Introduction

In the ever-evolving world of social media, the demand for captivating and professionally shot video content, especially vertical content for platforms like Instagram Reels, has skyrocketed.

People simply don’t have the time to always be on the go with filming - lifestyle shots, travel shots, finding the right lighting, making sure your kitchen is or bedroom is looking immaculate and aesthetic for filming content. It’s a lot to manage. Services are popping up to help people keep up with the video creation requirements, without needing to create all of their own content themselves from scratch. It’s particularly useful for B-Roll (short clips in between the main subject) to fill out engaging reels that the algorithm is going to love.

If you're a creator, marketer or a videographer looking to monetize your skills, launching a downloadable video subscription service could be your next big move.

This guide is designed to help you navigate through the process of creating and launching a successful subscription service for vertical stock video footage and how to use Clipara to provide a great experience for customers, and save you hours and hours of effort.

In combination with Clipara, you could launch your video service in one day (+ getting your content) with this guide.

‍

1. Establishing Your Platform with the Right Website Builder

Before diving into the content creation, the first step is setting up a home for your service - your website. When it comes to choosing a website builder, we recommend using a platform like Squarespace or Webflow, who we believe are the best platforms for setting up a service like this and have membership functionality out of the box. Although you could use lots of other website builders too. Here's what you need to consider:‍

• Ease of Use: Ensure the platform you choose is user-friendly, especially if you're handling the website setup yourself.
• Customization: Make sure you can create the brand and aesthetic you want for you customer experience.
• Membership Features: Essential features include subscription management, secure payment gateways, and member-exclusive areas.

Here’s what we’d recommend:

For Speed and Ease of use

Squarespace. It’s drag and drop, very easy to edit and has the membership functionality you’ll need and payment systems for your customers.

We have a complete guide on setting up Squarespace and Clipara together here.

For Customisation

Webflow. It’s relatively simple to use, but if you aren’t at all technical and don’t know your spacing from your padding or your grid from your flex (some grasp of CSS concepts) you might find it a little trickier and slower to get going. Or you’ll have to pay somebody to help.

If having something very customisable is important too you and you have the skillset, then I would recommend Webflow over Squarespace. You can even grab a template from their template library to get going even quicker.

‍

2. Building an Audience Pre-Launch

Your audience is your biggest asset. Start building your following before the launch by:

• Create your social profiles and start engaging: Launch your pages with a link to your website with a form to join your waitlist or get people to follow your account to see when you launch. Start posting content regularly to build up an auidence and engage with potential users
• Email Marketing: Start collecting email addresses early on. You can do this by sending people to your landing page and having an email collection form that links to an email service provided by the website builder or something like Mailchimp.
• Branding: Give your service a name and ensure your branding is consistent across all platforms. This helps in building recognition and trust.

‍

3. Planning Your Launch Strategy

A well-planned launch can set the tone for your service's success. Consider the following:

• Early Bird Pricing: Offer discounted rates for early subscribers to create excitement and urgency.
• Limited Memberships: Initially, offering limited spots can create a sense of exclusivity and demand.
• Marketing Campaign: Think about how you're going to roll out the pricing tiers or offers via a combination of email and social media

‍

4. Sourcing and Creating Your Vertical Stock Footage

This is the core essence of your business. Why are people going to pay for your service? For great footage that they'll be dying to use on their own instagram.

Think about what people want:

• Trending aesthetics
• A mix of very short (pre-clipped) and slightly longer footage
• Content types
• Creator personas (healthy living, entrepreneur, travel etc)
• Good videography

Think about the people you follow and admire, and think about the reels that perform well. Enable creators to create that kind of content with ease and put yourself in their shoes to plan out your strategy. Maybe take a look at some of the other services to see what you can do differently by focusing on a particular niche or footage that you can create easily that others might not be able to? Live in a beautiful sunny country? Get great outdoor footage. Have a beautiful kitchen and great accessories? Create lifestyle video in the home.
‍
There are hundreds of different niches and styles that you could go for - just do your research and thing about the demand for it.

‍

5. Hosting and Managing Your Video Content

Obviously, we recommend you use Clipara 😉. We probably wouldn’t write this blog otherwise…

Choosing the right platform to host and manage your stock footage is crucial. Look for a service that offers:

• High Performance and Reliability: Your subscribers expect smooth and quick access to videos.
• Downloadable Functionality: Ensure your platform supports easy downloading of footage for users.
• User-Friendly Interface: Both you and your subscribers should find the platform intuitive and straightforward to use.

‍

Many services have already built their downloadable video libraries with Clipara, like The Content Cove.

Clipara lets you do a number of things that will save you huge amounts of time, help you run a better service for your customers and provide the tools you need to learn and grow.

