How To Make Written and Video Content Work Together (Tips and Tools)

There are often debates around whether written content is more impactful or if video content brings you better ROI. There have been surveys and studies too.

For instance, more than 50% of B2B marketers use blogs, newsletters, and websites as their primary owned media platforms for content distribution, which is mostly written content. The same CMI study also shows that written content like research reports, e-books, whitepapers, and short articles or posts were among the top content assets that produced the best results in the past year.

On the other hand, video content is growing in popularity with 54% of consumers saying that they want to see more video content from brands. 96% of marketers also say that video marketing brings good ROI.

So the case for both written content and video content is strong. But as a content marketer how do you manage creating, distributing, and monitoring two such diverse content formats? That’s exactly what we’re discussing in this post.

Types of written content you can turn into video content

When it comes to written content, the list is inexhaustive. From short one-liners to multiple pages of an e-book, anything can be great marketing content if written well. But if you have a video content strategy running simultaneously, here are some content formats you should focus on.

📝 How-to articles

How-to articles are a great way to grab a reader’s attention, address their challenges and offer solutions. This type of written content usually matches the audience’s search intent too, since your title itself is the query that searchers are seeking the answer to.

How-to articles can also be a great base for your YouTube video content and social media marketing.

📝 Listicles

Listicles are another very useful format of written content that not only allows you to provide all the information concisely but also helps with SEO. With listicles, it’s much easier to pack your target keywords into your content as these are usually covered by your list items themselves. It can also be a great way to appear in the featured snippets on search engines like Google. But the best part is that listicles can easily be turned into both short videos like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts as well as long videos.

📝 Product reviews

Product reviews are a good way to draw your audience’s attention. Product reviews provide an opportunity to market your products and present them in the best light. Most importantly, your written product reviews can very easily be turned into audience engagement videos as people often turn to YouTube for their research before purchasing.

📝 Tutorials

Tutorials can be a good way to educate your audience on how to use your product for various use cases. Or to show them how to solve a problem and include your product in that solution. This is what is known as product-led content marketing and it can do wonders for your brand. This is, in fact, a tactic that many popular SaaS brands and startups are adopting to market their products. Tutorials can be great both as written instructions and videos.

📝 Guides

Guides serve a similar purpose as tutorials but you can be a lot more elaborate with a guide. It allows you to share detailed instructions on how to solve a certain problem or how to use a particular product and the same can be demonstrated in a video very easily. Guides can also be great for SEO as long-form content is often considered more authoritative by search engines.

📝 Case studies

Case studies are another long format that can be great for your content strategy. Case studies usually talk about how a user achieved noteworthy outcomes using your product/service. These are loaded with facts and figures to show your prospects how your product/service can help. If written well, they can be informative, engaging, and valuable to readers too. And these can be turned into videos as well.

📝 UGC / Testimonials

One great way to get content for your marketing blog, website, or social is to gather user-generated content (UGC). This is content that your users create for you. It could be a review of your product, a quick tutorial or the user’s story of how they’ve been using the product, a testimonial, or anything that your audience could benefit from. UGC in both written and video content can actually help build a community around your brand.

Partnering with influencers is also a great way to connect to a very targeted, relevant audience. You could either collaborate on a guest post on an influencer’s blog or ask them to mention your brand in their post or a video.

Content marketing tools you will need

When your content marketing strategy includes two content types that are so different from each other, managing content production can become challenging. The content writing process has unique requirements while video creation for business has its own challenges. Publishing and posting content regularly is another pain too.

With the right tools at your disposal, however, your entire content strategy can be executed a lot more smoothly. Here are a few content creation tools that we think might come in handy.

1. Narrato for content planning and creation

For your written content, a platform like Narrato can come in very handy. Narrato is a content workflow platform that helps you manage your content process from start to finish. The platform has powerful content creation tools to help you create high-quality written content, including SEO content briefs, an AI content assistant, topic generator, content calendar, custom templates, and style guides. Templates allow you to structure your content and add dedicated fields for videos and images within the text. You can actually create separate templates for all of the above content formats we’ve listed. Custom style guides in your Narrato library help you stay on-brand with your content, no matter who is creating it.

Team collaboration on Narrato is also very convenient, with custom user roles and access. Users can leave comments and messages on content tasks, making it easier to share feedback and collaborate on content. You can also publish content directly to your blog with the publishing support that the platform offers. Narrato has a content marketplace too with thousands of skilled freelance writers, if you want to ease the load on your content team further.

2. Powtoon for your video content strategy

Powtoon is a video content production platform that helps you create engaging animated videos and presentations without any expertise in design required. The platform helps you create videos and animations for various use cases, starting from HR and recruiting to marketing and lead generation. Powtoon offers hundreds of templates to help you create videos faster and also shares a customer gallery for inspiration.

With the intuitive editor, you can create animated videos with custom characters for brand recall, social media videos, marketing videos, explainer videos, and a lot more. You can also create your own screen recordings for product demos or to accompany your product-led blog posts.

3. SocialBee for social media scheduling

Just creating written content or video content is not enough. You also have to be regular in posting the content on the right channels. A social media scheduling tool like SocialBee can be quite handy here. SocialBee lets you manage all your social media accounts from one place. You can organize all your social media posts on the content calendar and assign a posting schedule for each. You can also customize your posts for each social channel and preview your posts to see how they will appear on different channels.

