One size fits all?

Over the last 10 years the video production industry has evolved and changed very quickly. Online streaming of content has grown into a huge and hungry beast that has disrupted traditional free to air TV and cinema market. 

One thing that changed in a big way, is the emergence of hand held screens for viewing content and the news feed system. With the emergence of Smartphones and platforms like Facebook and Instagram, its introduced the approach of scrolling through a curated news feed versus searching through websites in a normal web browser. 

This has led to some interesting changes in how we present content. Television in the past had a 4:3 SD picture, which then gave way to 1920x1080 HD picture which is what we are used to watching now. Better television sets, better broadcasting and better cameras allowed this to happen and it drastically improved the television watching experience. 

In a similar way smartphones and social media have meant that a huge amount of content is seen inside a news feed which means that content has to fit inside the parameters unique to the platform it’s in. 

Some of the most popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have adapted over the years to video and have improved the functions to utilise it. It can all get a little bit confusing. Facebook can play Widescreen video in the normal 16:9 ratio, but a lot of companies choose to use what is a called a 1:1 ratio so the content will appear in a square format, more like TV in the past. Instagram allows 16:9 or 1:1 video up to 1 minute in length in the news feed but will allow a 9:16 video in the 'story' section, which is essentially portrait style video. Snapchat is also pushing this style. 

This leads to more choices and decisions made in the planning and post production processes. A single piece of content that is being utilised on numerous platforms will potentially need to be edited into all different formats to maximise impact on all different social media and video platforms. This means potentially cropping out parts of the video and overlaying a full video over backgrounds. 

In this era of video content one size doesn't fit all.  

Measure Measure Measure! Why size DOES matter

Measuring what your marketing is doing is so important

When running a business time is vital. You are busy making sales, coordinating projects and overseeing staff. That’s why when something has worked in the past we think ‘Yep we can do that again this year.’ That previous newspaper ad brought in new customers, those same product images are working on the website and that video still tells our story.

But what has worked in the past may not work now. We need to know that our current marketing strategy is connecting to the customers we want now, is being seen by new markets and is telling our branding story.

How do we know if it’s working?

Measure. By measuring how many customers are seeing our products we know if its working. Are we getting less phone calls than this time last year? Are we getting less traffic on the website this month? Do we have less foot traffic coming into the store?

When you track your marketing and correlate that to sales numbers, inquiries and engagement we can see what is working and what isn’t. Maybe people want to read about your business online now and not in the Newspaper. Maybe people want to come into your store instead of calling you.

The more you can measure, the more information you have and the more informed decisions you can make. And that means your marketing budget is doing exactly what you want it to do.