That includes:

• Bulk uploading and bulk embedding (embed 100 videos or more in one go rather than doing it one by one like other video platforms). This alone will save you hours and hours.
• Built for optimum performance
• Automatic, easy to use download functionality on your videos
• Beautiful embeds - grids & carousels with lots of customisation options to match your brand
• Customisation without code
• Great UX on mobile and desktop with fast page speeds

‍

That means no slow websites, not having to add videos to your website one by one and no manually creating downloadable assets.

Setting up with Clipara is a simple as these few steps, which you can do in a few minutes:
‍

1. Create an account
2. Upload your videos in bulk
3. Design and customise your grids and carousels for embedding
4. Copy and paste the embed code
5. Add to your site builder like Squarespace or Webflow

6. Launching Your Service and Establishing Content Cadence

Now, it's showtime! Launch your service with a bang and then focus on:

• Consistent Content Updates: Regularly update your library with fresh footage to keep subscribers engaged.
• Subscriber Feedback: Use feedback to improve and tailor your service to your audience's preferences.
• Promotional Strategies: Continue marketing your service post-launch through social media, collaborations, and email marketing.

‍

Now Lets take a a quick look at a step by step guide to creating a downloadable library in Clipara, which can be done in just a few clicks.

How To Create a Downloadable Library with Search

One of the common Clipara widgets people use is search. With Clipara, once you've uploaded your content, we create the downloadable assets and download functionality for you. No need to set up your files somewere else and manually add links!

What is the search widget?

The Clipara search widget enables you to embed your entire library of content onto your site in one go with search, category navigation and more. Just like this:

How does it work?

The Clipara search widget is primarily based on ‘Tags’ added to your videos, as well as the name of the video (if you’re good at giving useful names to your videos!). You’ll be given the chance to choose whether video names are searchable in the Search setup.

The first step then, is to add tags to videos in your library to organise your videos.

Tagging your library

Time to organise your library so it’s easy for your customers to navigate. Head to your content library and start adding tags to your content. You can add more than one tag to each video if you want to. For example ‘Outdoors’ ‘Fitness’ ‘Spring’ might be added to one video so that customers can easily navigate and find similar content.

Once you’ve added these tags, they’ll be available as quick search filters in your embedded search widget.

Follow our guide here for setting up your tags.

Setting up your search

1. Create your campaign

Search will automatically include all of your content, unless it is set to ‘Unpublished’.

To create your search widget, first create an On-site campaign and select ‘Downloadable Video’

Then choose create a ‘Search’ widget:

You’ll then be dropped into the search editor.

2. Search Behaviour Settings

First of all, make sure you change your search settings to match your desired behaviour. Click on the Search option in the left menu to change your search settings.

Let’s walk through some of the options

1. Select promoted tags -  Selecting promoted tags will change the tags initially shown at the top of search. This can be useful if you have a lot of tags. Otherwise tags shown at the top will be based on up to 10 of the most used tags in your library.
2. Searchable Media Type - Select whether you want your search to be videos only, images only or videos and images.
3. Show search bar - If you only have a small, controlled number of tags and aren’t using searchable video names, you might want to hide the search bar. This means customers can’t search for random search terms that might not have any results.
4. Search video names - This by default is turned off and searches are only based on the names of tags.  However, if your videos all have useful names that are relevant to what the customer might be searching for, then turn it on!
5. Flag popular content - If you want customers to see which content is the most popular, you can choose for a ‘popular’ tag to show on the most downloaded video content. These tags will only start to appear once you have download data from customers downloading your assets!

3. Design & Setup

Styling your search widget is incredibly easy. You can currently choose between three styles, Round, Soft and Sharp. This will change the styling of the search bar and search pills. You can also change the theme colours.

Within the thumbnail settings, you can change the size of the thumbnails, and borders, and change the border radius (rounding on corners) of the the thumbnails.

Once you’ve created your search widget, simply install on any page on your site. If you need help with installing, check out our installation guides here.

Installing is as simple as copying and pasting a code snippet, that is compatible with most site builders like Squarespace, Webflow, Wordpress etc.

‍

And that's it! You'll now have the downloadable library on your site. You can also do more simple embed types, like grids and carousels.

Conclusion

Launching a downloadable video subscription service for vertical stock footage is an exciting venture that blends creativity with business acumen. By following these steps, you can create a platform that not only showcases your talent but also meets the growing demand for specialized video content on social media platforms like Instagram Reels. Remember, consistency, quality, and engagement are key to sustaining and growing your subscription service in the long run.

We hope this guide provides you with a clear roadmap to launching your own video subscription service. Stay tuned for more insights and tips on succeeding in the digital content market.

‍