At present, video content has already become an integral part of nearly any marketing strategy: it helps to boost conversions and sales, builds trust towards products or brands, enhance brand awareness, better uncover and resolve customer pains and engage even the laziest buyers – the video consumption stats can impress even the greatest skeptics.
When posting videos on a website or sharing them on social media, it’s important to get each video loaded quickly and could be easily browsed from any platform regardless of users’ devices and their Internet speed. Thus, marketers recommend not only paying attention to the video concept and its quality but also mind its overall size and format.
In this article, we’ll introduce various video formats that fit for building a successful digital marketing strategy while saving up tons of time needed to convert videos before uploading. Once you’ve uncovered the major features of each, you’ll be able to easily define which of the video formats will work best for your requirements and objectives.
6 Essential Video Formats to Try in Digital Marketing Today
No matter whether you’re going to make a trending YouTube video, upload a video to your Instagram feed, or just want to enhance the website’s load time – one of the essential things you’ll want to check first is the format of your video content.
MP4 (MPEG-4) Format
MP4 can be found nearly anywhere on the web today since it is one of the most universally compatible formats used in video marketing. Its popularity is explained by its ability to maintain a soli quality of the video while significantly reducing its size. It happens through the identification and removal of redundant data in media files. Moreover, during the MP4 encoding, the blocks of similarly colored pixels are grouped together and processed at once to reduce the color depth and sharpness of the video in the process.
This format is mostly used to digitally store videos and stream to online video platforms, as well as play video on a wide range of different devices. And also, MP4 is one of the most popular video exporting formats used by online video makers.
WMV (ASF) Format
Developed by Microsoft, this format type doesn’t feature the high-definition like MP4 but can compress videos in a smaller file size instead as it applies panning, transition, and timing effects to the files during the payback process.
However, the Apple devices do not natively support this file format, so users are required to download the separate tool called Windows Media Player app. Due to its comparatively low distribution, it’s not the best option for digital marketing purposes.
Because of its size-reducing feature, it’s mainly used for online video streaming or to attach short clips to emails.
AVI Format
One of the oldest high-quality video formats, which is still used for physical video distribution such as, for instance, a disc or flash drive. Nevertheless, AVI Format features a less sophisticated compression than modern formats, so its file size is much larger – nearly 2-3 GB per minute of video!
Thus, if not compressed, it can barely be used for streaming, download, or web use. However, with one of the best free video compressors, the AVI format can become a perfect option for short video distribution: promos, short movies, advertisements, and many more.
WebM Format
If you’re looking for an open-source video format for web browser-based videos that work on any device – choose WebM. Designed by Google developers, this file extension is built for internet streaming. It works perfectly with HTML5, doesn’t require lots of computer power to compress or decompress video data, and can be compressed into a much smaller size compared to some popular formats like MP4.
Since one of its basic advantages is fast loading time, WebM has become an essential format for digital marketers that need to embed video files into their web assets. However, if you’re looking for mobile-friendly formats, you should use MP4 instead, as WebM is not supported by mobile phones.
MKV Format
Originally released in December 2002, the Matroska multimedia container format is another open-source, flexible and universal file extension you can try for your digital marketing strategy. As a non-proprietary format, the MKV extension is super accessible and is typically used for storing short video clips, TV shows, and movies.
The MKV-formatted files are much more complicated to compress than AVI files, which is a major downside of the first ones. Nevertheless, it enables incorporating the entire video, multiple tracks of audio in several languages, subtitles, and metadata in a single file – a powerful advantage that helped to build up a strong user community.
MOV Format
This high-quality video format was initially designed for Apple’s QuickTime app and so far has become a standard in professional media editing. MOV format can contain videos, video effects, audio, text, images, subtitles, and other media types in a single file, and has already conquered the entire video technology industry by its easy conversion feature: to MP4 file and vice versa.
Today, it is supported by a diverse number of video players and video editing applications like Premiere or Final Cut and, because of how it stores data, this format has become a top choice for video editing and is less suitable for use on websites.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there are various video formats that will help you to successfully plan a marketing campaign that works. Nearly all those are web-friendly, easy to convert and use on different social media platforms and websites, can be browsed in popular video players, and are compatible with popular video editing software. Moreover, you can reduce the file size of any format mentioned above with an online video compressor or professional video compressor software installed on your hard drive.
Hope this information has helped you to define the most beneficial video format that perfectly fits your marketing strategy!
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