#even if its maybe not as long-term laborious it still takes effort and creativity

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Content marketing is visual marketing

Visual marketing adds a new dimension to your content marketing. While your competitors are still learning to fly with long-form blog posts and maybe a few gated assets, your content strategy could be centered on dynamic media like video, graphics and custom illustration.

In 2019, content marketing is visual marketing. There’s no way around it.

So if you’re planning the remainder of the year’s marketing campaign, know that the only way to truly meet your target audience’s expectations for relevant, authoritative information is to meet them on their terms. Provide them with visually arresting, must-see content.

What is visual marketing?

Visual marketing is the connection between a visual asset, like an image or video, and the idea it conveys. Based on cognitive psychology, companies can effectively market their products and services through a visual medium. This makes information much easier for users to retain and process.

So much easier that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.

And the brain can process these visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Because vision is such a dominant sense, it’s inherently obvious that marketers should be upping their investments to capitalise on visual content.

Our eyes absorb content at volumes that are unprecedented compared with previous generations of consumers. You should be helping your audience wade through what matters and what doesn’t.

Visuals afford a number of physiological advantages over other content types, such as:

Clarifying ideas and abstract concepts.

Supporting the understanding of new ideas.

Weeding out incorrect information.

Visual marketing goals

Humans are visual learners.

Go to any school classroom today and you see tablets, interactive games and colorful presentations. Gone are the days of stale lectures and barely visible words on a grainy challkboard.

A digital marketing target audience needs quick, frictionless information – straight to inboxes, social feeds and web search results pages. Visual assets make this possible.

They require less buy-in than a text-heavy blog post or lengthy whitepaper. Plus, visuals accomplish numerous marketing goals, like:

Brand awareness and identity

Visual branding is a first impression, often the only impression a consumer or buyer will ever have of your brand.

In other words, you have to get it right.

Company logos, color contrasts and typography create a larger picture of what your brand stands for and why an audience needs to sit up and pay attention to what you have to say. Having a consistent visual presence across all online channels ensures you’re creating a cohesive experience for users throughout every stage of the marketing funnel.

Product or service demonstration

What you sell matters. How you sell it matters even more.

Whether it’s a 90-second web demo or an in-depth, in-person product tutorial, you need a visual, interactive component to your brand.

There’s only so much a written explanation or FAQ can accomplish. But a comprehensive video that details important elements of your product or service is mandatory.

Content scannability

Visual marketing doesn’t mean you throw your written content out the window. There’s still plenty of room in your marketing campaign for the old-fashioned written word since text is the primary way search engines crawl and index your web pages.

That said, your content needs to be optimised for a mobile-first audience with a short attention span.

In practice this means using html subheads and imagery to break up text every 200 or 300 words. By embedding visuals throughout your on-page content you create a more satisfying, multimedia user experience.

At a very basic level, readers of any demographic prefer content that is easy to consume versus a laborious, long read.

Social media shareability

Content that is scannable tends to also be more shareable across social media platforms.

With roughly one-third of the planet using social media, it’s absolutely imperative that content performs not just for organic search engines but for human users too.

If it doesn’t get shared, it hardly exists.

Facebook and Twitter posts that contain images receive 70% and 78% more shares, respectively, than those with just text. And platforms like Instagram and Snapchat put visuals front and center, making text a secondary factor in social performance.

Lead generation and sales enablement

It’s estimated that 90% of all snap purchases are based on the branding of a product, aka how it looks and the emotion it conjures.

This means visual content marketing isn’t just about being present or being seen; it’s about driving sales too.

Videos and imagery play on humans’ conscious and unconscious biases in a way that text does not. They are deeply rooted mediums that our brains are hardwired to absorb and enjoy.

And that’s a powerful fact that can be employed in lead gen campaigns. Moving prospects further down the funnel via visuals brings them one step closer to becoming a customer, completing the overarching goal of all marketing and advertising.

How to go visual

Including visual elements in your content marketing strategy is easy.

Below are a number of assets to consider and how to quickly integrate them into your marketing campaigns:

Infographics

Design-centric formats are ideal for social media and email campaigns.

Infographics in particular combine the best in editorial and graphics to visualise key data points, important concepts and industry trends.

Sure, you could talk at length about rising economic spend in your sector, but a simple infographic with on-brand illustrations is going to make your point much more clearly.

It’s about simplifying content down to its bare messaging.

Videos

Video marketing is on the upswing, and has been for the better part of the last five years. Although it tends to require talent and budget a lot of organisations don’t have, video is the cornerstone of human connection.

Finding a way to incorporate it – in some form – in your marketing is table stakes in 2019 and beyond. Luckily, there are numerous formats and budgetary options to work with, such as:

GIFs.

Animations.

Web demos.

Live footage/livestreams.

Augmented/virtual reality.

On-location shoots.

Corporate testimonials.

Webinars.

Formatted eBooks, whitepapers and case studies

One of the best ways to immediately make your marketing more visual is to convert existing assets to new formats.

