[Updated 2021/06/25]
Eyeballs are getting harder and harder to grab, especially on Facebook, where the auto-play feature has completely changed the landscape of the platform, both on desktop and mobile.
Right now, video is the most engaging Facebook format. Uploading 60-90 second, funny, evergreen videos with captions and short text introductions is one of the most successful tactics to slow down scrolling on the app, at least according to Buzzsumo. A good video usually stops consumers for about 23 seconds – enough to grab their attention, at least. Video is also preferred on mobile Twitter.
Ignoring the social media benefits of online video assets, YouTube is the second largest search engine (according to Youtube stats), and it’s owned by Google! It’s important to rank well in it organically.
And that’s not to mention that according to Hubspot, most users would rather see videos than emails, images, blog posts, or other types of content.
So it’s clear that most potential customers want to watch online videos. How do we create them?
While trends are telling us that companies obviously need more video marketing, professional online video generation is expensive, cumbersome, and often difficult to pull together for most brands that aren’t already big-time video content generators.
It’s difficult but not impossible.
Here are some online video-maker tools we’ve gathered from across the Web that can help get the job done!
Video-Creating Mobile Apps
These video-making apps don’t even require a desktop computer: You can take videos with your phone and edit them with these apps.
1. Motionleap by Lightricks (Free with optional upgrades): A cool app allowing you to animate your pictures in a creative way. Choose parts of the picture you want to animate and freeze the rest of the picture to create an awesome cinemagraphic effect. The app also comes with cool animated overlays and fun visual effects.
For inspiration, check out #Motionleap hashtag on Instagram:
2. Boomerang (Free): Create looping video for Facebook advertisements.
3. Legend (Free): This is the ultimate typography app for putting text in motion, and it looks really nice for square social video.
4. Videoshop ($1.99): Format videos into square, social-worthy clips for Facebook.
5. Hyperlapse (Free): Create time-lapse videos for Instagram.
6. VidLab (Free): Add effects and sounds to the video you take on your phone.
7. Giphy (Free): Take a video and make a looping GIF. It’s easy to use to create content for tweets, Tumblr, and Facebook!
8. Clipomatic ($6.99): Turn what you say into live captions! It’s important for all videos made for Facebook to have text captions.
9. iMovie (Free): If you have a Mac product or iPhone product, you likely already have this app, which has many editing capillaries and can be used both for mobile and desktop.
Video Brainstorming Tools
10. Keywordtool.io (Freemium): A nice tool to run any time you are brainstorming video topics and pick up some related keywords to optimize your Youtube page later when you publish the video. You can pick “Youtube” in the drop down for it to look into video-specific keywords. You can set a target word to see the keyword group around it or specify negative terms to filter those out.
More:
- 3 Awesome Free Keyword Research Tools (Based on Search Suggestions)
- The Ultimate Guide to Proper Youtube Video Tagging
Desktop Video Meme Makers
Add filters and edit memes to make perfect Facebook videos, even if you don’t have a smartphone handy.
11. Kapwing ($2 to remove the watermark from a single video, or an unlimited plan for $10/month): If you’re really looking to just spruce up your Facebook feed, adding simple videos with video memes, collages, video loops, and stop motion videos can do wonders. This is a go-to GIF tool for that’s both cheap and fairly versatile as a desktop editor! It also allows you to edit montages or add video filters.
DIY Explainer Video and Animation Tools
What if you don’t have any video assets to start with or you want cool animations for your videos? Luckily, there are several apps with video libraries of animations you can choose from.
12. VideoScribe ($29/month, $144/year, or $665 one-time payment; free seven-day trial): This is whiteboard video software with pre-made drawings and images. You can add text and voice-overs, use your own drawing hand, and add color.
13. Biteable (Free for five video projects per month with a watermark; $8.25/month for unlimited creation upload and download function, more templates, and no watermark): This is a popular template-based video service that includes animations and explainer video templates with music.
14. Rawshorts (Free for five video projects; $39/month for 25 exports per month and no watermark): Create animations with a drag-and-drop interface.
15. Lumen5 (Free for everything and unlimited videos, watermarked; $49/month for no watermark, font options, customization, and square videos; $99/month for 1080p videos, brand presets, and custom fonts and music): Try this tool that’s explicitly made for turning articles into videos.
