The coronavirus pandemic has led to significant marketing budget cuts for many marketing teams around the globe. Simultaneously, with so many people now working from home, demand for video content is at an all-time high, and the ability to scale without driving up costs is critical.

While it’s clear that video marketing should be prioritized in your marketing strategy, the challenge is finding affordable and scalable ways to create quality content consistently.

Hiring video editors is one solution, but another great option is to structure your existing marketing team for sustainable, in-house video production.

How, you ask?

Here are five tips for marketing teams that are facing fewer resources, but greater demands, for video both now and in the future.

Read more: 7 reasons more companies are bringing creative positions in-house

1. Involve your whole team in video production and video editing

Collaborating with your whole team on video creation helps you maintain creativity across the marketing team, while still getting tasks done quickly. This way, you can also ensure your entire team’s marketing skills are combined towards creating awesome content.

However, when everyone is given the freedom to submit ideas for videos, it’s a good idea to ensure some type of order remains within the team when it comes to executing these projects. 

First of all, somebody in the team needs to be in charge of project management. Typically this would mean things like setting the strategic direction, timeline, and specs for the deliverables.

On top of that, the project manager should organize frequent check-ins with the rest of the stakeholders on each project — designers or brand managers, for example — to ensure everything is moving along. This would typically be something that a content manager would be in charge of.

If you have a separate specialist managing your social media platforms, be sure to bring them into the fold for collaboration. This way you can ensure your project meets the best practices of each platform.

Ideate with your whole team, and especially your content specialists or social media specialists, at the start of each project. Discuss how your content will be used and distributed through each channel, and how projects can potentially piggyback off current trends or viral hashtags.

Then, depending on the leanness of your content marketing team, you might have people who produce and edit your videos in-house. However, if you don’t have a dedicated person to perform these tasks, producing and editing videos can be supported by as many team members as you like.

In fact, the best on-camera personalities can come from any role within your marketing team. At Wibbitz, our social media manager produces the majority of our video content.

By allowing everyone to create and edit videos, you can really boost your content marketing team’s skill and productivity level.

To recap:

✔️  Make sure someone on your team is in charge of project management

✔️ Make sure to check in & align with all key stakeholders when you’re planning your video content

✔️  If you can, have your entire team collaborate on video production and editing

Read more: Going beyond marketing content: How to empower all your teams to create video

2. Make it easier for your whole team to participate — and minimize demands on your design talent

We live in an increasingly visual world and, chances are, your design talent is in high demand. 

Ever since the global COVID-19 pandemic started, people are engaging with more digital content than ever before. You should make sure that your team can easily produce great video content easily, and fast to keep up.

While not everyone can be a visual designer, there are tools that help you take some minor tasks off your designer’s plate. These tasks include things like images and banners for your blog posts, branded pictures and video assets, as well as simple video clips.

Fortunately, the ability to create content regularly, keep it fresh, and address video localization and personalized video needs has become more accessible and more economical than ever before.

Wibbitz Studio is actually designed to make video production easy, even if you haven’t had any professional training in video editing, so your whole team can use it super easily — regardless of if they’re video pros or not.

Read more: How to create a video… in under 5 minutes

To recap: 

✔️  Look into useful tools that will help your whole team take part in simple tasks that support your entire video marketing strategy.

Next, let’s look at how to make the most of this with template libraries, with a concrete example from one of our customers.

Read more: Report — How to make social video work for your marketing team

3. Build a bank of useful go-to templates your whole team can use

Starting with a template can make it easy to create new content. It also helps you ensure brand continuity and consistency, and it lowers the threshold for all of your marketing team members to take part in video production.

Accounting firm Bennett Thrasher leveraged Wibbitz to support in-house video production cost-effectively. They are creating compelling video content that speaks to their clients across various industries about what can be complex accounting concepts.

With a lean marketing team, having access to reliable tools is a must, especially when creating personalized video marketing campaigns on a budget, or exploring video localization strategies.

As Caroline Heys, Bennett Thrasher’s marketing coordinator, says: “It’s really easy to update the text, make design changes, then turn around the next video.”

