I love video production, it’s what I do after all, but I also love helping business owners. That’s why I’ve written this blog, to give an honest opinion on video production vs blogging.

These days everyone is raving about how you should be doing video marketing to promote your business. I agree, video content is powerful stuff but video marketing isn’t the be all and end all.

Here’s why we think you writing a blog is better than video production

Writing a Blog vs Video Production

Cost

Any content you produce has a cost implication, even if you do it yourself. There’s the cost of your time and the equipment you use plus the cost of any supplier you may use if you outsource it.

You can record video with your mobile to keep cost down but then you’ll probably want to edit it and you may need a higher spec computer and pay for editing software. Yes, there are free programs but they don’t always give you full editorial control of the video.

Then there’s your time to script, film and edit the content and create different ratio videos (square, landscape, portrait) for different platforms.

Writing a blog is a lot quicker and cheaper than video production. You need less equipment (just a phone, tablet or laptop), so get writing and write often!

Changes and updates

Text (or copy as it is known) is easy to change and update on your website blog. It can be swapped around, changed and any mistakes easily corrected. This is a lot harder, and sometimes impossible to do with a video without having to start from scratch.

Copy on your website and blog is future proof and can be changed as your business grows.

Ideas

You should have a list of topics you want to create content about. Things your ideal clients are interested in knowing about or questions they have.

You can answer these quickly and cheaply writing a blog. By using analytic tools you will be able to see which are the most popular articles. These popular blogs are ideal to be expanded on or turned into video content you know is going to be in demand before you press record.

Your blog is one of the places where you can get ideas for video before you start production

SEO

Google, and other search engines, use bots to crawl the internet and index the content they find. They use a lot of factors to determine how high your blog page appears in the results for search terms.

These bots read the copy on your website very easily so the bots know what is on each page of your website.

Video content is a lot harder for search engines to index. The bots are not that great at recognising speech, yet. This is where video descriptions, video SEO and subtitles help the bots identify the content of the video.

YouTube does use speech recognition bots to create automatically generated subtitles, but they are a bit pants in terms of accuracy. They are so bad that Google doesn’t use its own generated subtitles (or captions) in ranking video content.

So blogs are more likely to rank higher than a video without video SEO, correct descriptions and tags.

Multilingualism (is that even a word?)

I’m not sure it is a word but my autocorrect recognises it so let’s go with it.

It may be an advantage to have your website in different languages. It’s invaluable if you’re in the hospital, travel and tourism industry for example.

This is possible with video production, you could record content in each language, dub the audio or use subtitles (also called captions) in different languages. There are companies that offer a translation service for caption files.

But that is a lot of hard work!

Google chrome recognise when a user is looking at a website that is not in their native language. It then translates it within the browser for the user to read. Automatically!

No messing around for you, do the work once and let Google take care of the translation.

Please note, Google is getting better at doing this but it’s not perfect. If your business relies on having copy in multiple languages, have a multilingual site.

Conclusion

Video marking is here to stay but writing a blog is quicker, easier and cheaper than video production. Your blog is the place where you can express and test ideas and refine your message before you commit those ideas to video.

So get writing!

If you’ve found this useful don’t forget to download our free give guide below

p.s. You may also find this usefull – Huffpost.com – 10 Reasons You Should Start Blogging