then the numerous iterations of derivative content will only be worse off. With that warning out of the way, let’s dive into this content strategy!

Add Facebook Video Trailers for Additional Visibility

In a recent article I posted on my blog, I dove into the differences between Facebook and YouTube and how to best leverage each platform. One key point I made is that the two can actually be used in conjunction quite nicely once you understand their differences.

One standout example is YouTube sensation Michelle Phan, who has used Facebook Video as a platform to share mini “trailers” for her long-form YouTube content. Her team understands that Facebook video’s real power is its ability to leverage social lift and direct the audience’s attention to main content.

Since these trailers often consist of repurposed video footage that has been edited down to a few seconds, they don’t require much of an investment. However, by understanding the medium and properly leveraging her existing content, Phan is able to spread the reach and overall utility of her content in a big way.

Use Instagram Video for Increased Engagement

General Electric, the old industrial stalwart, is shockingly adept when it comes to content marketing. They’ve proven time and time again that they can be every bit as agile and innovative as younger companies when it comes to online content.

One great example of GE’s content marketing savvy is how they use Instagram Video to cross-promote their central content. In particular, the company’s #GameofInches campaign has proven successful. This campaign centers around a minisite that features short, 15-second videos highlighting the “rules of industry.”

GE has broken out and repurposed this central content on all of their different social platforms. GE uses their Instagram account to feature the main video content, as well as supplemental footage that directs attention to the central focus of the campaign.

Instagram is great for featuring supplemental content because it not only engages your following on the account, but it also drives interest and attention towards your integrated marketing efforts.

Create Blog Posts Centered around Video Content

Digital marketing software provider Moz has been at the forefront of online marketing thought for many years. One way they spread their online influence is by creating an informative presentation video every week that they call Whiteboard Fridays.

This long-form YouTube content is fairly in-depth, and oftentimes the concepts they discuss require revisiting. Understanding this element of their content, Moz also posts the video to their blog and accompanies it with a full transcript.

Moz doesn’t even need to doctor the original video content to transform it into another type of media that can garner them more exposure and provide their customers additional value. While this strategy might not work for all videos, the central lesson applies: If you’ve gone through the trouble of crafting a quality video with a great script, it would be wise to repurpose it as a blog post as well.

Develop Social Posts for Additional Exposure

Now that you’ve repurposed your video content, it’s time to further multiply your exposure by promoting all this content with your community via social media.

Not only can you use networks like Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest to draw attention to your content, but you can also derive visuals and other assets to incorporate into these postings from the videos themselves.

Images boost a post’s engagement on all social networks, and your video is a great resource to pull these images from. You can also incorporate lengthy descriptions or interesting quotes from the video to flesh out your posts.

For example, educational YouTube channel CrashCourse uses video content as a starting point for creating compelling Google+ descriptions. They also use bonus content derived from the videos to further engage their Twitter following.

These tactics combine to strengthen the overall strategy of repurposing—and thereby maximizing—the potential reach and effectiveness of your video content across multiple channels. Not only does this help make the most of your investment, but it has the added benefit of boosting the original content itself.

Sure, video might be an investment, but by effectively repurposing and recycling this content, you’ll make the most of your integrated marketing efforts on behalf of your business.

How does your organization plan to approach creating and distributing video content? Share your ideas in the comments!

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