Make It With Michael

By Cyndi Knapic A new Animoto survey reveals how marketers are keeping up with today’s rising consumption of video content on the social web, also known as the golden age of online video. And that is, by finding ways to be resourceful. A whopping 92% of marketers say that they repurpose existing content and assets to create videos, meaning that very few marketers need to pick up a camera to shoot photos or footage, or to create new stories from scratch when it comes to making videos. Of the 500 marketers surveyed who work at companies that have created at least two videos in the last year, 47% are publishing four or more marketing videos in an average month and 27% report creating more than six. Why are marketers creating more video content? The frequency at which marketers are publishing video content online is not surprising when you consider another finding of the survey, which is that 60 percent of the 1,000 consumers surveyed say they watch branded videos on Facebook every d...

By Ryan McCready The goal of any Facebook ad is to get someone to click or interact with your page. Right? Of course. And, as you know, an effective Facebook ad is made up of three carefully crafted parts: the ad copy, the ad image, and the ad headline. It’s a bit like a complex math problem getting them all to work together. So why is so little time spent on a part that they will see first—the ad image? Because so often ad creators are not designers. They’re marketers, social media managers, and content creators. In the past that would have stopped our quest for a perfect ad image. But now with so many graphic design tools at your disposal the lack of a design degree should not stop you from creating a great image. Trust me, I’m not a designer either. But I do know what to do—and what to avoid—when it comes to Facebook ad design. The following tips are curated specifically for non-designers—based on the experiences of a non-designer in a design-heavy company. DO: use high qu...