1. Video planning ?

For the first stage of your video marketing campaign, you’ll need a tool to help you plan your video.

At Narce, we use Milanote. With the free plan, you can create 100 notes and to-do lists, upload 10 files, save 10 images or links from the internet and share an unlimited number of boards with the rest of your team for them to view and edit in real time. There are also a number of other paid plans. It’s the perfect place to organise your ideas and projects! 

Another recommendation is Celtx, a piece of media pre-production software where you can write scripts for your videos, build storyboards, create index cards to read off from, manage your budget and much more. There is a Free (Basic) Plan, with which you can access the script editor, collaborate with people on projects and have limited use of certain tools such as the index cards and budget.

2. Video editing ✂️

Once you’ve recorded your video, the next step is to edit it. Everyone’s heard of the big boy editors (e.g. Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro) and while we can’t deny that they’re great, they can be very pricy. 

Instead, Adobe Premiere Rush is a great, professional piece of software to start out with. The Starter version is free to download on both mobile and desktop, and it gives you access to all of the features and on there. It also allows you to export 3 videos and gives you 2GB of storage. If you want anything more than this, you’ll have to pay, but even so, the paid version is a very reasonable price.

Another great tool that we recommend is Animoto. It’s a great website to make more simple videos on, and the drag and drop function makes it incredibly easy to use. You can use their extensive selection of templates or upload your own – and the best part? You can create unlimited videos using their standard features for FREE!

3. Video asset tools ?

Some videographers choose to get their stock footage and music from video asset tools instead of the default ones that their chosen video editors provide. 

If you are one of these people, a great video asset tool for royalty free stock footage is Art Grid. ? With the free trial, you can explore ArtGrid’s selection of footage, download preview clips and get the latest news and updates. Art Grid also has another branch of its website called Art List, where you can find royalty free music and special effects. ? We also use this tool at Narce; with the free trial, you can download watermarked song previews, organise your personal music and SFX page and get the latest news and updates. 

Envato is another amazing video asset tool that we recommend. It provides you with everything Art Grid and Art List do and more, including templates, graphics, fonts and add-ons. There is a free option available, and with this you get 12 free files every month, full access to item detail pages and the ability to browse the full library and save assets into your own collections.

4. Video scheduling ⏰

After your video has been filmed and edited, it’s ready to go out. However, if you’re planning on distributing it on several platforms (e.g. your social media accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), it may be beneficial for you to use a scheduling tool to help you stay organised.

The scheduling tool that we use at Narce is Hootsuite. ? With the free plan, you can manage 2 social accounts (we’ve chosen Instagram and LinkedIn), schedule up to 5 posts at a time and see an overview of all of your recent posts. 

Later is another very popular social media scheduling tool. It has a lot of similar features to Hootsuite, including a handy calendar view of your week. In comparison to Hootsuite, the free version of Later allows you to manage 1 social account, schedule 30 posts per month and it also lets you schedule posts for TikTok (which Hootsuite does not). 

5. Video distribution & analytics ?

When choosing where to distribute your video once it’s ready for the world to see (aside from the standard social media platforms), YouTube is the obvious choice. It’s the most popular video hosting website in the world – it had over 2 billion users in 2020 and it has the most extensive catalogue of online videos. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s free to make an account and upload videos. It also has its own audio library with over 35,000 royalty free songs and an analytics feature, where you can see the reach, engagement and audience of your videos to help you track and improve your ROI.

After YouTube, Vimeo is the most popular video distribution and hosting platform. With the free Basic membership, you get 500MB per week of upload space, up to 5GB of total account storage, basic analytics for your videos, the ability to upload up to 10 videos per day and much more. In fact, there are many pros that Vimeo has over YouTube; Vimeo has higher video quality than YouTube, it’s ad-free and its privacy settings are more advanced. 

At Narce, we choose to use YouTube over Vimeo, but both platforms have their respective pros and cons.

There you have it – 11 online tools that all have free trials or memberships to help you with every step of your video marketing journey. ??

Not sure how to get ahead of the curve with video marketing? Drop us a message and we can help you out!

We’ve worked with some big clients over the past few years, including Santander, Aston Villa and TEDx, with glowing client testimonials from them all.