We’ve been busy creating content for our clients that focuses on how they are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and what they are doing for their customers during these uncertain time. Here are a couple samples produced for Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, an overnight summer camp, and Solomon Schechter Day School, a private school in Chicago.
Camp Ramah in Wisconsin Emergency Fund 2020 fundraising campaign video
Solomon Schechter Day School COVID-19 Response video and marketing video.
The question of whether to open your business amid the COVID-19 pandemic crisis presents the ultimate two-sided market conundrum. The stakes, in this situation, include something far greater than whether your product or service survives in a competitive, free-market economy – the stakes include people’s very lives. I’d like, for a moment, to redefine and reassess how we think about the concept of the two-sided network platform, from a unifying product or service to something less tangible: a psychological state. This consideration will be necessary for any business that hopes to reopen its doors in the era of COVID-19.
During these uncertain times, we’ve been working with small businesses to help keep their digital marketing content flowing, lest they forfeit their visibility to their larger competitors with deeper pockets. If your organization is interested in collaborating on some projects, please reach out!
Not all videos need to be professionally produced. This is a bold statement, seeing that I am a professional filmmaker. However, one thing is clear: video must be used as part of your marketing, product, and outreach strategy. There’s frankly no way around it if you follow the data. Here are some tips for improving your DIY videos and giving them a high-quality look and feel.
Use a Tripod
Stability goes a long way. No one wants to watch a shaky video. Use a tripod or stabilizer for your phone and make sure the camera lens is pointing straight ahead and not tilted. This will also provide you with the ability to go hands-free so that you look more natural on camera.
Make sure the camera lens is in front of you and that you’re not looking off to the side. Match your eye line with the lens, which means that both the lens and your eyes are on the same level.
You can buy a tripod and phone mount online at Amazon (or even better, your local camera store). I use KobraTech, but there are lots of other options.
Lighting
Proper lighting is critical. Ensure that you are lighting the front of your face by keeping your lights/lamps within a forty-five-degree angle of your nose. You’re not going for Hitchcock, Welles, or Fellini here. If you don’t have lights, sit near a bright window – natural light is beautiful. Make sure you’re not backlit (too much light behind you, not enough in front of you), which will make you look dark.
Recording Quality and Frame Rate
Settings –> Camera –> Choose your preferences
iPhones now give you the option to choose your shooting quality – 4K, 1080 HD, 720 – and frame rate – 60 frames per second (fps), 30 fps, and 24 fps. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of each of these, I’d recommend shooting at 4K @ 30 fps or 1080 @ 30 fps. Go for highest possible visual quality. Keep in mind that shooting at 4K will take up more space on your phone, so make sure you have enough storage available.
If you plan on slowing down your footage, then consider 60 fps, but this frame rate will require more light to look good (it’s a shutter speed thing). The iPhone also gives you the option of using its built-in slow-motion feature. If you choose to use it for part of your DIY video, use it wisely.
Using the Zoom Function
Don’t use it. If you want your subject closer to the camera, move the camera or the subject closer together. Using the digital zoom degrades the quality of your image.
Exposure Lock
Use the iPhone’s exposure lock and focus lock feature to prevent the camera from continually trying to autofocus and auto-expose your image – this creates unsightly flickering. To use the AE/AF lock, hold down your finger on the area where you want your camera to focus, and the feature will activate.
Edit Your Video
Use the built-in editing feature, iMovie, or some other software to edit your videos and clean them up. If nothing else, trim the front and back ends of your video: no one needs to see you settling into your chair and clearing your throat before you launch into your monologue. Likewise, no one needs to see you get out of your chair, with a deep sigh of relief, to turn off your camera.
Audio
One of the things that makes a pro video a pro video is high-quality audio and sound. I highly recommend buying an external mic for your iPhone that you can plug into your device. The Rode SmartLav is a good option, but there are lots on the market to choose from: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1059342-REG/rode_smartlav_smart_lav_lav_mic_for.html/ap=y&ap=y&smp=y&smp=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIi52km_mz6QIVYR6tBh1M1wCMEAQYASABEgK9DfD_BwE.
If you can’t purchase a mic, try to get your hands on a second phone and use the voice memo feature to record your audio, which you can sync and match in editing. Place the second phone closer to your person, out of frame. Do a couple of audio tests to find the right position – it may be suspended above you or beneath you with the mic pointing towards your mouth.
