Show, Don’t Tell: The Absolute Necessity of Visual Content Marketing Strategies

This past January, Pinterest  saw just under 12 Million unique visitors. We upload 250 million photos a day, on Facebook and according to one study,  over two-thirds of Facebook activity involve interaction with photos and videos. Nearly every phone, smart, average and ‘dumb’ alike have a built in camera. The average person takes 2000 photos per year, that’s 166 per month, over 5 a day. People upload 3,000 images to Flickr every minute! Basic marketing savvy tells you to go where you customers are, find out their interests and model your content/message/product to suit. Numbers like that are impossible to ignore. In addition to digital content, social media and mobile/QR strategies, you absolutely need a visual content marketing strategy.

In designing your visual content marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep the focus on engagement. Images for images’ sake are a waste of time and resources. With every video you produce and photo you take, ask yourself how can this visual content increase engagement within my current fan/user base? How can this visual content increase acquisition of new fans/users? Basically, you need to ask yourself, Why?

A media page on your website, comprehensively detailed Facebook galleries, infinite TwitPics and Pinterest boardsrds are a fantastic way to catch and hold viewer attention, but cultivating engagement is about being selective, using only the most impactful, compelling, funny or mind-blowing pics and videos. Think of it like a recipe. The right choice of seasoning can make an otherwise bland dish a party for your tastebuds. Over season a dish, no matter how bland, and you’ll find yourself exploring new and exciting ways to curse the day you were born.

1 potato + 18 tablespoons of garlic = 1 bad night

It’s the same with visual content. Your clients will tire quickly of over saturation, especially if the product or service doesn’t necessitate a lot of interesting content. Try to limit your visual content, both on your web pages and social sites to what will be the most striking.

Making It Viral

Another vital component of your Visual Content Marketing Strategy is virality. It’s not enough for you to share pictures and video, you want your audience to share it as well. It’s important to note that there’s no guaranteed process or formula to ensure virality. If there were, we’d all be using it to make everyone and everything famous. Even though there’s no set map, but the following simple but effective tasks will definitely increase the likelihood that your content will be shared.

Capture/produce interesting content.

"I can't wait to see your empty conference room!"- Nobody

Pictures for business are different than pictures for personal use. I shouldn’t have to say that, but there are so many companies that put up images of employees, offices and locations with no context to their product or services. Hire a professional photographer/videographer when you can, and in cases when you can’t, only shoot what you need to shoot. Imagine that every picture you take will be the first and only  image someone will see of your company.  Picture every video you shoot as a client’s first and only impression of your organization. Doing so will help guide your eye to ensure that you’ve got interesting subjects and great visuals.

Make your content easy to access and share.

These products look amazing if you use your imagination...

Make sure you host your content well.  Don’t cover your images in watermarks or bury videos in the back of your webpage. Tag your Facebook photos, encourage sharing, leave the watermarks to the studios and stock photo salesmen. You want people to see and share your image. It’s one thing to protect IP, it’s another to be so protective that it turns people away. Remember, you want this to go viral.

Promote your content directly to fans.

You've got to see this!

So often people, organizations and companies just post a video with nothing more than a line reading “check out the new video” or “see the pictures from such-and-such event.” You need to seriously promote your content like a new parent showing off pictures of their baby. Before the event/activity where you’re going to create content, promote it. Post a line on Facebook saying “we’re going to be shooting a new video next week” or send out tweets asking for suggestions on best places to take product photos? Make the making of your content an event.  Even days/weeks/months/years after the content is posted, refer back to it. People love retrospectives. Something as simple as a Top Ten of the week, or Year in Review list are great ways to breathe new life (and gain new attention) into old content.

A targeted visual content strategy won’t guarantee success per se, but not having one will definitely put you at a disadvantage.

How Do You Spell ROI?

It seems that when it comes to social ROI (Return On Investment), every marketing professional, online community manager and savvy blogger has their two cents- but there’s no universally accepted solution. What’s good for one organization may not be as effective for another. An amazingly successful strategy crafted for the staff writers of a publication to increase readership, may fall flat for a group of freelancers.

I addressed this issue in an eBook. I published last year. In the book, entitled “Best Better Practices” I stress the importance of focusing not what works, but rather what works best for your needs. Nobody knows (or rather nobody should know) their customer base better than you. You know how your audience and clientele respond to your activities and thus you should use that knowledge to create strategic plans that get you closer to your company’s specific social media and digital marketing objectives. All businesses, regardless of size have to determine if a strategy is effective, if it’s getting you the results you intend. Even though this fact prevents the marketing world from crafting the ultimate measuring stick by which all digital users are compared, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create a smaller measuring stick to compare your own achievements by.

Again, because of the subjective nature of social success, the following is just a guide to help you establish criteria, not what that criteria should be per se.

Knowing What You Don’t Know

Whether you’re the only employee of your business or one of thousands, to establish objectives and goals, you need to ask some questions. If you’re the only employee, those questions can be asked in your head, or outloud to your investors, friends, confidant, etc…or to a mirror if you want to go the Stuart Smalley route.

Marketing Genius?

The first question- what do you want to measure?

Often, it’s easier to start with quantitative questions. Quantitative questions deal strictly with numbers. Some basic examples would be Acquisition (how many fans? How many repeat customers/visitors?) Virality (how many retweets or shares?),  Action (how many people click my links, donate/buy my products?) and Duration (how long does my content stay in people’s minds? How long between my posts and customer response?).

