If you haven’t noticed, the future of the Internet is video/audio. If you don’t believe me, you can believe the New York Times. Or ask any twenty- or thirty-something.

Blogs are giving way to podcasts and YouTube channels. Just last week Instagram introduced a new platform called IGTV that will support videos of up to 60 minutes in length. But you don’t have to launch a YouTube channel to keep you content relevant.

While financial, legal and scientific subjects may be challenging to animate, here are a few ideas:

Talking Heads

I made a short video below to demonstrate how easy it is to do an expository blurb. I did this using my iPhone 7 and a tripod with a bluetooth remote. The only hard part was wrangling the cat.

 

Stock Video

Most stock photo sites now also offer videos, the price is higher, but that reflects the higher cost of production and the fact that posts with videos perform better SEO-wise. But check to see what video formats your website will support before investing in a clip. I downloaded a snippet in QuickTime (.mov) from Shutterstock, but my site, which is built on WordPress, doesn’t support .mov files as a default. I got it to work with some programming hacks, but, alas, my site will only support one video per post. If this all sounds like Greek to you, check with your web team.

Animated Report

If you are producing a report or thought leadership piece, talk to you designers about the possibility of rendering some of the charts or graphs as animations. I don’t have the software to create one as a demonstration, but your designer should. It only needs to run for a few seconds, maybe in a loop. In fact, the smaller the file, the more likely it will work on multiple platforms.

Summary

It might require thinking about your content in a different way, but once you become familiar with the options out three, adding video elements to your posts is not much more complicated than adding any other graphic.