A lot of companies treat their photo and video content like some sculpture you’d find in The Louvre—created once with a lot of effort, then forgotten to gather dust.
We helped a company a few years ago with a three-minute sales video. We interviewed team members, the client and the company’s president. We were on-site for two days and captured a lot of great b-roll and drone video of their project sites.
At the end of the project, we delivered the raw video and the final product to the company and gave their social media person a tip: they could take the raw interviews and produce 3–5 short-form social media reels to boost their social media efforts.
From what I’ve seen, the video was posted on their YouTube page and posted once on their social media channels. It doesn’t look like it’s on their website, and I haven’t seen evidence of them repurposing any of the interviews for short-form reels, which happens quite frequently.
This one-and-done approach to content is incredibly time-intensive and costly, leaving a lot of value on the table.
The real secret to getting the most out of your marketing budget is planning how the photo and video assets you capture with each project can be used and repurposed for future content.
When organizations stop producing content as one-off projects and prioritize recurring content days throughout the year, they can begin building a media library containing high-quality photo and video assets that meet immediate marketing needs while providing a foundation for future needs.
When thinking of the possibilities from the content we captured, this company could have:
- Put the sales video on the home page of their website
- Created 3–5 evergreen social media reels from the interviews
- Cut a simple 60–90 second testimonial on the careers page.
- Cut another 90-second testimonial from the President to go on the About page
- Update the website’s hero background from the b-roll and drone video
Stop thinking of marketing as one-and-done projects. Create a system for repurposing existing content. Build a media library to pull from.
