• 4 Ways to Go Beyond Reading and Watching with Interactive Content

    Last week, Leo and I attended the quarterly Boston Content meet-up to engage in a discussion about Interactive Content. You’ve likely seen the term on several “trends & predictions” lists for 2016, but what is interactive content, exactly? And how can you use it to support your brand’s content marketing initiatives? Senior Content Marketing Manager at SnapApp, Lena Prickett, was the leader of the discussion and she had four key takeaways for using interactive content to help boost business goals.

    1. Interactive content requires consumers to engage in a way that goes beyond reading or watching

    Bringing users into the experience and allowing them to tailor the content to their interests is what interactive content is all about. This also allows marketers to essentially have a conversation with their prospects. Brands are able to gather additional data to then deliver a more personalized experience to users. It’s one of the best ways to deepen information exchanges with an audience. Especially if you have proprietary data – do something with it!

    2. Interactive content can take on different shapes, but requires you ask the same questions

    Content formats include, and are not limited to: interactive infographics, “gifographics,” quizzes and assessments, data visualization and maps, calculators, surveys, and generators and tools. The latter of which gave this blog post headline a “B+.”

    And I must personally highlight one of 2016’s top trends, 360-degree video:

    No matter what format you decide on, you should be asking:

    • What is my goal? How will this content format help me meet it?
    • What do I want my audience to gain?
    • What resources do I need to make this happen?
    • What existing content do I have that I could make interactive?

    3. Speaking of questions, you need to ask yourself, “Why should this content be interactive?”

    Sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense. If the interactivity is not actually adding any value for your audience, then spend your time and resources on something else.
     
    4. When done right, interactive content can help you meet a variety of business goals, from qualifying leads to increasing blog interaction

    As a content marketer, you’re often competing for people’s attention with Buzzfeed, the king of interactive content. So you should do your best to distract people with your own Buzzfeed-esque, “bored at work” content that ultimately keeps your brand top-of-mind and engaging. If people can engage with your content they are going to stay on your site longer, which can in turn help boost your SEO. The longer someone stays on your site, the more you learn about them and the better you can engage with them in the future. Appeal to the interests of your audience, while giving them something useful. And consider scalability by looking for and creating an interactive tool that will scale across all of your programs and channels; investing in a repeatable, templatable platform is often ideal.

    What types of interactive content do you like the best, and why?

    Tim Bradley

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  • 6 Best Practices for Creative Content Marketing in 2016

    Here at Matter Communications – and likely similar to PR agencies globally – all of our PR professionals are busy wrapping up 2016 planning with and for their respective clients. But what separates our group of PR pros from the competition is the fact that they’re able to efficiently and effectively incorporate creative content marketing into said plans because of our in-house creative services, Studio-C by Matter Communications.

    Having a written creative content marketing strategy is important, as it will inform the creative content you’re producing, and ultimately the effectiveness of the strategy overall. Here are 6 steps to ensure your business has a successful creative content strategy in 2016:

     
    1. Have a clear objective
    Direct and simple is the key. You should be able to say the objective in one sentence.

     
    2. Know your target audience
    “Consumers” or “everyone” are not your audience. You have to target your audience – hence the term. Deliberate demographics are a must.

     
    3. Know how your audience engages with content
    Facebook, right? Maybe. But with the plethora of social mediums (Instagram, Vine, YouTube, SnapChat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), there’s likely a better way that just throwing your content up on Facebook and hoping for the best. That, and most companies have an intranet. Or they may collaborate with spokespeople and brand ambassadors. Or they might be hosting or attending an event. There’s certainly a number of ways to engage with your audience – you need to figure out what’s best.

     

    4. Have a clear call-to-action
    Why are you creating this piece or pieces of content in the first place? To gain “likes” or “comments” or “shares”? Or to “sign-up” or “call” or “join”? Going back to your objective, decide on the call-to-action at the beginning stages of the project and make the plea obvious to the audience throughout (or at least of the end) of the creative content.

     
    5. Have more than one creative tactic
    Go back to your objective and ask, is this video/infographic/microsite/mailer the best way to achieve it? Yes? Even so, it needs to be part of a larger strategy if you expect results. Having a wide birth of creative content targeted at your audience will allow you to compare/contrast results and ultimately see what’s the best tactic to move towards your objective. The average number of tactics used by B2C marketers in 2015 were 12.

