Content marketers and analysts alike predicted that online video would soar in popularity and significance to become one of the top marketing trends of 2013. With this in mind, marketers everywhere have been working to incorporate video into their marketing strategies this year and beef up their online video presence.
While questions about practicality and cost caused some marketers to shy away from video in the past, today’s technology has mostly taken the intimidation out of online video production. In fact, you can now create top notch, professional video content in-house, without even picking up a video camera.
Here are three types of video content assets you can easily create with nothing more than PowerPoint and Brainshark.
1. Textual video infographic
As previously mentioned, video content is a hot commodity, but let’s not forget about another powerful type of content that has set the marketing scene on fire: the infographic. Infographics have exploded in popularity over the past year and a half, as they offer an attractive, visually appealing option for communicating valuable ideas and data that may have otherwise been buried in lengthy reports.
So, with video and infographics both topping the list of most-desirable content types, why not combine the two for an even greater impact? This type of video can be particularly useful as a way to highlight industry trends and establish your company as a thought leader.
Here’s an example of a textual video infographic that we created entirely in PowerPoint using these simple steps from our own Paula Crerar. Once the slides were complete, we uploaded them to Brainshark and added some simple background audio to achieve the final effect.
2. Customer testimonial
Customer testimonials are an important component of every sales and marketing strategy. While written case studies have their place, video testimonials are a powerful means of clearly and efficiently conveying the customer’s story.
When many marketers hear “video testimonial,” they often assume that they’ll need expensive equipment and will be bogged down in logistics to coordinate recording times with customers who may be located on the other side of the country, or the other side of the globe.
This three minute video from Marit Fratelli will completely reshape your view of the video creation process, as it coaches you through five steps to creating a professional-looking video testimonial without using a camera.
3. Statistics video
When doing research for a blog post, content marketers will often uncover a wealth of insightful and compelling statistics. They will then weave these facts and figures into their article as supporting evidence for their points, but the value of those numbers doesn’t end there.
As Brendan Cournoyer explains, these same statistics can be repurposed into videos to extend the reach of the story the data tells and appeal to a wider audience using the power of video. Not only does this prolong the life of the message, but it also enables marketers to derive multiple content assets from a single piece of research. Like textual infographics, stats videos can serve as a valuable thought leadership content asset.
In this example, we adapted 10 video marketing stats from a recent blog post into PowerPoint slides, added narration to the slides with Brainshark, and came up with the voice-enriched video presentation below.
As you can see, with these simple tricks, high-quality video content is just a few PowerPoint slides away. You can easily create impactful online videos by repurposing existing content assets into video form, and in the process, add powerful tools to your content marketing arsenal.