Orientation
IG Stories 1080x1920
IG Stories 600x700
Before you shoot, consider where you are going to be posting your video and how you want to orient your phone. For Instagram Stories, orient vertically. For YouTube or Vimeo, orient horizontally.
Rule of Thirds
Use the rule of thirds to compose a more professional-looking shot. Use the grid lines on your phone to help you line up your subject. You can learn more about the Rule of Thirds here: https://digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds/.
If you have questions or would like a more in-depth consultation, please contact me. I can also help you take your video to the next level with some simple, cost-effective editing using animated text, motion graphics, music, and more.
Chasnoff Media would like to congratulate Jessica Brunt of Dwell Well with Jess, for being featured in April’s edition of Portland Monthly as one of Portland’s top realtors! Here’s a little 30-second video we did to celebrate her accomplishment and share the news with her clients.
A timely and relevant op-ed piece by political strategists David Axelrod and David Plouffe.
On the surface, this article is about politics. But replace "Joe Biden" with "your business," and what you have is a playbook for what every company (especially small and medium-sized companies) need to be doing right now: namely, leaning into their digital marketing and sharing their stories. Now is not the time to back off. If you do, you risk obsolescence amid the flurry of activity by others to corner markets in the online space. "The challenger needs to behave more like an insurgent…" Turn the tables on your competitors by taking action and not sitting idly by to see how things pan out. Be creative. Expand your reach. Carefully craft your messaging and content. Create a strategy rather than just throwing posts against the digital wall.
These are certainly uncertain times. Every day seems to bring more questions and less clarity. When will the economy open up again? When will we be able to leave our homes? With marketing budgets slashed, how and where will I find my next clients? With each day bleeding into the next and weekdays blending seamlessly with the weekend, it can be hard to feel grounded.
Nathan Furr, in his HBR article “Don’t Let Uncertainty Paralyze You,” shares three habits that can help readers develop their own ‘uncertainty capability.’
Open Your Eyes to All Options, Present and Future. Look past your immediate situation at the bogger picture. Contextualize. Don’t narrow your thinking.
Think in Terms of Probabilities, not Binary Outcomes. Things are rarely black and white and if we can catch ourselves before jumping to extremes and worst-case scenarios, we’ll be better off for it.
Remember that Possibilities Always Exist. We always have choices. They may not be good choices, but they still exist.
Published April 7th, 2020 in the Portland Business Journal.
When you think of creative content, what comes to mind? Perhaps it’s photos, videos, or clever copy nestled within the margins of your favorite social media channel or newspaper.
However, I contend that creative content is about more than the final image or words on the screen or page. It’s just as much about ideation, production, distribution, and strategic execution—and integrating these elements into the creative process. By looking at creative content through a strategic lens, you will find that there is more to marketing and advertising than the artwork, copy, layout, and design.
Think strategy first
Before you leap into creative efforts, take a step back to consider a few strategic marketing questions:
What is your product or service?
What are your value propositions?
Who is your target market and what problem is your product or service solving for them?
What’s your call to action — what do you want members of your target market to do?
What resources do you have to work with, from cash to in-house talent?
Your answers to these questions should inform every creative content decision you make moving forward.
Along with asking yourself these questions, I recommend having each member of your marketing and sales team answer these questions on his or her own and then discussing their answers together as a group. This is a powerful way to discover fresh ideas or reveal gaps in your organization’s strategic vision.
Set key performance indicators
From the very beginning of the strategic marketing process, you must set clear, simple, and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). These will enable you to accurately assess whether or not your creative content is hitting the mark across marketing channels.
Your KPIs will vary depending on which channels you use. Choose KPIs that are meaningful to your organization. If you don’t, you are simply collecting data that will guide you nowhere.
Some possibilities are:
“Likes” on social media
Positive reviews
Return on ad spend (ROA)
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per lead (CPL)
Revenue
What you measure should always depend on what you’re trying to accomplish and how you intend to use the KPIs to strengthen your business.
Measure, analyze, and adjust
Strategic marketing is a long game and your approach to creative content needs to reflect that. You must resist the urge to push content to your channels simply to “get something up.” Having a big-picture creative content strategy and knowing what you want to accomplish will enable you to collect valuable data in real-time, measure it, evaluate it, and adjust your strategy based on the feedback from your audience.