Take a blog post and turn it into an eBook complete with branded elements and illustrative cues.

You can also make your content more authoritative and click-worthy by supporting your research with pull quotes, page breaks, logos, photography, corporate branding and visual markers.

Three-thousand words on a new industry trend is a lot more digestible when complemented by data visualisations, text callouts and graphical overlays.

When in doubt, think like a reader. What bores you to tears, and what actually keeps your interest?

User-generated content

Sometimes you don’t even have to do the legwork in your marketing. Let your audience do it for you.

By running branded hashtag campaigns, social media contests and product giveaways you can gin up interest and engagement in your company’s marketing efforts. Then you can compile all of these interactions into something visually compelling.

View this post on Instagram

Welcome to the #bitterpups family Audie!

A post shared by Bitter Pups (@bitterpups) on Apr 9, 2018 at 1:45pm PDT

Take Bitter Pops, for instance.

They’re a small-time brew shop in Chicago and they run an Instagram account called “Bitter Pups.” Followers show up in store with their furry friends and take photos with Bitter Pops swag to be featured online. We loved this idea so much we crowned it one of our favorite social media campaigns in recent memory.

Rather than running the same types of social media posts over and over, allow your followers to post for you.

Over time, followers act on their own accord simply to be part of something bigger than themselves.

That’s free, visual content for you.

Blog posts

As we stated before, blog posts can be visual too.

This post, for example, is quite visual, as we included several forms of content to better illustrate our point. We featured social media embeds, YouTube videos, graphical CTAs to in-depth content, custom images and GIFs.

It’s basically blogging 2.0.

Just because the text is doing most of the messaging, you still need your blogs to be attention-grabbing, which is where visuals come in.

Paid ads

Paid ads are another content format to consider.

Because Google Ads Quality Scores account for the quality, creativity and relevance of your ad landing pages, your ads need to be optimised with visual components.

This often means on-brand colors, thematic imagery or photographs and clickable CTA buttons to best convert users who land on your page.

Depending on where you’re sending users, you may need conversion forms, video demos or product comparisons on your landing page, too.

In this case, visuals once again work best. Keep your text to a minimum and let your product branding speak for itself. This goes for ads across search, social media and display networks.

But avoid stock photography

Stock images are the downfall of online humanity. They’re so obviously staged and hilariously boring that they can actually have a negative impact on your brand.

So avoid stock photography if possible. Relevant, hi-res photos, in general, have value in some cases, but if you have the opportunity to custom-create design assets, then do so.

Visualise your success

Visual marketing is now mainstream across B2C and B2B organisations, though it may still have ground to make up in your specific industry.

Some companies still rely on physical marketing like trade shows and business cards – more power to them. Others have pivoted fully into automated technology and digital-only marketing – even more power (and ROI) to them.

While you may not be able to convince higher-ups to move the majority of your marketing budget to visual, you should at least aim to outpace your competitors’ visual output.

Videos (63%) are already shared on social media more often than blogs (60%). And 51% of B2B marketers are making visual assets their top priority moving forward. So clearly there is momentum toward going visual.

Will you ride the wave or sit it out?

from http://bit.ly/2ZjMLl6

#content marketing

[solodevcms]

A Web CMS for the Modern Advertising Agency

Remember your 21st birthday? OK… maybe it’s a little fuzzy. You can blame the fancy shots for that. But turning 21 is more than an excuse to party – it’s a major milestone and a rite of passage to the next chapter in life.

Well, this year marks the 21st birthday of the web Content Management System (CMS), and there’s plenty of reason to celebrate this groundbreaking innovation.

If you’re still unfamiliar with this three-lettered acronym, “CMS” is a fancy term used to describe the software that organizations around the globe use to build, deploy, manage, and host websites. The advent of the web CMS gave unprecedented new powers and capabilities to advertising agencies, helping them evolve into a new breed of “digital agencies.” CMS unlocked a world of control, providing firms – both small and large – with the kind of software needed to offer web solutions to their advertising clients. This revolutionary technology propelled the advertising industry into the 21st century and transformed the agency model forever.

However, not all web CMS platforms are created equal – and that couldn’t be more apparent than it is for the modern advertising agency.

Although many point to 1996 as the official “birthdate” of the web CMS, the origins of Solodev date back to the early 2000s – so we were just in time for the party. It was a different world back then; the software was calling all the shots, and CMS might have more accurately stood for “Compromise Management System.” It was a bleak landscape, one where almost every aspect of how users could design and build websites was limited by the solution.

This immediately struck us as odd. Why wasn’t there a single platform on the market that gave users the space to create on their own terms? Wasn’t the web supposed to be about “freedom?”

When we set out to build the Solodev Web Experience Platform, our goal was simple: to be a truly unique voice in the CMS industry, and deliver on the promise of total freedom across design, functionality, scalability, and security. We wanted to build a web CMS that enabled users to dictate to the software how they would design and build their websites – not the other way around.

