​5 similarities and differences between blog post and video text writing (2023 Update)

Blogs are everywhere! Each month nearly 70 million new posts appear on WordPress blogs alone. Well, quite impressive, but still, the demand for video content grows faster overtaking written content. While text marketing tends to become a thing of the past, video content can soon obtain the status of an absolute ruler.

It’s a transitional process that, for sure, brings some challenges and issues, especially when you’re the one who writes content. That’s why we decided to prepare an article for content writers who have just started writing texts for videos. It will help you easily see the differences along with similarities.

👉🏻 Well, let’s talk about some common points necessary to do in case of both blog post and video text writing.

1. Planning and writing outlines and scripts - in both cases you need to make a plan and outline your ideas before getting started. It will help you organize your work in a more structured way and not forget about important information to include. Based on a proper research of the given topic for an article or a video, writing an outline should be one of the necessary parts of your planning.

2. Understanding the target audience - to be sure that the content you are writing is relevant and matches the audience, i.e age, gender, country, social habits and so on.

3. The tone and the mood of the content - after you identify the audience, you can easily understand what tone and mood to use to make your article or video text truly precise and fruitful. It also depends on the topic, and in case of videos, the style, type and even the product (to be more professional or friendly).

4. SEO optimization - both of them should be optimized for search engines. Why? Because otherwise, your content will not appear on the first pages of search engines. (Google, Youtube, etc.)

5. Being ‘’smart salesy’’ - in both cases, by being as helpful and nice as you can, when you have something to sell to your audience, the result will be much more natural. Besides, when you focus on supporting people by bringing free value with your content, then they will want to return the favor by supporting you back and showing interest in your product.

👉🏻 Now let’s explore the differences to make sure your text is relevant to the case whether you write for a blog or a video.

1. Length - content writers are always encouraged to write short and precise sentences even when creating blog materials. But in case of writing video scripts you should be even shorter, always cover complex ideas in more compacted paragraphs, and try to avoid long, compound sentences. By dividing your script into a series of bite-sized paragraphs, you prepare for an easier shooting process when it comes to bringing your script to life. Video scripts are often compared to elevator speeches i.e you should manage to express as many precise ideas as you can in minutes.

2. Expressing ideas - In blog posts you can sometimes repeat the same idea in different ways adding as much information as you want if you find it relevant. In videos you are simply not allowed to do that because remember, you should keep it short and cut.

3. Style and approach - whatever sounds natural to someone reading a blog post does not necessarily sound natural as they are watching a video. That’s why in case of videos you need to write as conversational and friendly as you can avoiding long narrative language. The sentences of video scripts can be formed with some imperative tone most often requiring pauses for a smart transition from one sentence to another. For sure, the tone, style and the structure of the text highly depend on different types of marketing videos; it can be a problem solution structure, introduction with benefits, concentrating only on one feature and so on.

4. Visuals matter - When you write blog materials, the main idea in your mind is to create sentences that can catch your reader. But in case of videos, it’s not just about writing nice sentences. It’s all about matching texts to visuals the best possible way. Besides, you should also closely collaborate with the production team and storyboard writers to succeed. So video script writing requires double skills, and if you want to have a good video script, as a content writer you should keep visuals top of mind.

5. Priorities - when writing articles, you pay more attention to a headline, sub-headlines, bullet points, keywords, visuals like photos, GIFs and others. Videos require paying more attention to the first 2-3 words and a call to action. A good ending is really a good CTA. But that doesn’t mean you should just put a logo and contact information. Your ending should be influenced by what you want your viewer to walk away with.

6. A small bonus - if you are going to have a 1 min video, make a structure of how long each part should be and then start writing. After finishing, read the whole text with some emotional intonation pretending like you’re the voice over artist to see how long the video will be. Usually, for a 1 min video you need around 170 words.

The Takeaway

Video marketing and blogging have common goals, i.e building brand, attracting customers, educating and so on. But the approaches they require for reaching those goals are different. That greatly touches also the aspect of right wording when you want to shift from blog to video text writing.

The first period of video text writing can be a bit tough for those content writers who used to create blog posts, but it’s just a matter of time and practice.

So if you are a content writer who wants to start creating video scripts and need some advice on how to have really good pieces, just contact us.

Blog post and video text writing; have you started practicing?