By thinking in terms of long-term strategic campaigns, rather than individual posts, you get a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening, where you’re confronting obstacles, and how you can pivot.
Every KPI and data point is — quite literally — your customers telling you what they do or do not like. Listen to them. Use your audience’s response to inform your marketing and content decisions, rather than relying on internal office politics or your organization’s pre-existing biases.
Build your calendar
A simple way to organize and clearly communicate your creative content strategy to your internal teams is to develop a content calendar that plainly lays out each aspect of your campaign.
Type of creative (video, photo, animation, etc.) being posted
Launch date
Channel
Copy
Call to action
Relevant notes for those executing the campaign
By distributing this content calendar among the different people and departments that are involved in the sales or marketing of the product or service, you keep communication clear and acquire buy-in from key stakeholders. In addition, this simple tool helps keep everyone on a consistent schedule, clearly delineates responsibilities for success, provides accountability to team members, and defines an actionable approach for strategy execution.
Put strategy first
By now you’ve probably noticed that this article doesn’t offer tips on shooting video on your mobile phone or rules for the run-time of your social media videos. That’s because a successful creative content strategy is about more than the look of the final design. It’s also about the essential strategic questions every organization must ask in order to be successful.
Strategy is the partner of creative and they should be developed and designed in concert. If you can bring this approach to your organization’s creative content, you may just have something that people “like.”
"Strategy design operates at the organization level. Strategy execution operates at the individual level. If you don't make this distinction... you'll mistake individual action for strategy. And that can be disastrous."
I love this HBR article by Graham Kenny. It speaks to so much that I worked with clients to discern: when thinking about content creation, it is imperative to consider the larger strategic landscape. A strategy is not just "what," it's "how." How will you integrate content into your marketing eco-system? How will you create a content-rich consumer journey through your digital channels? You may have great content, but without a strategic deployment plan, its potential may remain unrealized.
With numerous production projects on hold due to the current state of affairs, I have, admittedly, been more immersed in Netflix than usual. However, some motivational gems have appeared amid the hours of television consumption. The most poignant for me, at this given time, is a line of dialogue repeated throughout Narcos: Mexico, spoken by Angel Felix Gallardo, played by the very talented actor Diego Luna: “In crisis, there’s opportunity.”
So now, when so many businesses are struggling to survive—pivoting, contracting, or justifiably hitting the pause button on operations—where can you look for opportunities amid the COVID-19 crisis? How can you recognize opportunities when everything feels so bleak?
Assess
With business ops slowing down or coming to a pause, this could be a great time to assess your business from the inside out and ask pertinent questions:
• Has the current crisis revealed any gaps – both in your business or in your industry? Is there an opportunity to fill those gaps to create a strategic competitive advantage moving forward?
• Has the crisis provided you with any opportunities or new insights on how to innovate, change your business model, or otherwise strengthen your position (even if strengthen, at this moment in time, simply means surviving)?
• What are your company’s points of differentiation and value propositions? If every business like yours is being impacted in the same way by this crisis, is there anything that you can do differently to increase your chances of survival?
• Now, with a couple weeks of hindsight since the beginning of the crisis, is there anything your business could have done better to prepare for such uncertainty?
• Has this crisis revealed any leaders in your firm (or weak links)?
• What has the crisis revealed about your own character? Is there anything you’d like to bolster or change?
Catch-Up
The pace of my business, and certainly my life in general, has slowed significantly in light of the COVID crisis and orders to shelter in place. This has provided me with the opportunity to catch-up and do a lot of the things I didn’t have the time, energy, or focus to do before.
• Strategize. Now is a great time to review your firm’s strategic plans, and if you do not have strategic plans in place, to begin formulating them. I have been collaborating with numerous businesses to help devise their digital marketing strategies, video strategies, and social media strategies.
• Create. Write those blog posts you’ve been putting off. Record those videos you’ve been avoiding. Outline your social media content calendar so that the next three months are ready to go.
• Communicate. Re-connect with the people in your life – those in your personal and professional life.
• Update. Now is a great time to update that aging website, refresh the images and branding elements across your digital channels, and refresh the old templates you’ve been using for a decade.
Reflect
Times of crisis always present an opportunity to reflect, check-in, and change.
• Are there trade-offs that your company (or you, personally) need to make? Creating an impactful strategy and a successful business means making choices – both what to do and what not to do.
