There are two inescapable truths in content marketing:

1. You need to produce new content consistently to be successful.
2. Consistently coming up with new content ideas is hard.

Fortunately, you don’t have to come up with a new idea for every single piece of content you produce. Repurposing your existing content into growth-focused marketing videos helps you maintain consistent content production without spending hours racking your brain for new ideas. 

Worried all this repurposing will create redundant content? Don’t be. It’s true that video outperforms all other types of content, but some customers still prefer reading blog articles or perusing charts and graphs. 

People will engage with your brand in the way that works best for them. 

Creating repurposed marketing videos provides an easy and effective way to connect with your (many, many) customers who prefer video—all the while raking in the traffic, engagement and conversions that are the hallmark of video marketing. 

Repurposing content into videos is a win all the way around.

How to repurpose content into videos

Here are three high-level strategies and best practices for repurposing your content. Keep these tips in mind as you plan your own videos. 

1. Choose the right content to repurpose

One of the big mistakes people make when they repurpose content is assuming that any piece of content can be turned into a video. But that’s not entirely true.

Things like company news stories, press releases and opinion-heavy content usually work better in text. These types of content can be tricky to turn into helpful marketing videos, even if you run a news agency.

However, instructional content and pieces that rely heavily on visuals (charts, graphs, etc.) are easy to repurpose into marketing videos. And these types of content match the most common viewer intent: learning new things.

In most cases, content that works well in video form will be relatively easy to repurpose into a video. If you’re struggling to find a way to turn a piece of content into an engaging video, it’s probably because that content isn’t a good fit for repurposing in this way. 

When that happens, choose a different type of content instead. 

2. Use video to make your content more human

One of the most valuable aspects of video is that it can make information more relatable. 

People intuitively recognize and relate to human faces. Additionally, it can be daunting to read about complex topics, especially if there’s a whole lot of reading to do. For most people, it’s much easier to listen to someone talk about a complex topic.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to show a person explaining something in a blog post. That’s what video is for.

A video of someone talking can work for explaining almost anything. But it’s especially powerful for repurposing things like whitepapers and case studies. Whenever you can, have a person get on screen and talk about the topic. It makes the information more approachable, relatable and memorable.

3. Be mindful of video length

The information conversion rate for turning content into video isn’t always one-to-one. 

Video is an ideal format for conveying information, but viewers are more sensitive to video length than readers are to blog length. It’s easy to skim an article and pick out the most vital information. It’s much harder to skip around in a video and find what you need.

If your video is too long, it will impact its performance much more than being too long will impact a written piece. Remember: You don’t have to put everything from a blog post into a single video. It’s wise to break up long pieces of written content into multiple videos instead.

These short marketing videos will be easier for viewers to consume and also more efficient for you to produce since you’ll get several new videos from a single piece of written content. 

There’s no hard and fast rule for how long a marketing video should be. The ideal length will depend on the content and where you post the video. In most cases, short videos perform better on social media. But you can get away with longer videos on YouTube.

Contributed by Leah Diviney, a content manager at Biteable, the world’s simplest video maker. When Leah isn’t busy making videos, she writes about them for the Biteable Blog.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.