Video has become a dominant force in online content. As businesses continue to look for new and engaging ways to connect with prospective customers, video is an essential channel that cannot be overlooked.
Fortunately, creating videos has become easier than ever, with online tools and desktop apps now available to help professionals and even novices create beautiful, compelling videos.
My team and I use a range of tools for our client projects, ranging from the streamlined, text-focused ContentSamurai to the super-sophisticated (and pretty complex) Camtasia.
More recently, we've become huge fans of a tool called InVideo, which has become our “go to” solution for the majority of videos we've produced of late. Perhaps one reason we keep returning to InVideo is its ability to help us create such a wide range of video types.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we dive into InVideo, let's take a moment to talk about the importance of video as a whole, when it comes to content and promotional media.
Why should you care about video for your business?
It's surprising to most of us that YouTube has only been around since 2005, but the fact is that online video is still very young. It was only in 2016 that Facebook started competing with YouTube for video-viewing dominance. But these days, driven by these and other online platforms, video has become one of the most dominant mediums for consumers to consume content.
Video has also been shown to be responsible for higher conversion rates when it comes to sales. For example, according to a report published by Forrester, including video in an email leads to a whopping 200-300% increase in click-through rate. And Unbounce has reported that you can increase your conversion rate by up to 80% by including video on a landing page.
Video also works effectively across different formats, from social media to ads to training and presentations. The fact is that people love watching videos online – so much so that it's been estimated that more than a third of all our online activity is spent watching videos.
As you can see, video should be an essential part of a business' marketing strategy. Not only does it increase conversions, but it also improves familiarity, likability, and overall engagement among prospects and customers.
InVideo (our little secret… revealed)
As I mentioned above, my team and I have become enamored with InVideo, and have used it to produce several client videos, not to mention our own content.
Of course, we like being hired to produce material for our clients, but with InVideo, those with creative minds should have no problem developing their own professional looking video content.
How InVideo Works
InVideo, as mentioned above, enables you to create a wide range of video types. When you first login to your account, you'll be asked what king of video you'd like to create.
There are three options:
1) Start with a script – this could be a blog post or article or some other text that you want to turn into a video
2) Use one of InVideo's growing list of templates to quickly and easily swap out text and images, and get your video produced in no time at all.
3) Start from scratch
If you decide to start with a script, you are presented with a ton of “themes” which will aid in instantly turning your text into visually stimulating video content.
Most of the themes have pre-built animations and several templates for different “scenes” which help make the video flow more interesting than seeing the same animated slide over and over.
While it may, at first, seem daunting to pick a theme, InVideo has made it easy… simply hover over the various theme options (I think there are currently more than thirty to choose from) and you can watch how the text unfolds in a series of animations.
If you are more interested in leveraging InVideo's large selection of pre-built templates, you can hit the “quick videos” tab and scroll through dozens of ready-made video templates. These templates range from promotional videos to videos highlighting a single product to brand videos to use on social media and lots more.
As best I can tell, the InVideo team continues to add new templates that are seasonal, enabling you to churn out videos for the summer, holidays, or even Black Friday.
You'll also find that video templates come in an assortment of shapes and sizes conforming to the different platforms where your videos might appear.
Speaking of various dimensions, InVideo also allows you to create a video from scratch… and when you do, the first thing you need to select is the ratio of the video. Here are the current options (though I suspect that as new video dimensions become popular, the InVideo team will be adding those as well).
Building a Video Using InVideo
A few weeks ago, I used InVideo to produce a listicle video to promote an e-commerce platform called GrooveKart, for which I'm an affiliate. I used the “storytelling” option to upload my own script. The entire process took me less than 30 minutes from start to finish.
I had created a list of 9 reasons to build an e-commerce store using GrooveKart, which meant that my video would have a total of eleven “scenes” – one title scene, nine scenes covering each of the list items, and a final scene with my call-to-action when I would tell viewers where they could buy GrooveKart.
Here's a look at several of the individual scenes I built out for the video:
While InVideo does an amazing job providing stock images and videos to include in your video production, I chose to upload my own images for this particular project. In this case, I took screenshots of the GrooveKart product and sales page and used those in my final video as background images.
InVideo also gave me the ability to select from a huge collection of audio tracks to use as an underscore to my video.
It's also possible to record voiceover tracks or use their text-to-speech capabilities to enhance the audio further, but in this case I chose to stick with just music.
Within each scene of the video, I had the ability to edit content, ad images, animations, highlight sections of text, include overlays, add stickers, and so much more.
The range of options at this level of editing might seem a bit overwhelming to the novice video-maker, so if it feels like too much, my advice is to simply stick with the default settings. You can always adjust those few bits that you're not happy with “off the rack.”
The entire listicle video was set-up and published in lightning speed, and I was able to get on with my day without looking back.
As someone who simply cannot leave well enough alone, I have to admit that I did go back a tweak a few sections before finally uploading the video to YouTube.
Here's the completed video:
Overall, I'm thrilled with InVideo, and have tremendous admiration for the hard-working team behind it.
So if you're looking for a tool to produce professional looking, powerful videos… without having to hire a team like mine, InVideo is at the top of my list for tools you should consider.