Making marketing videos the easy way

I’ve spent decades making videos & always loved it, but I simply didn’t have the time or the skills to do it on a more regular basis until I discovered InVideo.

Back in secondary school, my favourite class was Media Studies. In the first year or two, we used cameras with video tape in them, and learnt how to do linear tape-to-tape edits with a hardware video mixer. By the third and fourth year, we had moved on to digitising footage and editing it with Adobe Premiere Pro and AfterEffects (which I continue to use to this date — I’ve never felt at home with Final Cut Pro).

Since university, I have spent over a decade in marketing agencies and in-house marketing roles, helping produce many videos from every angle — even stepping in front of the camera multiple times to host interviews.

With all this experience, I still find video editing a bit of a chore at times for a couple of reasons as per the headings below:

I’m good, but not THAT good

I love video production, but if you’re not doing it full time, it’s very hard to get particularly good at it. For me, the time restrictions of being a fully rounded marketer have meant that I only ever learned the skills I needed to get the job done, and that I’m considerably slower than some at video production when it comes to animating on-screen graphics — and I usually need to buy expensive plugins or templates to do something the way I want it, otherwise I’m just left “headdesking”.

I don’t have time

Video production is really time-consuming, particularly with lots of animations, and a slower computer, I might literally be waiting an hour to render a preview or to export my file, during which time my computer becomes too slow to do anything else productive. Beyond those technical challenges, I’ve usually found myself in small teams where I am responsible for multi-tasking so many different marketing elements, of which videos are only part, so I simply can’t dedicate days of my life to video production.

Video is important, but…

As a digital marketer that’s run dozens of cross-media online campaigns, we’ve regularly found video to be one of the best ways to engage audiences, and virtually every campaign has a video component to it.

Video is important, but it often takes up too much time and subsequently budget from other parts of the marketing campaign (like the media spend for getting eyeballs to the video). Most brands I’ve found don’t want to spend so much time and money on the creation of their videos — they want to make new videos every week, but simply can’t afford to do so, and when they do do so, they don’t make the most of them because the budget was spent on production.

Scaling up output, while scaling down budget

I hate wasting time and money. So in my marketing roles, I’ve regularly invested in new online tools which make video production quicker, easier and cheaper, so that not only I could make videos, but I could train visually inclined junior staff to do the same.

Unfortunately, until recently, it’s still been a slog, and I’ve spent days of my time having to adjust every element of the videos produced by junior staff in other web-based video editing platforms. Sometimes you just need a few more restrictions on what can be done, so that they can’t go too far astray from your original design.

In all this time, I’ve not been able to fulfil my dreams of video production at scale on a budget I can afford, until today that is!

After 2 decades, I’ve found the video editor for me!

I recently came across InVideo, and I have to say, it’s pretty amazing and well suited to video production for social media. You can easily make those feel good viral story videos, with on-screen text and a mixture of photos and video clips, that are all the rage these days. It’s got some great templates to start with, and they’re quite customisable to your brand’s colours and style.

What’s unique about InVideo is how you actually make videos: You start off with a script. Each line of your script automagically becomes a new animated frame in your video, which can be customised to your needs, with different videos, fonts, colours etc. All of which means, if you have spent some time to really choose and define the template and style you want, prepared your text, images, video clips and music, you could literally throw those into a video and be done in about 10-20 minutes, which is pretty awesome!

There’s promise of more cool features coming, but even today it gives me everything I need to get my team producing videos at scale in minutes.

I was actually hesitant about telling too many people about InVideo, because I wanted it to be my secret weapon that makes everybody go “Whoa! How does he produce so many videos so quickly!”, but if you have a need to regularly create videos for your business, I strongly recommend you check out InVideo and become your company’s video rockstar!

For transparency, I wrote this blog post because of incentives from InVideo to upgrade my InVideo account, but I had already recommended it to 2 friends before writing this.