Every year sees video leech more and more web traffic from other content types. As of 2018, worldwide internet users watched in excess of 500 million hours of content on YouTube every day. We collectively upload as much video content online, every 30 days, as all of the major American television networks have put out, combined, in the past three decades.
As of 2018, worldwide internet users watched in excess of 500 million hours of content on YouTube every day. Click To Tweet
But what does this mean for you, fellow content marketer? Some 64% of customers make a purchase after watching branded video content — and social media video content inspires 12-times as many shares as image- and text-based posts combined. Plus, the brain processes video up to 60,000 times faster than it does text, which means the right clip could help you make a more emotional connection with potential customers.
64% of customers make a purchase after watching branded video content. Click To Tweet
For these reasons, content marketers need to “up” their game when it comes to video — and to do that, they need the best tools they can find. From generating ideas to designing and deploying video content, here are 12 incredibly useful video tools your team can use to generate interest, broaden your audience and create tons of new brand converts, starting today.
Video Tool #1: Splasheo
Splasheo is a crowd favorite here at C&C. This is an easy-to-use tool that content marketers can use to “frame” their videos for a bigger visual impact.
Why is this important? For a start, it’s because most uploaded videos are shorter than two minutes. Videos longer than this — and even some that are shorter — need a bit of help when it comes to keeping your audience’s attention. Splasheo helps out by making it simple to add punchy, professional-looking, attention-grabbing captions that add visual interest (and additional information) and keep your audience glued to short and long videos alike.
Video Tool #2: Wistia
Wistia is far more than a video customization tool — it’s a whole channel customization tool. It’s a great ally for any brand that hosts a variety of video content natively on their website. For content marketing teams who are tired of the same old embeddable video players, Wistia is great for turning the viewing process into a branded experience in its own right.
Users can choose custom thumbnails and colors, easily add logos and branding, and strategically place calls to action on a stream of your own video content that has none of the competitor’s videos and none of the usual YouTube clutter. It’s also easy to integrate with marketing and analytics platforms, which saves you time. If you see a video on the C&C blog and it’s not hosted in YouTube, it’s hosted in Wistia.
Video Tool #3: Camtasia & SnagIt from TechSmith
There are many reasons why brand ambassadors and content marketers might want to record what’s happening on their screen and then share it with the world. Maybe you want to present a demo of a piece of software, create a video tutorial, or create a webinar or training video. Whatever the case, Camtasia is a user-friendly app for Windows and macOS that makes it easy to capture and polish your screen capture for a wide audience.
Camtasia helps you organize screen footage, webcam footage or both, and then offers a suite of editing tools such as effects, transitions, music, title cards, animations, captions and more. You can add interactivity with quizzes and other forms of audience participation — perfect for holding your viewers’ attention.
SnagIt is another tool from TechSmith for capturing and editing footage from your screen. SnagIt easily integrates with services from Google and Microsoft to save you time if you plan to export your video to presentations or documents.
C&C team members are big fans of TechSmith products, and when you see a video on the C&C website, it’s likely been edited in Camtasia or SnagIt.
Video Tool #4: Vidyard
There are three main pieces to Vidyard — video hosting, screen recording and sharing, and video personalization. The hosting feature provides customizability for your player plus deep analytics tools so you can better know your audience.
For content marketers, the video personalization feature might be the most exciting. Closing a sale is all about creating an emotional connection with your audience, and what better way to do it than incorporating their name, their company’s name or other personal details? Vidyard makes it easy to put together personalized offers for many prospects at once. Doing so could help you improve conversion and retention, build a more passionate audience and improve the quality of your sales calls.
Video Tool #5: PlaceIt
Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, financial or otherwise, to start your content marketing project from scratch. That’s where PlaceIt comes in. Billed as the internet’s largest repository of visual templates, the platform caters to those designing t-shirts, banners, book covers and, of course, many different kinds of videos.
For video, PlaceIt offers several hundred templates that can provide inspiration, concepts for storyboarding, or the raw materials you need to create professional-looking footage extremely quickly.