We then took things a step further, re-architecting Solodev for Amazon Web Services in a SaaS delivery model – the first enterprise web CMS to do so. Without even knowing it, this one decision would ultimately revolutionize the business model for the entire industry; Solodev made procuring an enterprise web CMS easier for agencies while lowering the cost, freeing more funds for the creative process, and providing a platform that was infinitely more focused on the overall “web experience.” Finally, agencies had a secure, scalable, Cloud-based platform that was uniquely designed around their industry needs.

While most enterprise CMS platforms provide a singular web experience (in other words, a website interaction that doesn’t change whether you’re a programmer in Brooklyn or a retailer in Spain) Solodev aimed to be different – and we truly hit our mark.

In recent years, there’s been a dramatic shift in our industry, focusing more on the holistic “web experience” as a reflection of design and functionality. But thus far, the effort has been composed of “polishing up” the singular user’s experience. Unlike other solutions, Solodev gives agencies the power to craft unique web experiences for different customer segments – from geographic regions to demographics to behavioral mechanics. This strategic agility not only helps agencies cater to a vast array of clients and their respective customer segments, but ultimately provides a more well rounded experience to the end user. Simply put, the Solodev Web Experience Platform is the next evolution in web content management – and in the coming years, the notion of a singular web experience will become a thing of the past.

At its core, Solodev was built for digital agencies, helping them achieve greater control and flexibility over their website services than ever before. Multi-site management continues to be a major factor for agencies when considering web CMS platforms, so we focused on building the most robust, multi-site management capabilities on the market. With one login to manage all of your clients’ websites, Solodev gives agencies the ability to create credentials for internal personnel as well as clients, using a permission-based system where agencies control who has access to what on the most granular of levels.

Thanks to our SaaS delivery model, agencies can also sign up for Solodev and be up and running in minutes rather than months – all at a reasonable price point that frees up dollars for creative. Agencies no longer have to worry about hosting fees, long-term contracts, and managing multiple web CMS platforms with different contracts and hosting configurations. Simply put, we wanted agencies to have total freedom when it comes to design, functionality, scalability, and security; no compromises, just the power to create whatever they imagined for their clients.

To deliver on this promise, we rebuilt our software layer by layer and optimized our platform to take full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its entire product suite. Agencies can now craft custom websites without their web CMS telling them what to do and how to do it. Instead, Solodev serves as a true “blank canvas” for agencies to bring digital brands to life.

Solodev gives agencies a strategic agility they’ve never had before. If a client needs a project done quickly – or specifies that they want their website deployed in a cloud environment – agencies can respond with lightning speed using Solodev’s On-Demand model. Deployed in 45 minutes or less, Solodev is one of the fastest platforms on the planet, giving you the ability to create re-usable templates to speed up development time.

Because of our SaaS and Cloud-based configuration, Solodev doesn’t come with the baggage that most competitors do. There’s no $500,000 price tag with our software; in fact, our entry-level plan is only $99/month. There are no licensing fees, no need for IT maintenance, no manual updates and none of the expensive and often unexpected add-ons that come with traditional enterprise web CMS deployments. In essence, Solodev delivers one of the best Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) on the market while enhancing agency productivity on multiple levels.

Solodev’s advanced templating system empowers designers to create the core layouts of any web design on a virtual “blank canvas” – one that web developers can easily transform into re-usable templates. This allows agencies to write minimal code that delivers maximum impact, and focus more on their creative process. And with Solodev, agencies can even build evergreen template “packages” that replicate a given style or design scheme, providing a foundation on which to develop future websites.

When it comes to content, Solodev gives agency writers and content creators more control than ever. Imagine writing copy while watching your web page update in real-time (working in draft mode and eventually publishing). Now imagine doing it all without any laborious training or deep technical knowledge. With Solodev, it’s all possible – and agencies now have a key advantage in managing and growing their overall content strategy.

Turning 21 is a major milestone for the web CMS. But when the party’s over, how does the industry continue to mature? And for digital agencies, how does it answer the need for greater freedom and control? The answer, in a word, is “experience” – and at Solodev, we’ve always focused on making the best web experience platform on the market. A key part of that is simplicity; that’s why we’ve intentionally left E-Commerce, Marketing Automation, and other enterprise software out of the mix. We wanted our CMS to be the best at what it does – and not another “jack of all trades.” And while most competitive platforms have recently begun to package their CMS with their own nascent enterprise software applications, we decided to give more freedom to the users – and made integrating with your favorite “best of breed” software vendors, from CRM to ERP, extremely easy.

When we say “total freedom” in all aspects of your web presence, we mean it. Solodev forces nothing on you – just the power to create your most imaginative ideas online. It’s the only platform that simply and elegantly delivers a blank canvas where you have complete freedom to design, build, and deploy your websites and applications – without compromises or limitations.

And after 21 years of waiting, there’s no better birthday gift than that.

About the Author

Shawn Moore is the founder & CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from its inception as a small web design company to a successful software company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.

Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

#advertising #digital marketing #digital experience #web development #web design #ad agency #webcms