This video marketing tip shows you how to improve Zoom recordings by editing and enhancing them.
While video conferencing has been around for a long time, the dramatic shift to remote work brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has made virtual meetings and presentations staples of business today.
And with all the benefits of meeting and presenting virtually, this trend isn’t likely to subside any time soon.
Record your session
Zoom (and GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Webex and a host of others) allows users to easily record a session. This creates video content that can be shared with attendees, registrants, colleagues, customers and prospects.
That’s great, but it can also result in some incredibly long, clunky and boring videos! You can do better!
Seven ways to improve Zoom recordings
Let’s assume your recording contains some real nuggets of insight and information you’d like to share, all buried in a protracted video full of long pauses, pre-meeting inaction and other distractions.
I’m going to describe seven ways to improve your Zoom recordings by using some judicious editing and powerful video enhancements. You’ll benefit from more views, clearer messaging, better engagement, additional video content and more.
If you’re handy with video editing and marketing applications, you can do these tasks yourself. If you’d rather spare yourself the effort, you can outsource these tasks from suppliers such as Entente’s Easy Business Video service and others.
In the tips that follow, I’ll use an example of a real-life video we edited for SD8, one of our clients: a long Zoom recording with a welcome message, a moderator and seven primary presenters.
Let’s dive in!
1. Trim the fat first
You’re very likely to have extra footage at the beginning, middle and end of your recording. This can come from:
- starting the recording early,
- inefficient handoffs between presenters,
- technical glitches during the meeting,
- a long discussion at the end of the meeting,
- continuing to record after the meeting has ended.
Viewers will be turned off by this (literally), so the first thing to do is trim that footage out. Try to include just the relevant information.
In our example, the client’s raw recording was 1-hour and 32-minutes long! So we cut:
- footage before the start and after the end of the meeting,
- housekeeping comments by the moderator,
- each presenter’s requests for “next slide,”
- delays before the next slide was displayed,
- a long Q&A session.
The result was a video 38 minutes long — much better! (The Q&A portion was saved for a separate video.)
First edit pass – 38:32
Next, we reduced that to 35 minutes by streamlining the intro footage. This helps viewers get into the “meat” of the presentation sooner. It also allowed us to display a shared title slide in the video’s first frame.
Shorter intro – 35:21
2. Create a title scene (thumbnail)
A thumbnail is the image that shows before you play a video, and is often quite small. This image typically defaults to the first frame of your video, or one of the other scenes in your recording, neither of which might be the best representation of your content.
Even if you have a title slide at the beginning of your Zoom recording, as we did after our second edit, consider creating a custom thumbnail instead. A well-designed thumbnail can increase the number of plays of your video, among other benefits.
Here’s what we created for our project. See the difference?
An attractive thumbnail increases plays
3. Add Chapters
If you have multiple topics, or multiple presenters, or both… make it easier for viewers to jump to the content they’re most interested in.
That’s what chapters do, as in our client’s example:
Chapters: Fast access to content of interest
4. Create outtakes
There’s no rule that says you have to present an entire meeting in one mouthful!
In addition to creating a full-length version, consider breaking out bite-size sections about specific topics. These can be used as trailers, focused tutorials, quick quotes, social media shares and more. That way, a single good Zoom recording yields a whole library of related video content.
In our sample project, we created a 5-minute stand-alone video for each presenter’s section:
Outtakes multiply your video content
5. Add annotations
Some well-placed text annotations can help you identify speakers, introduce new topics, emphasize key points and more.
Because our Zoom recording had mostly small images of the presenters, and even smaller display of their names, we added annotations near their video picture. Here’s what that looked like:
Use annotations to highlight speakers, topics and concepts
It’s also possible to turn annotations into clickable links. That way you can send viewers to another video, a web page or related content. Engagement upgrade!
6. Activate call-to-action links
A call-to-action is a more prominent clickable option than an annotation. Use CTAs to enable the most important action you want your viewers to take.
Linked CTAs can be an image or text. Here’s an image example at the end of our client’s video, linked to their Facebook page:
Use CTAs to increase engagement and response
7. Order transcripts
Finally, once your edited video, outtakes and versions are done, get transcripts of the narration for each. For best accuracy, outsource this from a human-based service. (Speech-to-text apps can create transcripts, too, but with reduced accuracy.)
A transcript has many uses:
- Make it available to hearing-impaired viewers.
- Add material from the transcript to your video’s description field. This helps potential viewers understand what the video’s about. It can also improve your Video SEO.
- Highlight quotes from the transcript on your website, social media and other channels.
- Create written collateral such as e-books, flyers, infographics, blog posts and more.
Zoom ahead of the pack
You invest a lot of time, talent and money in your virtual meetings and presentations. Get the value and the ROI you deserve by using these tactics to improve Zoom recordings.
Even a little bit of polish will put your videos ahead of the average Zoomer. And trust me, your viewers will thank you!
View our client’s enhanced Zoom recording
——–
What’s been your experience when watching Zoom recordings?
Have you tried any of these techniques on your own recordings? What was the result?
Are there other tactics you’ve found to improve Zoom videos?