Video Tool #6: Wirecast
From Experian to Nissan to Nestle, the list of brands crushing it with live video grows longer by the day. In 2016, live streaming was already a $30 billion industry — and since it’s only going to get bigger, now’s the time to get your foot in the door.
Wirecast helps out by turning your computer into a television station. Maybe you have brand representatives at a panel discussion or lecture, or you want to give viewers a look behind the scenes at your operation. Whatever the case, Wirecast is a great tool for seamlessly recording live events, adding transitions and effects on the fly, and streaming them directly to Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
Video Tool #7: Videoshop
If you want a full-featured video editing tool that gets proven results, you can stop looking. Videoshop was Samsung’s weapon of choice when they rolled out a video-based campaign for a new set of multi-room speakers. After two weeks of running their ads, Samsung noted strong performance along a variety of key metrics — including 2 million views in total, a 50% jump in online brand searches, and 14% more on-site conversions.
So the question is — Why does Videoshop work so well? First, this iOS and Android app make it easy to create different versions of the same video. That makes it great for A/B testing. Furthermore, Videoshop offers a huge variety of filters and transitions along with easy editing tools for adding text, slow or fast motion, animations, voice-overs and more. When you’re done, it takes just a moment to send your finished work to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and other platforms.
Video Tool #8. Magisto
Magisto takes a different approach to video editing. By using smart algorithms, this tool plucks out your best photographs and most interesting video clips and assembles them into an exciting, well-crafted piece of video content. You can add a cherry on top with your choice of musical selection, themes and effects.
As content marketers know, editing together a piece of content that keeps the audience’s interest can be an arduous task. Magisto takes the heavy lifting off your hands and makes it simple to create brand-new interpretations of existing footage and photos. It also supports cross-channel marketing thanks to easy exporting and analytics tools. Samsung, Mitsubishi and Zappos have all used and raved about the app — so give it a spin for yourself.
Video Tool #9: Promolta
You know a lot of legwork goes into video creation. But the act of promoting your video, and actually getting it in front of receptive eyeballs, might take just as much dedication. Promolta is one option for greatly reducing the effort involved.
Promolta is a self-service advertising tool that integrates with YouTube. The process is simple — you provide a link to the YouTube video you want more traction on, and Promolta pushes that video out to a trusted network of more than 10,000 websites, blogs, apps and social channels. One of many success stories is Canadian musician Bill Gottfried, whose video for “Psychopathic Traffic” jumped from a couple of hundred views to close to 90,000 after a helping hand from Promolta.
Video Tool #10: Stacker
Stacker is another promotion tool for video-minded marketers that’s worth consideration. There’s a good chance your campaigns are active on a variety of social media websites, and Stacker is a great way to publish your posts on all of them at once. More than that, it takes the hassle out of timing your posts according to your geographical target areas. You can easily set the desired day, and time of day, and let the tool do the rest.
Even more impressively, Stacker assembles all the comments and messages your content receives and places them in a universal inbox. No more hopping from site to site to respond to fans, customers and prospective converts. It also generates reports on the performance of your videos to help you further fine-tune the best time to reach out to each audience and see which videos get the most attention.
Video Tool #11: Canva
While most content marketers might use Canva primarily for graphic design, C&C’s community manager Christin Kardos is a fan of its animation features, too.
According to Kardos, “Canva can render your static designs as GIFs and videos. And here at C&C, we actually use it that way sometimes, ourselves. You can make things move and talk with very little time investment.”
Video Tool #12: Animoto
Another popular tool on the C&C team, Animoto is a drag-and-drop video marker for creating powerful, professional videos. C&C consulting co-lead Zontee Hou loves the platform. She says, “Animoto makes it so easy to turn still photos and text into a compelling video that’s perfect for the way people consume videos on social media (in short bursts and with the sound off).”
Time to Capture a Worldwide Audience
By now, you’re probably itching to get started on your own video productions to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Each of the tools we mentioned is intuitive and accessible — and ready to help you capture the attention of a worldwide audience. So what are you waiting for?