Through my personal love of outdoor adventure and Overlanding, I met Chase Putnam lead engineer and co-owner of Craft Autoworks. Craft Autoworks is a custom camper van and #vanlife builder based in Reno, NV. They specialize in custom Mercedes Sprinter Van builds that are unique and amazingly well thought out and executed. But as a personal project Chase designed and built two Overlanding products for guys like me with Toyota Tacomas and a recurring wanderlust. This project had several components that clients don’t often think about up front, but have become more important in recent years. The video poster frame and the social media edits…
So I created promo videos explaining the features and benefits of their Overland Electrical System and Portable Kitchen System. These videos live on their website and help potential customers understand the benefits of those products.
Social Media Edits
One thing that really helps drive awareness for Craft Autoworks is their presence on social media, particularly on Instagram. Instagram has some particular requirements for their various post formats and for some reason they’re all different sizes and time durations. So after a lot of experimenting and re-working, we settled on 1×1 Aspect Ratio (square) videos at 59 second duration. Craft has been using these videos in their paid campaigns on Instagram with great results.
View this post on Instagram
Poster Frames
When you post a video on the web, before that video starts playing, the browser loads a static still image so that you can see what you’re about to see. Unless you specifically create that poster frame with a custom design, the video platform, like YouTube, will select one from the video and just use that one. Sometimes you get lucky and that frame is good, but most times it’s something like the presenter with their eyes closed and they’re tongue sticking out mid sentence. Not good. So for these I created two poster frames for Chase to use. One is the standard 16:9 wide frame hd image for YouTube. The other is a custom aspect ration that works for the social posts on Instagram on Facebook. We had to do some more experimentation to figure that out since as I mentioned, it’s not clear what the specifications are for that image, and they keep changing… Anyway, here’s what we came up with.
Total Video Marketing Packages
If you’re looking for a video with everything you need to get your videos working for you on whatever platform works best for your business, I’m here to help!
-Mike