• Do the different components of your business ‘fit’ together? Are there any weak links? Did any of those weak links make your business more vulnerable to the current crisis? Perhaps your portfolio of clients was not diversified enough, or your revenue was overly dependent on a single client.
• If your business disappeared, are there other things in your life that bring you joy? If you could no longer go into work, what else would you do? How would you fill your time?
As much as we try to prepare for the unknown and shelter ourselves from turmoil, we will continue to face crises of all varieties. However, by confronting these crises head-on and taking the time to understand their implications, perhaps you can find the hidden opportunities that lie tucked away in the folds of chaos. Don’t forget: “In crisis, there’s opportunity.”
Need help with your firm’s strategy? Want guidance on how to accomplish these goals? We’d love to work with you.
We all want to maximize the number of eyeballs on our content and increase overall engagement. So, when is the best time to post content to your social channels? Well, it depends: on your industry, audience, KPI's, and content goals. However, you can use data to help make informed choices and increase your likelihood of success. Below are four graphics for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn based on research from Sprout Social. Please note that all times are in Central Time.
Source: Social Sprout
To learn more, you can also check out this interesting article on their website, which breaks this information down further by industry: http://bit.ly/best-posting-times-sprout-social.
This week saw the wrap of a big project produced for Stages Indoor Cycling. After months of collaboration between Chasnoff Media and the Stages marketing, sales, and creative teams, we completed the new product video for their Solo indoor bike. The creative process included scripting the voice over, storyboarding, production on location at the Portland Bay Club, and post-production, where we were able to integrate some incredible footage shot by their marketing and sales teams from around the globe.
Teamwork. Idea-sharing. Adaptation. From the first rough cut to the final, this video took on a life of its own and organically evolved to both tell the Stages Indoor Cycling story and clearly promote the product. From the director’s perspective, I wanted to ensure that the video conveyed all of the key elements relevant to the product, which were essential from a marketing and sales perspective. However, I also wanted to communicate through the visuals, editing, and overall story, the company’s strong culture, brand value, and key differentiators. If you put this video side-by-side next to some of the competing brands, you’ll find that it communicates a different energy and grittiness.
Big thanks to the Stages marketing team and everyone involved. It’s always exhilarating working with all of you!
Creative content is about more than the final image or words on the screen or page; it’s about ideation, production, distribution, and strategic execution. By looking at creative content through a strategic lens, we can recognize that there is more to marketing and advertising than the artwork, copy, layout, and design.
Thanks to everyone who joined us on the 19th at the University of Oregon Executive MBA in downtown Portland where I presented alongside Brianna Showells, VP of Marketing for Nike Swim and Nick Winkleblack, CMO at Ox Media on growth marketing strategies. I focused on content creation and provided actionable, hands-on tips and tricks. If you weren’t able to join or want to review the slides, you can download the presentation deck below. Questions? Contact me at gabe@chasnoffmedia.com.
Video marketing trends change so rapidly from year-to-year that it can feel hard to keep up. According to Entrepreneur, here are 5 trends to watch this year: 5 Video Marketing Trends you Should Follow in 2019.
“Video is the most ubiquitous marketing tool. Hate it. Love it. It doesn’t matter. No matter how many times, you wish that ad would go away before you can watch the brand new music video for God’s Plan (Drake), or how foolish you think video is as a medium. It is not going away anytime soon and it presents a rather enormous opportunity.”
There’s no getting around it - online video for marketing and customer engagement is here to stay. If your company isn’t using video yet, are you leaving money on the table? Check out this article from Forbes: Video Marketing In 2018 Continues To Explode As Way To Reach Customers.
Abiding by copyright and other IP laws is a requirement when creating and distributing content online content. The Center for Social Media, part of the School of Communication at American University, has produced a free resource to help individuals and firms navigate, in a more judicious way, the online world of sharing, re-posting, and copy & pasting.
You can download the Code of BestPractices in Fair Use for Online Video here or acquire it directly from their site at http://cmsimpact.org/codes-of-best-practices/. There is some other great content available on their website as well; take some time to peruse.
With 800 million active monthly uses, Instagram is one of the best social media marketing platforms out there. Here's a cheat sheet and some pics I put together to ensure that your videos are formatted properly and look great.
Max resolution on Instagram is 640x640. If you're shooting widescreen (with your phone turned horizontally), set resolution to 640x360. Download the file below for full specs.
Instagram Video Export Settings
Instagram Audio Export Settings
