In 2025, digital marketing without media just doesn’t work.

If you want to achieve real results, media needs to be central to your content marketing. Impactful, audience-centered media is the #1 way to stop customers’ scrolling thumbs. Motivating them to act always starts by interrupting the ordinary. And on the internet, “the ordinary” is plain, boring text.

Media is your best way of competing for viewers’ dwindling attention.

But media is a broad category. To direct it in a way that works for you, it’s crucial to narrow it down. Aligning media with your goals and strategy is essential to the true full-service marketing experience. Every time your collateral misses out on media, it underperforms its full potential.

The right strategy prevents that from happening.

For exceptional results, 100% of your marketing should use visual media.

How to Integrate Media Production with Your Marketing Strategy

Ideally, your digital marketing partner should work with you to ensure media production develops hand in hand with your content marketing initiatives. Having a clear marketing strategy enables content marketing that truly speaks to your audience – and everything you release can be fully supported by media production in advance.

Whether you’re looking at blog posts, social media, short-form videos like Instagram Reels or TikTok, or even full-scale video on YouTube, the media production arm of your marketing agency should be one step ahead when it can: gathering the photos, footage, interviews, or whatever else your content marketing projects need.

Here’s how to break it down in a way that all makes sense:

1. Videos

Video is the #1 most sought-after content on today’s internet. More than that, it’s the most powerful when you want to inspire and influence consumers. Video is so powerful that just having one on a page makes visitors far more likely to follow a call to action – even if they don’t actually watch the video.

It’s that valuable.

Unfortunately, many businesses are hindered by a common worry: video is intimidating. It has a high barrier to entry and lots of things can go wrong. There’s a lot of rehashed advice online about using “grainy smartphone footage” for that “authentic, behind-the-scenes feel” … but that can easily backfire.

Video showcases what’s special about your brand in a way nothing else can match – so high production quality is key, at least to start. And, contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t take hours of footage to get video marketing off the ground. Videos can be just thirty seconds in length and still make an impression.

So, how do you get started?

First, commit to being an active part of the process, even if you’ve never spent time in front of a camera before. A video is the next best thing to meeting in person, and telling your story in your own words helps newcomers to know, like, and trust you. All that happens before you’ve ever met face-to-face.

Second, use video right. In addition to social media videos, you’ll also want brand film: a curated combination of all your best visual content crystallized into a video that gets to the core of what you’re all about. To craft a terrific brand video, you’ll need a variety of interviews, testimonials, and brand-centered photography.

Last, don’t go for the “DIY” approach. Anyone can pick up a smartphone and record a Reel, but that doesn’t make for a true video marketing strategy. Many digital marketing agencies claim to do everything, only to give you this bait and switch in the end: “We’ll be glad to teach you to do video production yourself.”

Video is worth it – but unless you’ve got in-house experts, you can find yourself bogged down in the details. Look for a marketing agency that provides everything: preparation, production, and post-production. That’s efficiency in a nutshell, so you have all the video you need for remarkable content marketing.

2. Photos

It’s easy to overlook the role of photography in your marketing plan, but that’s precisely why it’s such a great opportunity: every day, your prospects, leads, and customers are inundated by uninspired stock photography.

It’s said a picture is worth a thousand words, but what’s photography worth to your marketing? A photo earns just a few seconds of attention on average. But if your photos are really worthy of attention, the sky’s the limit.

Brand photography, also known as B-roll, is the alternative to those stale and stodgy stock photos you can buy from a thousand different sources online. Your customers might not know where those images come from, but they know what they’ve already seen countless times before. Brand photography helps you make your mark.

If you’ve never had brand photography before, it might be time for a website refresh that maximizes its impact. Your website’s internal pages and blogs all benefit from photography that comes from your brand and elevates your visual identity. Naturally, social media posts should use photography as much as possible.

Depending on your needs, it might take only a few days to build a portfolio of hundreds of useful photos. From there, keeping your imagery fresh is as simple as adding a few dozen more seasonally for the first year. Brand photos also boost your video production by giving you more ways to tell visually-oriented stories.

Your content marketing will be more memorable and you can avoid hefty photo licensing fees.

3. Podcasts

Most people probably don’t remember that “podcasts” got their name from the Apple iPod.

Even though that piece of trivia is lost to time, though, podcasts are as popular as ever.

Podcasts attract millions of listener-hours a year for a wide range of reasons:

• They can be enjoyed anywhere – while commuting, working out, or taking care of the chores.
• They’re flexible enough to fit into whatever time is available without making lots of demands.
• They give wide audiences the chance to hear interesting, insightful takes from proven leaders.

Your podcast doesn’t need an audience in the millions to move the needle on your goals. Instead, it needs to deliver helpful, informative, incisive content to your ideal customers: the kind of people who will respond best to hearing your expert takes directly from you. That smaller, focused audience makes a big difference.

For maximum coverage, podcasts should be videoed. That way, the video version can be published on YouTube, clips can go to Instagram and TikTok, and the audio can be used across podcast-focused websites. Audio quality sets pro podcasters apart from amateurs, so be sure your marketing agency or media company is in the know.

Media Content Can Revolutionize Your Marketing Plan

Media production builds trust by ensuring everything your company publishes is cohesive and compelling. Some businesses will go for a media production agency like our friends Paper Jacket here in Tampa. But if you’ve still got work to do on your strategic marketing plan, consider a full-service agency that can do it all for you.

Contact New York Ave to find out more or get started.