And it’s true: a collection of handy templates gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of video content. One template can turn into multiple different types of videos for many different platforms. In fact, Caroline Heys shares that she was able to create 20 videos for Bennet Thrasher using a single template.

Having a large library of branded video assets and templates also makes it a lot easier for your whole team to repurpose existing content.

It’s a good idea to have all your video assets organized into folders with approved layouts saved, so anyone on your team can just just pick a template and edit the parts of the video that need to be changed. 

This way, you can also get your videos done a lot faster than if you start from scratch every time. When all the assets in your template library are already branded and tailored to your specific brand, you can produce compelling video content in mere minutes, as opposed to spending hours on a single clip.

To recap: 

Create a template library with branded video assets to:

✔️  Lower the threshold for your entire team to take part in video production

✔️  Make it easier to repurpose your content

✔️  Save time on video production

Read more: 3 ways marketers use video to humanize complex products & services

4. Repurpose your video content whenever you can

It’s important to remember that different types of content work differently — on different platforms, and for different audiences — and it’s usually a good idea to mix it up.

We explored having a multimedia content marketer mindset in another blog post, and that also applies here. Both content marketing and video marketing are evolving. Don’t get stuck doing the same thing forever, but instead try different formats, channels and platforms.

In addition to thinking multimedia, you should also think both multi-channel and multi-purpose. However, avoid multi-effort: Having a lot of people perform the same task or doing the same thing over and over is not efficient for your team or company in the long run.

For instance, could content that was already created for a blog post or news release be converted to a video format? Or the other way around: Could a detailed product video easily be converted into an actionable ‘How to’ blog post?

Repurposing content and making use of different formats is a great way to help extend the value of team members’ efforts — while providing a wide range of formats to meet varied audience needs and preferences. Additionally, different content formats perform better on different platforms.

You likely have existing content that you’ve invested time and effort into creating. Maximize the value of that content by going through it and seeing if there is anything worth leveraging in a different format.

A lot of companies primarily focus on written content, and turning all the evergreen content on your blog into compelling videos is a simple way to repurpose your content and bring more value to your audience.

To recap: 

✔️  Go through your existing content to find out if any of it could be used to create a video

✔️  Plan and create new videos that can be used for different purposes, platforms and audiences later

Read more: 3 ways to captivate your Instagram audience by repurposing content

5. Create great content once, use it multiple times

In addition to reusing the same content in multiple formats and channels, you can and should use it more than once.

Video content is valuable. If one piece of video your team has created has the potential to appeal to more than one audience, you can create multiple versions of the same video in order to appeal to different, more narrow target groups.

HubSpot, for instance, has a different Wibbitz Studio account for every language they need for their varied audiences — English, Spanish and French — allowing them to leverage core content to address each market segment.

They simply duplicate a video into each account and then edit with new copy or media. This can work both when needing to create content for different languages or to address the different needs of various market segments. 

In addition to localizing your content, you can also publish the same evergreen video content multiple times. For example, explainer videos, educational videos, or customer testimonial videos are always fresh and valuable, and thus there’s no expiration date on them.

Your content distribution strategy should include the reposting of your evergreen video content at regular intervals. Remember: This is valuable and informational content and each time you reshare it, it will reach new audiences and help build your brand awareness.

To recap: 

✔️  Make small adjustments to your video content in order to make it appealing to multiple audiences

✔️  Localize your video content whenever you can

✔️  Republish and reshare your evergreen video content at regular intervals

Read more: Video localization at scale: How to create personalized video content for every target audience

Do you need a hand with your video marketing?

The bottom line is: any type of video content from product videos to explainer videos can significantly improve your digital marketing strategy — right now as well as in the future.

If you’re looking for tools that are easy to use and will add to the list of skills of your entire team, look no further.

Wibbitz is an online video editor that gives you the freedom to create short-form video online in minutes. You can use it for video ads, social media marketing, or anything you need!

The best part is that no previous experience is required. Video creation is easy and fun — and you can try it with Wibbitz for free.