Module 5 - Making the most of your collateral

How can you repurpose the video content you already have?

There are three places to repurpose it: on-site, email marketing and social media. In this part of your YouTube ads course we're going to talk about how you can make the most of your collateral, and I'll take each of those three in turn.

What should you do with video on your own website?

Start by asking whether you have any video content on your website at all, and if not, find places to integrate it. Perhaps you have individual product pages. Is there an opportunity to restructure the way those individual product pages are designed and use video content by embedding a video within that web page? That's one of the first things you can do.

Then let's say you have a blog or a news section. You can use your video content and blog about it. If you have probably only got a few pieces of content at the moment, think about all the things you talk about in those one or two videos and how you can blog about those in different ways. That way you may end up with five or ten different blog articles. Simply create a blog title from something you are talking about within your video, write a very short micro blog, then pull that video content in from YouTube, and you're going to help direct traffic back to your site. Suddenly you're starting to add a little bit more life into your website as well.

Make sure that in anything you do on site you always include a call to action, so that those visitors who are reading your website and watching your video content know there is more valuable content they can see over on your YouTube channel. That's going to help increase watch time and it's going to help you get an increased subscriber base.

How does video fit into email marketing?

Email marketing is a great way to reach into an existing audience, and video slots into it easily. You've probably already got an email marketing strategy and you've found ways to be effective on there, but have you included video before?

A lot of email marketing systems allow you to easily integrate video into your email template and design. Often you can just take your link from YouTube and populate that in as you build your email campaign, and it will pull that content in. So is there a way you can include more video content in your emails? Or perhaps your email content is working just fine, but you could start split testing and add in some other email campaigns that specifically champion your YouTube channel and use that video content. Again, make sure that you include any calls to action so that visitors know they can watch more over on YouTube.

How do you use video across social media without it taking over?

Cut your longer YouTube content down into short teaser clips for other platforms, rather than trying to run every channel as its own full production. You can really get carried away with social media and it easily becomes a full-time job for one person, if not a whole team. Even with the support of agencies, every channel can be looked after by multiple people, and it can become a very big task.

So when you think about your YouTube channel and the video content you've got, one of the ways to repurpose that content is using shorter, cut down content for other platforms. Say you've got a video on YouTube and it's five minutes long. Take a look at that and extract ten seconds of content, and use that on Instagram Reels or on TikTok for example, as teaser content to bring people back to your main channel.

If you are posting links, use short links such as Bitly to help monitor that traffic. And always make sure that in the short content you are driving traffic back to your channel, whether it's a Bitly link or not. It's a great opportunity to say, hey guys, this is what we're talking about here, but if you want to know more, watch the full length over on YouTube.

What is the activity for this session?

Take one video you've currently got, or one video you are about to create, and work out how many different places it can be used.

Can the video go on your website? If not, can you create a new web page where it can go? Can you send an email campaign around this subject and embed the video? Hopefully you've got no restrictions or limitations around your current email software, so you should be able to do this, fingers crossed. Then can you talk about this video, or use a short version of the content, on other social platforms?

Suddenly one video becomes multiple pieces of content across channels. So thank you for your time, and I hope you get on well.