Create and Add to Your Asset Library, Even During Quarantine

Today’s article is a guest post written by Megan Steffen, talented photographer and owner of Untapped Media Inc., which creates beautiful visual brand assets to support the content marketing efforts of wine brands.

Even with everyone in quarantine and your business potentially changed for the foreseeable future, you still need fresh content to post to your social media accounts, website, and other marketing channels. Even with a skeleton crew and an adjusted business processes, you can create new content regularly! (You can do this. We promise.)

Here’s a step-by-step process you can use to up your digital assets game—whether during the pandemic or after it’s all over.

Planning New Digital Assets for Your Wine Brand: The “To Do” List

Creating (or simply growing) your library of digital assets—including photography—is not difficult, but it does take some time and planning.

1. Write down what types of content topics you want to share with your audience.

Pro tip: Think about your brand’s positioning, and whether or not it has shifted. You have a story to tell your audience and you need an image to help tell that story!

2. Make a calendar for your social media marketing, email marketing, and other marketing efforts.

Pro tip: A Google Sheet works wonders.

3. Collect your existing assets. Use Dropbox, Google Photos, Amazon photos – your choice. Just make sure the folder structure is clear and orderly.

Pro tip: Download the app for whatever cloud service you choose and upload all of your phone photos there regularly. Frees up space on your phone AND keeps your photos organized.

4. Create new assets. Take photos and videos of every single thing you do in your business. You never know when you’ll need that shot. Just because you took the shot today doesn’t mean you can’t use it a year from now

Pro tip: If it’s a shot of the outdoors, make sure the weather matches the actual day you’re posting on. For example, a gorgeous sunny day in July is not relevant to a dreary rainy day in January. Unless you’re “pining for brighter days.” Stay relevant.

What About My Existing Content?

Let’s expand on the last point from above, creating new assets. Here are some ideas to extend the life of your existing content or ways to get more out of each mini-shoot:

• When shooting a subject, shoot from multiple angles – up, down, right, left, macro, wide angle, with people, without people, with a prop, without a prop…basically every way you can think of. You’ll use all of those images in some way.
• Crop images from your existing asset library in new ways – zoom into one section of the image, angle the image differently, make it square or very tall & skinny/short & wide.
• Re-edit existing videos. Ask your videographer to create new cuts of the video they produced for you. Create long-form & short form versions. Use outtakes or b-roll.
• Take your product with you wherever you go. You can pop that product into your weekend getaway to Tahoe, the side of the road with an amazing sunset, on your dinner table, on a picnic in the park – the options are endless!
• Use social media apps that make sense for your brand, from Boomerangs and Hyperlapse videos to Slo-Mo and Cinemagraphs. Test out apps like PicLab and Over for adding quick copy to an image. Use the Stop Motion app to make a fun stop motion video.
• Edit the images you already have using Instagram functionality. Don’t want your edited photo to go onto Instagram, but you want to use the editing functionality? Here’s what you do:Put your phone on Airplane mode, open Instagram, edit the photo, click Share. It will fail, and that’s OK; next, click the X and remove the image, turn your phone back to wifi/data enabled.
• Collect images & videos from your extended team. If you’re a medium-sized business, you have a bunch of people at your company who can send in photos from their arm of the business. Even if the images aren’t perfect, there are plenty of apps out there to help them along: Instagram, VSCO, Camera+, and so on…
• Create quick social media graphics using your phone (PicLab, Over, Font Candy, Spark, InstaQuote) or desktop (Canva, Pixlr) using images you already have.
• Hire a content production company to help fill your content calendar. Our team at Untapped Media can produce professional level imagery and copywriting to supplement what you’re already producing! Just give us a shot list to run with.

Keep your communication flowing to your customers during this time and make sure they know you’re still in business, ready to help, and ready to serve. Strong, quality content goes a long way to telling that story!

If you have further questions for Megan, she can be reached via her contact form at Untapped Media. Have an idea for a guest post with Copper Peak? Reach out.