You and I both know that creating an eye-catching video with Animoto is a piece of cake. But then what? You’ve heard that you’re supposed to be making videos every week, maybe even multiple times a week. But how? With what content? With what time?
Don’t worry. We understand that for many entrepreneurs and small business owners, it’s hard enough to make time for meals, let alone multiple videos.
That’s why we’ve created our Weekly Series templates: to make it easy for you to make consistent, on-trend social media videos each week.
We’ve kicked off the Weekly Series with three templates: #MondayMotivation, #TipTuesday, and #WellnessWednesday. These popular hashtags will not only help improve your content’s reach, they’ll make it easier for you to adjust the video each week.
They’re short and sweet, allowing you to make impactful videos and engage with your followers in just minutes. To save even more time, duplicate your project each week to keep your brand settings. With only a few minor adjustments, you’ll have a brand new video on your hands for your social media channels.
Without further ado: let’s get into the templates!
Okay, you may be thinking, that’s a pretty good pitch. I’m interested in posting more frequently, and in a short amount of time. But what exactly will these templates do for me? I’m glad you asked! Let’s walk through each of these templates and how they can work for you.
Happy Monday! Give your followers some inspiration, or even a giggle to brighten the start of their week.
The joy of this short, two-block template is that it has a lot of range. Feature a motivational quote, or even a funny meme. If you find it enjoyable, the likelihood is your followers will, too!
What’s an exciting feature your customers may not know about your product? Is there a fun hack that’s relevant to your audience?
You’re an expert on your own business, so share that knowledge! #TipTuesday is all about sharing the details: from bonus ways to use a product, to important industry facts, to useful hacks.
This is a great template for presenting extra information in the form of a fun fact or “did you know?” about your business.
Feel free to go a little more in-depth: if you’re a bakery, what’s beneficial about your “secret” ingredient? How does using a realtor help ease the stress of house buying? On a more personal note, what’s something that you have found that has improved your life? Share what you know, and benefit from being seen as an expert by your audience.
What makes these templates great is that they work for all industries! Though we designed our templates around a sunscreen and beauty brand, the underlying structure of the template applies to any business.
To further illustrate this point, we crafted our own examples featuring totally different small businesses: a family photographer and a boutique gym owner. Check them out below!
For our photographer, it made sense to design mainly for the photo-heavy Instagram. That freed us up to make #TipTuesday into a vertical video, great for either IG Stories or IGTV.
Though the #TipTuesday example here is set up as a list, the structure—sharing a tip from your own business expertise or industry knowledge—remains the same!
For our gym owner examples, we wanted to go bright and bold to better fit industry standards and to catch more eyes on Facebook and Instagram. We chose a thicker sans-serif font and made it a striking yellow to make it more in line with fitness trends. Changing the style to Jump Cut gave the video a punchier feel: perfect for images of people working out!
Are these example videos helpful? Would you like to see our templates feature more example videos? Let us know by filling out this quick survey!
Equipment: iPhone 11 Pro Mini phone tripod (similar ones here)
Location: Our local park
Time: 1 ½ hours to create photo and video assets for all three templates plus extras (we also grabbed some iced coffees...it was a very hot day!)
My colleague Seoul and I knew that we wanted these videos to be short and sweet with no audio, which meant that there was going to be text on each block. We wanted to create images that would serve as a clean backdrop to the text, but also provide a sense of our sunscreen “brand”.
We decided to shoot outdoors at our local park, which happens to sit on the water. Using just an iPhone and a mini phone tripod to stabilize our video shots, we captured sunlight filtering through trees, waves rippling through the water, and ourselves rubbing sunscreen into our hands and faces (yes, that is my modeling debut in our #WellnessWednesday template!)
Though we took our time to make sure we got all of the photos and videos we needed, assets like these are easy to shoot, and easy to reuse in multiple videos. Determine the feel of your brand: is it bright and colorful? Cozy and warm? Outdoorsy and adventurous? This will help you think of what kinds of images—of your product, or of related textural backgrounds—will work best for your videos.
And like us, you can do it with simply your smartphone, a stabilizing force (a tripod, a stack of books, whatever works) and your caffeinated beverage of choice!
My goal is to help you create videos that attract attention, as quickly and easily as possible. With the new weekly series templates, I’m hoping that feels easier than ever. Get started with one of our three new templates below, then just copy, tweak, and repeat in the weeks that follow.
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