There are a host of other features that you can find a good use for as well.

4. YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics for performance monitoring

If you are putting in the effort to create and publish content, you would also want to know how your content is performing. For this, you actually have two very useful free tools that you can rely on. For your written content, Google Analytics gives you more or less all the data you need regarding traffic and content performance. Monitoring your Google Analytics data will tell you whether your content strategy is working or needs to be revisited.

Similarly, for your video content on YouTube, you can use YouTube Analytics which shows you all the relevant insights. This includes your number of views, average watch time, revenue earned if any, and so on. All of this information can help your video marketing strategy tremendously.

How to use your written content to create video content

Now, looking at the long list of content types that we have above, it may be a little intimidating to think of creating both written and video content.

But the truth is you only need to strategize once and the rest becomes easy. Most of the time you’ll find yourself simply repurposing your written content into content for your YouTube channel or social media.

Here’s how you can go about it.

1. Repurpose your blog content into YouTube content

The easiest way to get content for YouTube channels that you run is probably by repurposing your blog content. Users on YouTube are usually looking for explainer videos, tutorials, or educational content. Your how-to articles, guides, and tutorials can serve as a solid base for such unique content for YouTube.

Since your video’s length is not an issue on a platform like YouTube, video creators can let their creativity loose to cover everything that’s there on the blog post to deliver maximum impact.

Here’s an example of how HubSpot repurposes its blog content into YouTube content. This video is just a reproduction of one of their blog posts titled The Best Free Email Marketing Software: An Honest Roundup.

Creating video content from your blog articles will be even easier if you have pre-made templates for your videos, like the ones you will find on Powtoon and similar platforms.

Using a template will save you a lot of time in video editing and cut down the effort needed.

2. Share snippets as short video content on social media

Social media video production is another important but painstaking task in video creation for businesses. But with some good written content at your disposal, social media video content can be easily created too. Now, with social media, you usually have a limit on the length of videos you can post. For instance, an Instagram reel should not be longer than 90 seconds. Or TikTok videos are no longer than 1 minute. This is also because social media users don’t have the patience to watch an hour-long video and they have other platforms for that.

So if you really want to hook your audience on social media with engagement videos, you need to cut them short. The best way to do this is by taking a small section of your blog post/ article and turning it into short video content that is informative and engaging at the same time. Or you could take 5 or 8 items from a listicle and turn it into a carousel format video. Content that is slightly longer can be posted as IGTV videos on Instagram too.

Here’s an example of a carousel video from Narrato’s LinkedIn feed, which was repurposed from a small section of one of their blog posts.

3. Create infographic videos from your written content

While you can have long, fleshed-out explainer videos for YouTube, it is always a good idea to deliver your video content in a more impactful format. This is where infographic videos can help. Infographic videos will allow you to talk about everything that’s there in the written content from your blog or e-book and yet present it in a way that is easy to consume for your audience.

This is also a good way to add some color and fun to video creation for business. Animated videos are a lot more eye-catching and uplifting than videos with lots of text or stock images. They can convey all the crucial information in a visual format through charts and graphs, making the job a lot easier for YouTube content creators.

Popular YouTube channel CrashCourse can be a great example of what infographic videos should look like.

You can also use clips from your infographic videos in your social media campaigns.

4. Educational videos launched as a series

Some of the best content for YouTube that you can create from written content is educational videos. Many brands are already using this tactic to drive traffic to their YouTube channels and acquire new customers. If you have a content cluster on your blog, it becomes even easier to create an educational video series out of it. A content cluster is when you have a large number of articles or blog posts revolving around a central theme.

All of these written content pieces can be converted into individual educational videos and together they can be compiled into a very valuable series for your audience.

Here’s an example of an educational video series on ClickUp’s YouTube channel.

5. Create UGC videos from your user testimonials and reviews

Another great approach to video content marketing on YouTube or social media is user-generated content. Almost every business gathers user reviews and testimonials to build social proof for their brand. These same reviews can be used in your video content too. You could use these written reviews, case studies or customer testimonials by turning them into a slide deck and then into a video.

You could also ask your users to record their testimonials as videos and share them with you. Brand videos like these can help build trust with your audience as it is easier for them to relate to an actual user.

UGC videos need not always be reviews and testimonials though. You can also have UGC videos showing how to use a product or discussing common user pain points, which can be very valuable to your audience.

Here’s an example of UGC from Notion’s YouTube channel. This content holds good both for UGC videos and written case studies.

6. Use embedded videos in your blog posts

Your YouTube channel or social media are not the only platforms where you can post video content. If you are creating videos from your written content, you should also make it a point to embed them in your blog posts and articles. For instance, an embedded video of a product review or an infographic video within your blog post can be a great way to ensure that the audience stays on your content. Even if they don’t have the time to read the entire article, they can quickly take a peak at it through the video.

Since you are putting so much effort into content production, it is always advisable to use that content on all possible channels for maximum reach.

Here’s an example from the TechSmith blog on the very same topic.

Summing up

Creating both written content and video content for your business does not always have to be effort intensive. More often than not, you will find that the written content you create easily fits in with your video content marketing strategy. All you need is the right tools and a solid content plan to save time and effort. We hope these tips and content marketing tools we’ve shared with you will help you achieve amazing outcomes from your content marketing strategy.