SPONSORED BY STORYBLOCKS
Back in 2015, Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and Tom Wilkinson were featured in a series of parody stock photos to promote their upcoming movie Unfinished Business. The film has a 10% rating on RottenTomatoes.com, so don’t worry if you never saw it.
The faux stock photos were the best part anyway.
This series of images inserted the three actors’ heads into existing photos, creating a hilarious mockery of the genre.
The movie was terrible, but its promotional tactic was a watershed moment for visual content. Bland, meaningless stock photography had become so ubiquitous – and so universally disliked – that it could be used as a tongue-in-cheek marketing vehicle.
Several years later, marketers fully understand that these kinds of images get about a 10% positive rating from our audiences, but we’re struggling with what to do instead.
Now more media have joined the fray, forcing us to curate high-quality audio and video resources along with standard photography. As both CEO of the stock imagery service Storyblocks and a marketer myself, I spend quite a bit of time trying to find the right balance between time, budget, and quality in visual content.
Those are really the three pillars of a best-in-class visual content strategy, so let’s dive into each one to see how we can build a meaningful and effective system for making our content look good without breaking the bank.
The tyranny of time in visual content
How many of you have found yourself squeaking a blog post in just under the deadline only to realize you’ve forgotten the images? It’s okay, you can raise your hand. I won’t tell anyone.
Or maybe you’ve been meaning to start a podcast, but can’t imagine where you’ll find enticing opening and closing music.
Or maybe there’s ninety percent of an explainer video sitting on your desktop that just needs some solid B-roll footage, but you just can’t find time to film it.
We know we need supporting images in our content, and we don’t need Vince Vaughn’s mocking raised eyebrow to tell us that it has to be professional without being cheesy. But the trouble is we rarely have the time to create those pieces from scratch.
New tools to the rescue
This time crunch has created a big market with a strong need, which has mercifully been filled by a new crop of tools designed to give us a sophisticated look without keeping us at our desks till midnight.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Magisto
Intimidated by the video editing process? Magisto is for you. It lets you quickly and painlessly deliver unique videos with the ease of creating a PowerPoint presentation.
There are even A/B testing options to help optimize your video’s performance after it’s published.
For $10/month you can create videos up to five minutes long and include your own branding. Not a bad way to get in on a format that’s driving over 70% of web traffic right now.
Moovly
Moovly’s claim to fame is animated video, which sounds fancy and complicated…