16. Wideo (Basic $19/month, 10 downloads per month, 1-minute videos from 20 templates; $39/month for 10-minute videos from 80 templates; $70/month for unlimited templates and unlimited video length): A robust animation creator with a lot of options, this is a marketing favorite.
17. Easy Sketch Pro (Starter level for $37 one-time fee; Business level for $67; Business Pro level for $97): This tool can create a more chaotic and fun doodle video with interactive functions.
18. PowToon (Free for limited storage, templates, music, max video length of 5 minutes and max five exports; $19/mo for Pro with 2 GB of storage and up to 15-minute videos and 25 exports; $59/month for no watermark and 10 GB of storage, no other restrictions): PowToon is an extremely popular animation creator with built-in templates and text.
19. Content Samurai ($97/month): This is an article-to-video smart editor that uses templates and your script plus photo and audio options.
20. WeVideo ($7.99/month for unlimited square and horizontal videos; $19.99/month business plan includes a team license, premium motion titles, collaboration tools, and social marketing options): This fast online video editor offers limited capabilities and is simple to use.
21. Slidely ($49/month basic for one video a month; $99/month for four videos per month; $199/month for 10 videos a month; $359/month for 15 videos per month): Access their library of high-quality stock videos and professional music to create square or ordinary videos.
22. Animatron:
- Wave.video ($39/month for 5-minute videos; $79/month for 20 brands and 15-minute videos; $149/month for 50 brands and 15-minute videos plus cheaper asset prices): This is a video editor tool with a huge array of stock images and designs.
- Studio (Free for no commercial rights and royalty-free animations; $15/month for no watermarks and a greater library of clips; $30/month for more storage, third-party transfer rights, and more import capabilities): Studio is an animation and explainer video tool for small businesses.
Tools for Audio and Sound Effects
Take a look at these sites to download royalty-free sound:
23. SoundArchive Online (Free)
24. Soundcloud (Free)
25. Freesound.org (Free)
Tools for Creating Thumbnails and Pictures
Let’s say you have shot an excellent scene and are ready to put it up on YouTube. You need an eye-grabbing thumbnail, and you may also need to create, crop, or design images to be used in your video. These are free tools that let you do that:
26. Snapseed (Free): Google’s photo editing app is great for editing thumbnails and creates cool graphics and transitions.
27. Canva (Free): The ultimate tool for creating graphics, this free utility has been a favorite of marketers for years.
28. Pixlr (Free): It’s a robust free photo online editor.
29. PicMonkey (Free): This online photo editor is known for better selfies.
30. GIMP (Free): Download this program and you’re basically getting free Photoshop!
31. Sumopaint (Free): This free online editor is better for drawing your own graphics.
Pro Tip: Don’t forget that you can also create large pictures and make them pan and move later with most video editing software, a tactic called the Ken Burns effect.
Screen-Capture and Video-Grabbing Tools
There are other ways to generate video besides shooting the film yourself or creating an animation:
32. HYFY (Free): Use this screen-capture app to create video of your desktop; it’s great for tutorials of your software or products!
33. KeepVid (Free): Download videos directly from YouTube with this tool. (Remember to keep in mind copyright constraints, however.)
Tools for YouTube Analytics
34. Tube Buddy (Free for the browser extension; $9/month for more tools; $19/month for bulk processing tools; $39/month for advanced tools): This app comes highly recommended by Jim! It can allow you to schedule publication of videos and filter comments, and it suggests tags. It has dozens of data and promotion tools It will also allow you to create end screen cards, add emojis, create thumbnails, create captions, and more!
35. Tubular (contact for pricing): This data-collection app also has a wide network of content creators.
- DealMaker: Find contacts for sponsored videos!
- Intelligence: Use this for research, coming up with ideas, and seeing what sorts of videos people want to see.
36. Youtube!
And lastly, one of the most useful apps is made by YouTube itself: the YouTube Creator Studio app! Here’s a quick rundown:
- Dashboard: Check for notifications and alerts from YouTube, including the latest updates and stats for your review.
- Video Manager: Organize and update your videos from one place or dig into a particular video to adjust settings individually. Use tools to optimize a video, tweak its settings, or bulk-update changes across videos with a single click.
