When my friend Rebekah Radice asked me to try a new service for creating videos that was just going up on Product Hunt, I didn’t hesitate to take a look!
Normally when I’m approached to test a new tool – which happens twice a day on average – I obviously have to take a pass on most. I simply don’t have the time to review everything that’s out there, and anything I do test must have a clear benefit to me and/or my audience.
Promo by Slide.ly is such a tool.
Now, Rebekah asked me to check this out as a favor… she thought I should share a video but I prefer to write a detailed and compelling blog post as that’s my own particular… idiom. 😉
Marketing Video Basics With Promo
As a communication medium, there’s no doubt video is taking over. But, just as with images and written content, there are different kinds and uses of video.
Live video interviews, or video tutorials on YouTube, would be considered “long form content” that might be ten or more minutes in length (equivalent to about a 1250 word blog post).
That’s not what Promo is for.
Rather, you’ll want to consider using Promo when you need to create more short form style content, particularly for social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube where video performs exceedingly well.
You see, the videos that you’ll create with Promo are 15 seconds long by default, which means they’re just long enough to convey a single, powerful message, idea or announcement. But short enough to hold someone’s attention on today’s fleeting networks.
The genius behind Promo is that it deftly combines gorgeous stock video content with creative music tracks and perfect font pairings, resulting in easy, effective videos!
Let’s walk through what that looks like.
Creating Your First Video With Promo
First of all, you can create a free account and play around with putting a video together – it’s only when you want to download a finished video that there’s a cost. Promo’s pricing structure is based on how many videos you think you’ll need to create per month, though credits do rollover. Any video that you create and download is yours to do with as you please.
Here’s how to get started.
1) Create a free account here: thesmh.co/TryPromo (If you indicate to Promo a category and subcategory for the kinds of videos you’ll be creating, you’ll receive relevant suggestions.)
2) Think about what you might create a short video about – it could be your product, a new blog post, an upcoming event… whatever you want to talk about… and click on Start Here.
3) Check out the curated suggestions or enter a keyword to search for video ideas.
4) You can mouseover a thumbnail to get a feel for the footage, or click preview to see it full size.
5) Once you find some video footage that you like, click on Use to get to the Customize screen to make it your own.
6) Promo provides three frames, each with their own text areas that you can change the words, font, size, colors and position.
7) Choose some background music by clicking on Choose Music and selecting from available tracks. You can filter by category and click play to give it a listen.
8) Insert your logo or other imagery into the final frame for branding.
When you’re happy with your selections you can click on Preview to see it all come together!
Videos you create are saved in your Drafts folder until you choose to proceed with publishing and downloading them. Here’s one that I threw together to promote my Facebook Survival Kit, uploaded to my Facebook Page:
This is your chance to be the Marketing Hero at the office. Grab your free Facebook Survival Kit here => http://thesmh.co/FBSurvivalKit
Posted by The Social Media Hat on Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Again, this is where short form video can really shine. The Facebook algorithm loves video content, yet if you’re anything like me, creating video isn’t exactly easy. But with Promo, it was quick and painless to get my message across. And in fact, once the post started to accrue some organic reach, it became a perfect candidate for a Facebook Ad to reach an even larger audience.
With the link above which Rebekah so kindly provided, you can get 20% off for a limited time, so do check it out!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Other than an upgraded account for testing purposes, I was not compensated for this review, and receive no commission for signups.