     
    6. Know how to measure success
    Ultimately there isn’t an exact science for measuring creative content ROI, but at Matter we’ve created a framework to benchmark for ROI success for clients. This framework will help define what success means to your clients and how to measure it – either against the competition or against individual pieces of creative content:

    6a. Clearly define 3-5 measurable goals

    • B2B Examples: lead generation, sales, lead nurturing, brand awareness, engagement, customer retention/loyalty, customer evangelism, upsell/cross-sell
    • B2C Examples: sales, customer retention/loyalty, engagement, brand awareness, customer evangelism, lead generation, lead nurturing, upsell/cross-sell

    6b. Select Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you can track

    • General performance: traffic, new leads, reach, subscriptions
    • Channel-based: website, blog, social networks, search engines
    • Source-based: direct traffic, organic search, referrals, email, ppc
    • Campaign-based: demand gen/lead nurturing, opens, click-throughs, conversions
    • Sales funnel: new leads, opportunities, customers
    • Direct impact on sales: qualified leads handed off the sales
    • Revenue-based: cost per lead, marketing contribution to pipeline

    6c. Create and use content that’s going to move the needle

    6d. Gather data and calculate your investment

    6e. Use this data to make better decisions

    Research shows 60% of companies who have a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared to the 32% effectiveness of those who only have a verbal strategy. The takeaway: it’s important to have a written strategy for creative content marketing in 2016 so you can measure successes and ultimately make better decisions.

    Tim Bradley

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  • Infographic Best Practices

    Infographic Best Practices

    Data, data, data… how can we make the communication of data quick, clear and interesting? Of course an infographic. Love it, great idea. But not all infographics are created equal. So what makes one stand out as effective and unique? Well, in my first couple of months here in Studio C at Matter Communications, I was tasked with creating a couple of these information graphics one of which ended up in Times Square in New York. I figured this was a good time to share some infographic best practices for creating and laying out an infographic.

    Start with a concept

    Depending on who the client is and what their data is about, deciding on a visual direction is the first decision you’ll make. For example, one of the infographics I created recently was for a company that tracks food safety. With that in mind, I selected visuals for the infographic that reinforced their story. Fish on a plate, pizza, bread—all of these visuals were either used as basic illustrations to give greater context to the information, or were turned into representations of the data.

    Keep it short

    One of the bigger challenges I’ve come across is a client submitting long explanations for each data point. Focus on a visually interesting number or percentage is usually distracted by a long statement expounding on the data. While there should always be a description of the data—so it makes sense and is true to the facts—some clever copy editing can help de-clutter the design returning the reader’s attention back to the most impactful parts.

    Charts and graphs

    Here is an opportunity to have some real fun. Since you started by selected a visual concept, you can now turn a regular pie chart or bar graph into something interesting that stregthens the concept. In my example earlier of the food safety client, I used a flat vector style for the design and selected different foods to be in the layout. In one area of the graphic I cut a loaf of bread in two, making one section of bread just about 2/3 of the entire loaf. The data was refereeing to how 2/3 of the respondents of a survey answered a certain way. This visual representation of the data was certainly more interesting then a generic chart.

    And Some Technical Thoughts 

    When it comes to color and typography, less is more. But you can get a lot of mileage out of just a couple of typefaces and a few colors. My first suggestion is to stick with a client’s visual corporate standards. Choose fonts and colors that are on brand and work well together. The key is to choose a font that has a large family — many weights and styles. This will allow you to create emphasis, texture and contrast to the typesetting. As for color, use a few “percentages” of a color to create depth. Both of these strategies will lend the overall layout a uniform feel while presenting variety in the design.

    Have fun creating your next infographic. I know I will!

    Matter

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  • Augmenting the Art of Storytelling with Creative Visual Assets

    As PR pros, we’re trained experts in the art of storytelling. From traditional media relations to the multifaceted realm of social media, there’s always a story that needs to be told regardless of the message or medium, and we’re here to help tell it.

    However, sometimes showing is the perfect complement to telling. Numerous studies show that enhancing your story with creative visual content can work to deliver messaging better through both traditional and social channels. With this growing need for visual storytelling in the industry, I’m proud to work for a forward-looking agency that had recognized this and implemented creative services in-house with the announcement of Studio-C.

    Studio-C will now give our clients the option to visually augment their story through a variety of creative services including everything from videos to graphic design. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with the members of Studio-C, and can endorse their unique ability to collaborate with our PR teams. Whether through an informative infographic or engaging video, I have seen Studio-C’s ability to bring messaging to life through a variety of creative visual elements.

    Check out some of the great stories we’ve told here and stay tuned for many more to come!

    Matter

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