- Community: Communicate and collaborate with your fans and fellow creators. Review and respond to comments, read private messages, see videos where you’ve been credited, or review a list of subscribers (if your channel has at least 1,000 subscribers).
- Channel: Adjust settings that affect your channel overall, such as signing up for monetization, controlling your upload defaults, or enabling live streaming.
- Analytics: Review your channel’s performance and get info on how your channel is growing. Find reports and data to help you evaluate your channel and video performance, including views, subscribers, watch time, revenue for partners, and more.
- Audio: Access the Audio Library to add sound effects or unique music.
And there are many more online video creation tools out there – this is just a sampling! But at least now it looks like creating videos for companies for marketing purposes isn’t impossible after all.
9 Responses
I do admit that I’ve been a big time video marketing slacker. YouTube is a great place for building steady streams of free video traffic that helps boost SEO and sales. Sometimes, I noticed that adding a link to a specific webpage, blog post,or affiliate links tends to get more videos when I add the link in the YouTube header description section. But other times, I noticed that adding a link to my site might take away from good SEO. Not sure if YouTube’s or Google’s search algorithsm change or what the case is. But nevertheless, the more videos anyone makes and adds links in their YouTube video descriptions, they more traffic they get and likelihood them getting more online sales. That’s the bottom line..more SALES. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh buddy! 🙂
Just had to double back one more time and add some valuable feedback to this amazing video marketing tools post. Since I like what I see in this blog, I’d be more than happy to share it on DNN with a link to your blog for my readers to see for more information. I heavily emphasize using YouTube or anyone’s video sharing platform for uploading video to promote their business, because people online are immediately attracted to video, image, content, and seeing how many shares a post or webpage gets on social media before they share the post or webpage with family, friends, or co-workers. I’ll link you in the next post with a link to the DNN page with the link attribute pointing to your story. I see I’ll have to keep coming back to this post over time myself and seeing which one of these valuable tools I can personally use to enhance my organic YouTube video marketing campaigns. 🙂
Thanks you for your suggestions! I agree potential customers love short videos and we are more likely to engage then with a 60 second video. I wish more marketers did this! Videos are a great way to showcase your products and definitely get them noticed.
Nice tools to make your video more attractive.
Thanks Stephanie ,
I like your tips.
And I have used some of them in my own business.
Also I have used this software to create attractive movies. I offer to
try it, which could help any professional to make his own video advertising and drag millions attentions to his Business
Here is the of the product link : http://tiny.cc/44fwry
I admit I’ve only dabbled with a few videos, so I have a lot to learn still. This list of resources is amazing! I knew about a few of them, but there are so many nifty tools here that I had no idea about. I’ve bookmarked this and shared it pretty much everywhere today. Thank you for pulling this all together and being so thorough in your explanations and recommendations, much appreciated.
Hi Stephanie,
Video marketing is great and I recently dove into YouTube video marketing and started creating lot of videos which are relevant to my blog audience and topics. Although getting ahead in video marketing is not as easy as it sounds but things will get easier when you have access to the right tools that you’ve mentioned here.
Unfortunately I never got access to most of those tools so I am going to get access to some of the tools that will be helpful for me in creating and editing my videos for YouTube.
Keyword research is one of the important factors even in video marketing. I personally use tools like SEMrush for finding long tail keyword ideas for my videos so I can include them within my video headings, meta description, tags etc to get more views for the keywords I’m trying to rank for.
And I heard a lot of positive things about the whiteboard video software VideoScribe with pre-made drawings and images, so I’m going to give a try to it!
Thanks for the compilation, keep sharing more.
For pictures, posters, banners, I use Pixteller. Many templates to choose from.
Hi Stephanie,
Video marketing is great and I recently dove into YouTube video marketing and started creating a lot of videos that are relevant to my blog audience and topics. Although getting ahead in video marketing is not as easy as it sounds but things will get easier when you have access to the right tools that you’ve mentioned here.
Unfortunately, I never got access to most of those tools so I am going to get access to some of the tools that will be helpful for me in creating and editing my videos for YouTube.
Keyword research is one of the important factors even in video marketing. I personally use tools like SEMrush for finding long-tail keyword ideas for my videos so I can include them within my video headings,
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