The Importance of high quality media assets

Whether it be social media marketing, a logo, promo or instructional videos, website icons, or other images and videos. These days, you need to look professional and coordinated to make a good impression.

We are constantly bombarded by all sorts of stimuli online. The average person’s day is spent mostly looking at screens. All sorts of news, social media platforms, emails, notifications, texts and more are clamoring for our attention through our phones and laptops. If your bid for that attention for advertising a product or service isn’t the cream of the crop, you will be ignored.

You need to grab a viewers attention within 3 seconds, or they will slip by, and your marketing, brand building or outreach efforts will be wasted. Having a shoddy video taken with the inside-facing camera on your phone will look like the 100+ other videos and images the viewer sees every day. The same goes for unprofessional Facebook live posts, or mundane Canva posts. Methods like this worked a few years ago, but weren't' effective for long as everyone jumped on the train. Your content won’t stand out. If you aren’t grabbing attention with something entertaining or educational within the first few seconds of a view, your media is just more noise in their daily overstimulated online lives. At the very least, your content needs to look professional.

In digital marketing, it is so important to invest in high quality media to cut through that noise. Take a look at your Facebook feed, your Instagram, or a competitors website. If the quality of the images, video, animations or any other media or design aspects isn’t top notch, you, and any other potential viewer or customer, will immediately (perhaps only subconsciously) lose trust in that brand, product or service.

Video content is still king - but these days, most advertising videos are being watched on mute. Consider adding subtitles to your video clips, or give a convincing reason for the viewer to unmute and watch your whole video, within those first few seconds. Errors, verbal typos, bad editing, or a lack of variety are some of the reasons that a person will close your video. Also, of course, don’t be boring. Some of the most successful video marketing campaigns of the last 5-10 years provided more entertainment than information.

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People connect to the entertainment and brand voice built by the company through their videos. Look at the very quirky, funny and entertaining video ads done by Dollar Shave Club. After the launch of their first, legendary video ad, they sold over 12,000 subscriptions in two days. They quickly became the number 1 online retailer for razor blades, and the company was bought for over $1 billion 5 years after the launch of that video.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses often cut corners on the quality of their media. They think that it’s something that they can ‘invest more in later’ when more revenue starts to come in. The unfortunate truth is, in the competitive digital marketing world of 2020 and beyond, you won’t even get off the starting line without quality media assets. In this arena, you’re not only competing against your industry, you’re competing against every other company that is marketing to your audience, for any product or service.

The best approach to start is to invest in one or very few channels that will have the best return for your brand. If your target audience is spending time on social media, invest in high-quality social media assets. If your audience is searching for you on Google, create a solid ad and back it up with a polished website with stunning design and professional media assets. If you’re advertising on Youtube, you’re competing for the attention of someone who’s trying to watch a cat video, or a music video, and views your content as just another forgettable commercial in between them and their desired content. It’s an art to capture the attention of a viewer through any of these methods, and at best you’re looking at a modest hit rate. Without a proper investment in quality media assets, your hit rate will be close to zero and will result in a marketing campaign that has a negative ROI.

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Here’s what you can do:

• Work from a strategy. Define your brand, the colour, the message, the voice, and your slogan or tagline. Identify your target customer, what they relate to and where they are getting their content from. Figure out when is the best time to post.

• Start by creating only high-quality content. Even if it’s less often, consider the content you are creating and posting as your portfolio. On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it most definitely is one. Potential customers who are researching your company before a purchase will be looking at that portfolio. Also keep in mind a good piece of media can be reused while a bad piece of media is more or less useless and potentially harmful. Remember the Dollar Shave Club ad. That ad was shown to users multiple times over months, if not years, and still returned ROI across that time period.

• Work with a professional. As a business owner, you have enough on your plate running your business. It is a better investment of your time to continue delivering your service to generate revenue, and invest in a professional’s help to create high quality media assets for your brand. Whether that’s a professional photographer, graphic designer, digital marketer, web designer, or videographer, you’ll get much better results with a professional’s support. You'll probably pick up some skills and techniques you can use along the way.

• Analyze your results. If you spend time or money on creating a media asset, you’ll want to ensure it was worth it. To start, especially if you’re creating your own media, share it with a few trusted friends or peers and get their feedback. This can confirm if you’re on the right track and if your message and branding are clear and concise. So much useful information can come from external feedback, it’s almost always a good practice to get an outsider’s point of view.

Once you start to get a flow and alignment to your media content, it will become easier to generate more. You can also reuse some or part of the media you've created to save you time and investment in the future. For example, high quality graphics for your website can be reused in your social media, or even incorporated into your videos and animations. A solid video clip can become a recurring message you use as well. You’ll have a more defined and distinct idea of what you want your media to be, which will help when requesting work from professional media creators and digital marketers.