• Using Infographics for Creative Content Marketing

    Using Infographics for Creative Content Marketing

    Brands and organizations are moving more heavily into content marketing, and the demand to produce a stream of creative work means marketing managers are looking for ways to get it done at scale. One way to approach this is to develop a content package consisting of related pieces that can be used and re-purposed in a variety of ways, thereby extending the life of creative assets over the course of many months or a year.

    Does your company participate in trade shows? Conduct surveys? Provide thought leadership? Run paid search and social campaigns? Have need for sales collateral? By looking at these needs holistically, you may be able to develop an approach and a content package that will provide assets for all of them, and at a steady cadence to fill out your content calendar.

    How does this work?

    Infographics are often the jumping-off point for a content package. Infographics typically incorporate 6-12 individual “data points”, often gleaned from a survey or set of features; each data point is displayed as an illustrated or graphic element paired with brief descriptive text. Infographics are well known for their eye-catching qualities and when printed, make great handouts at trade shows and conferences. They can be hard to digest on a smartphone screen, however. That’s one reason why it makes sense to turn your infographics into animated videos.

    Get moving!

    Animated videos have a reputation for being expensive, but many marketers don’t realize that half the labor involved is in the development of illustrations and copy. Your infographic has already done that work, so you may be halfway to the creation of an animated piece. Animated videos are easy to digest on phones, can be used to populate your site and social channels, and look great in your trade show booth – especially when there’s a matching piece of print collateral to take away.

    Check out this piece for Axis Communications that we turned into a video.

    Axis Communications – The Cybersecurity Storm from Matter on Vimeo.

    Another approach is to cut an infographic into pieces. Each data point can be made into a small stand alone infostamp image, or animated into a GIF. Presto! Now you’ve got 6-12 pieces for your content calendar. Use them to highlight  individual points that you flesh out in a post, point viewers back to the “master” infographic or animated piece, drop them into an email template, or use them in a paid search or social campaign.

    Check out this example of an infographic for Sylvania that spawned a number of small GIFs for use in social.

    How far can it go?

    Take a real-world example. One client came to us seeking marketing support for a new product launch at a trade show. We began by creating an infographic that mixes survey results and product details, basically framing a market problem and our client’s solution. The infographic will:

    • Work as creative material for trade press
    • Act as a printed handout at the event
    • Become an animated video for display on monitors around the booth, which will draw the attention of passers-by (and will later be repurposed as a lead-gen tool featured on their website’s new product page)
    • Transform into a set of 12 infostamps and GIFs, which will be used in paid and social outreach campaigns leading up to and after the show
    • Support sales teams

    Whew! That initial piece of infographic design turned into 14+ individual assets for use in a number of ways, and it was much less expensive than if each of those components had been considered separately. It’s all a part of building up a solid content library…but that’s a post for another day.

    Matter

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  • 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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  • An Infographic on Infographics?

    What’s trending on Twitter? In addition to the #SAGAwards and #GetHappy at the moment, infographic posts are another hot commodity on this social platform. In fact, posts linking to infographics outweigh the number of traditional posts by nearly tenfold. The increasing popularity of infographics coupled with the rise of social media have contributed to these visual representations going viral, fueling the need for instantaneous results. Whether you’re enhancing your social media, technology or health story, infographics are here to visually enhance your message (and so is Studio-C).

    Okay – so they’re popular on social media, but how successful are infographics? Let’s turn to—yes—an infographic on infographics courtesy of Mashable, which breaks this down to a science, and offers insight on infographics in recent history:

     

    Are you burned out on infographics? Are you a fan? What’s the best one you’ve seen recently?

    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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