I often talk to my clients about video and how important it is, so today let’s talk about two video apps to make your life easier. Both of these are free.

The first one I want to talk about is called Magisto. It’s available for iPhone and Android. It allows you to create polished-looking videos from chunks of other stuff. So what does that mean? It’s a really simple process of three steps. The first step is to pick your style based on the story you’re trying to tell. They have several templates to choose from. Step two is to upload pictures or other videos. Step three is pick your background music and it creates the video for you. You can even add text.

What does this mean for you? In the course of your business, you can create short, 10-second videos and take pictures — things that separately might be just an incoherent mess — and load these elements into Magisto and have one comprehensive, polished video. It’s so cool and looks very professional. I love it, it’s just a neat little tool.

The second tool I want to talk about is called Hyperlapse, which is iPhone only. It takes a long video and condenses down into something short. Say you’re a realtor and you want to have a walk up to the house you’re showing. That is super boring if you walk up for a whole minute. People are not going to watch that. But you can take a minute’s worth of video and compress it into something like 10 seconds. I find editing very challenging, where I have to cut something at exactly this second and pick it back up at exactly another second. This gets rid of that.

The other benefit of Hyperlapse is that smaller videos fit in Instagram stories better. Hyperlapse was built on the Instagram platform so it’s really integrated with Facebook and Instagram.

There are so many really good video apps but these are two that make your videos simple, more polished, and easy on you. I’ll be the first person to admit I’m not great at shooting video but I want it to look professional and these apps help me to do that. There are professional versions of  both apps but start with the free ones first and see if those work for you.

Video, baby! If you haven’t integrated it into your marketing plan, it’s time.