08 Mar 5 ways to get more from the video you already have

You’ve shot a video. Perhaps it shows how to use your product. Or it describes the unique aspects of the service you market. Maybe it features your company management discussing your product portfolio, corporate commitment, or milestones in your brand’s legacy. Or the video may focus on a key opinion leader highlighting the benefits of your brand. Or customers providing testimonials about your advantages. Whatever the content, the questions now are: What more can you do with it? How can you get more value from it? Below are five ways.

Before thinking about other ways and places to use your video, first think about the goals you want to achieve. A video can serve many purposes. It can raise awareness. It can raise credibility. It can educate. It can sell. It can help engage visitors to a website, readers of a blog, and recipients of social media posts. It can be a tool in search engine optimization initiatives. (In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research found that web pages with videos are 50 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking!)

Identify your goals and your target audience. Those key elements drive decisions about how to repurpose the content of your video and where to use it. For example…

1. Focus on each use of your brand.

Using your existing footage, create shorter videos, each focusing on one specific use of your product or service. If your brand is a medication with multiple indications, create one video per indication. If it is a device with multiple uses, create one short video per use. If needed, to your existing footage, add new “slides” of text and graphics. Or add stock footage—for example, showing the function of the body part being treated. Change the voiceover. (Or, if the video had none before, add voiceover.)
2. Focus on each audience.

Edit your footage to create shorter videos for different target audiences. Create a version for patients. A slightly different version for caregivers. One or more for healthcare professionals—do physicians and nurses (or allied professionals) use your product differently? Would it be helpful to have a version specifically for payers? Investors? Partners? Distributors? Your sales force? Your other staff? New hires? The media?
3. Tell a different story.

Use the product footage to tell a story about your corporate mission. Take the milestones footage and use it to tell a new story about your vision for the future. Or about your focus on R&D. Use the customer testimonials to tell a story about the added value your product and program provide. The images on your video can support many narratives.

4. Focus on issues.

Perhaps you can tie your brand to a timely issue—your product can be especially useful during flu season, for example. Or maybe it would be helpful to provide a “reimbursement review” that teaches (or reminds) patients and providers how to obtain reimbursement for use of your product, what’s covered and not, the billing procedure and codes—videos can even be tailored to each health plan, if appropriate. Or perhaps the issue is simpler: the product is on sale.

5. Choose your channels.

Where do you place all these videos? Your corporate website, product website, blog, social media sites, video-sharing sites (such as YouTube and Vimeo)…even your own site dedicated exclusively to your videos. All of these outlets enable you to raise your brand’s profile and strengthen your search engine optimization. Your videos also may have applications at conferences and on sales calls. Plus, video helps enhance the distribution and pickup of your press releases. The content, target audience, and length of your videos help determine their best destination. For example, brand awareness videos may be longer, and best suited to the video-sharing sites. Shorter video “snippets,” often product- or service-specific, can be most effective at earning high rankings on search engines and driving users to relevant landing pages within a site.

There’s much more you can do with your video—more ways to reshape it, more ways to use it and re-use it, more ways to distribute it. A good healthcare marketing partner can cost-effectively help you assess the video footage you have, recommend new ways to use it, implement those recommendations…and generate more return on your investment in video.