Once you have that list in place, you’ll want to find out where you are currently.  This is the easiest part. It’s just a matter of looking at the data. Once you have this preliminary list of questions and answers down, it’s time to start asking what I like to call, the Impact Questions.

Boxing gloves aren’t usually necessary in digital marketing...

Examples of Impact Questions are-

How did my actions influence the current number?

What outside factors contributed to that number?

If I did nothing else, how would my numbers change?

These are the tougher questions to answer and often times, it may be hard or even impossible to answer them with 100% accuracy right off the bat, but a good overall goal is to make sure that as many results as possible are deliberate. Basically, if it happens on your site or with your audience, it’s because you did it.

It’s The Thought That Counts

Another way to assess your activities is by looking at qualitative data. Qualitative data is a little trickier as it’s absolutely objective. Sentiment (customers/audience speaking negatively, neutrally or positively about you), Influence (customers who have their own base of fans, followers, etc) and to some extent Virality fall under the qualitative label.

So which is more important, Quantitative or Qualitative?  It’s Girl Scout cookie season, so we’ll use them as an example.

Don’t let the smiles fool you, they’re here to chew bubblegum and sell cookies…and they’re all out of bubblegum…

Let’s say Janis and Joni are two girl scouts who have both sold 50 boxes of delicious, tasty shortbread cookies (I’ve got nothing against Thin Mints or Samoas, but I’m a Shortbread man). Joni is in a high traffic area downtown, so she’s selling 50 boxes per hour at a rate of 1-2 boxes per customer. Janis is in front of her neighborhood grocery store and she personally knows all of the people who buy from her. She sold 50 boxes in an hour a rate of 4-5 boxes per customer.  Joni is an example of quantitative success, whereas Janis is an example of qualitative success.

In the short term, Joni will most likely outsell Janis at the end of the season because the traffic rate is higher. Although there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to sell the same amount of cookies next season. Janis probably won’t get a lot of her friends and neighbors to buy more cookies once they’ve made their initial orders, but she probably can count on duplicating this year’s success because she knows them.

So what does that tell us?

Quantitative and Qualitative are equally important parts of a well-balanced social strategy. Keep that in mind when you’re developing your activities.

Once you’ve got your Initial questions answered and your Impact questions, it’s time to start setting goals and crafting benchmarks around those goals. If your goal is to get 100 new fans to your Facebook page and you have 50 fans right now, and you’ve noticed that you pick up one new fan every time you post a link with a mention to a related company’s Facebook page, then you’d start including links with mentions to related company’s Facebook pages twice as many times. If you increase the number of posts with links and mentions, and you see a decrease of no change in fans, then the ROI of that activity is low and you need to determine a method that raises the ROI.

Overall, success is subjective but if you know where you’re going, it’s a hell of a lot easier to figure out how to get there.

Facebook Timeline, the Basics…

There’s been a bit of talk around Facebook’s Timeline for pages. It’s really not that huge  of a change, but the changes that are present are significant enough to warrant some input. Considering Facebook will be making the changes to ALL pages at the end of March, I figured what better topic to address for the first entry than the basics of the new features on the Facebook timeline.

Cover Photo

Perhaps the most striking of changes that come with the Facebook layout is the ability to select a large photo to brand your page distinctively. The available space for the cover photo is 851×315 (that means 815 pixels wide, but 315 pixels tall). The image must be high resolution and at least 399 pixels wide.  851×315 is a safe minimum. If the image is larger, you have the option to reposition the photo. There are a few rules governing the type of image used.

You may NOT:

• Have any call to action (i.e.,”Click Like” “Like Our Page” “Refer Your Friends” “Donate here” etc).
• List any contact info including phone, email, websites, physical addresses
• Display internal FB aspects like an arrow pointing to the Like and Share buttons
• Any marketing/sales language (i.e. “Download free” “Get 10% off” etc.)
• Infringe on copyright, trademark or intellectual properties (the image must be yours)

Be mindful of these restrictions. Any pages found in violation of these restrictions may be blocked, suspended and/or deleted. The user responsible for any pages found in violation may have their accounts suspended and/or be banned from creating pages altogether.

App Label/Image

The App label and image are the buttons at the top of the timeline that allow visitors to navigate to various areas of your page.  Previously, they were contained within a tiny list on the left side, but now you have the opportunity to create something eye-catching that will drive visitors to explore you page further.  The app label should be compelling, intriguing and straightforward. The image should grab their attention and standout from the other menu elements.

Milestone Posting

Milestone posts may be dated as far back as 1800, allowing companies to enter their entire history from their founding date, along with other significant milestones. When you click the “Milestone” link, you’ll enter the event name, location, specific date and a story about what happened. You can upload photos as well. An example of a Milestone would be the first property sold or the opening of your office, obtaining new certification, etc.

Pinning

If a particular post is timely and important, you’ll want to Pin It. Pinning keeps it at the top of the timeline for seven days (you have the option unpin it prior to that as well). At the end of seven days, the post returns to its place in the timeline as a regular post.  Pinning is ideal for promotion upcoming events, new properties, articles and so forth.  Note, you cannot Pin and Highlight the same post.

Highlighting

Noteworthy posts that you’d like to feature can be highlighted. Highlighting expands the post across the entire timeline rather than delegated to either the left or right column. This practice is best for announcements and events that may be of particular interest to your visitors, but conceded priority to a more urgent post (since you can only pin one at a time).

These are the basics of the new Timeline layout for pages that will have the most impact on your business.  Though the layout and some functionality may have changed, the general essence behind Facebook’s role in your digital marketing strategy is the same- Action, Reaction, Interaction.