Better Visual Marketing in Eight Easy Steps

Understanding the value of a quality visual marketing strategy is essential for digital advertising success. 

Between Facebook video, visual tweets, messaging apps, data visualization, and live-streaming video, consumers see visual content virtually everywhere they go online.

A quick look at the numbers reveals that images are swiftly enveloping the Web:

• 63 percent of social media content is now made up of images.
• 95 percent of marketers report that their visual content is more effective than text.
• The average mobile YouTube viewing session is 40 minutes long, with an increase of 50 percent year-over-year.

If you’ve ever doubted the value of visual marketing, it’s time to get on board with the trend.

However, a byproduct of this image and video outbreak is marketing clutter. With everyone producing more visual content, it’s increasingly difficult to stand out – and we all know what happens next. As much as image-rich messaging appeals to consumers, content blindness is always waiting in the wings.

The solution? Take your content up a notch with these eight strategies for better visual marketing:

1. Say it with original pictures whenever possible

Always look for opportunities to convey your message with unique images that are easy to view and share. If you have stats to offer, create an infographic. If you’re promoting an event, snap a timely or seasonal photo. Even run-of-the-mill job listings can be embellished with images that lend interest and garner attention.

We're #hiring for our global digital marketing team. Learn more here > https://t.co/v50lYftdu7 #peaceloveicecream pic.twitter.com/R7V9utfIaq

— Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) January 28, 2016

2. Use animated GIFs

They may be everywhere, but they remain a fun way to engage audiences. Salesforce’s blog post,For Visual Learners: 10 Animated Gif Stats about Marketing in 2015, aligned each point with an animated GIF as a way to further illustrate and support its research. The GIFs give curated stats personality and memorable flair.

3. Be real

Much of today’s visual content reads as forced or staged, so when you’re creating yours, steer clear of tropes and stereotypes.

How many can you count in this episode of Optimum’s The Unmovers ? (Answer: Too many).

Don’t blow your budget on stories that have been done to death. Instead, make your original video content feel fresh and new, like Samsung did with its documentary project The Connected Series on Vimeo.

4. But don’t rule out stock photography

Authenticity may be all the rage, and original visual assets will definitely differentiate you from your competitors. That said, stock photography is a powerful support system that can prove to be invaluable for brands with limited production resources. Make stock photos your own by applying filters, changing the contrast or saturation, and cropping to fit your brand’s visual identity. Once you identify a look you like, always stay consistent.

5. Take all the help you can get (from your customers)

Few brands have an easy time of generating enough visual content to feed multiple digital channels and appease their customers. User-generated content is a near endless source of visual assets for your brand.

Take a cue from companies like Patagonia, which invited its “ambassadors and friends” to share images of their outdoor adventures throughout the climbing season in Patagonia. The result is a huge gallery of images that reflect the brand’s rugged personality and supply content for social accounts like Patagonia Climb on Instagram.

6. Create content for every part of the marketing funnel

Design content that will resonate with leads, prospects, and existing customers. Every piece should serve a clear purpose, whether it’s an animated explainer video meant to boost product awareness, or an image-rich contest for your most loyal customers.

7. Leverage hashtags

This is one of the easiest ways to extend the reach of your visual content. Include established brand hashtags – like #GoPro, #GoProGirl, #Hero3 – but supplement these with additional hashtags that are popular with your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter fans.

Relevant tags that are already being used can help your visual content gain traction, such as GoPro’s use of #360, #MusicMonday, #GreatWhite.

8. Don’t forget the audio!

Before you say it with pictures, consider how sound might play a part. Your first few frames are what will draw viewers in, but user-initiated audio can really enhance your overall message – and even become central to the experience, as is the case with this user-generated video curated and revined by Burt’s Bees.

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Eight best practices for your native advertising strategy

Here are eight refined tips to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your native advertising strategy and enjoying the highest levels of consumer engagement. 

According to the Association of National Advertisers, 63 percent of advertisers were planning to increase their native advertising budgets in 2015, bumping up spending to $10.7 billion. That’s an impressive uptick of 150 percent from spend in 2013. Additionally, 72 percent of publishers are currently offering native ads, or planning to within the next several years.

This impressive growth is for good reason – the native ad format performs for advertisers. Native ads result in four times the lift over traditional display ads for branded search activity and six times the lift for generic search activity. The reason this format performs so well for advertisers is because it engages consumers.

In a cross-channel and cross-device world, native formats have the ability to complement any context, whether consumers are on their smartphones or desktop Web browsers. That flexibility pays off; our research has found that over 60 percent of consumers have “positive impressions” of native advertising.

This is due to three key reasons:

1. Consumers say native ads introduce them to new products.
2. Native ads provide information that consumers wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
3. These types of ads also fit naturally within the online experience.

To help marketers effectively use native advertising to its fullest potential, we set out to understand and define the creative best practices associated with this format. We held an in-lab survey of over 800 internet and smartphone users, and used eye-tracking to determine fixations, or momentary pauses of the eye within an area of interest happening long enough for cognitive processing to take place. This extensive research helped us develop eight best practices marketers should follow when incorporating this powerful format into their advertising strategy.

1. Images featuring people

People-based images deliver fixation on PC, and deep engagement and lower-funnel metrics on mobile. Images with people lead to higher brand familiarity, brand affinity, purchase increase, and recommendation increase. Consider leveraging these types of images in your native ads, especially on mobile.

2.  Labels of transparency

When one is new to market, transparency is critical. Native video units benefit from a clear label. In this case, the word “sponsored” leads to increased recall, familiarity, and interaction on all platforms.

3. Symbols as labels

For more established native units, like a native mobile app install ad, you may use a “$” as a label of transparency.  This is a space to watch as consumers become more accustomed to native units.

4. Logos

Don’t shy away from letting your logo shine in your native advertising. On mobile, a logo leads to a 25 percent increase in fixation. Logo presence is very important, and larger logos deliver recall, action, and longer fixation for your ad on multiple platforms.

5. Brand mentions

Brand mentions do not have the same impact as logos, but are still important to include in the headline of your native ad, especially with static image ads. Doing so can lead to a 24 percent increase in aided recall, and 11 percent increase in purchase intent. However, in native advertising, brand mentions in the body of the text do not provide significant changes to brand metrics.

6. Video ads

Native video ads that are about 15 seconds long drive greater recall and purchase intent than longer video units, following the trend seen in general video advertising. Consumers were more likely to fixate on 15-second ads on both PC and mobile; they have shorter patience and are looking for the least disruptive ad experience possible.

7. Auto-start ads

Don’t be afraid to leverage auto-start ads when it comes to native, as it drives a slight increase in brand affinity and outperforms user-initiated ads in recall and fixation.

8. An easy to navigate mobile experience

Ensure that you have a seamless mobile experience in place for the consumer post-click, as users tend to fixate on the “more” button.

In conclusion

Native advertising offers a ton of opportunities for marketers, and there’s a reason it’s been a breakout star in the industry. To ensure you’re making the most out of this impactful ad format, it’s important to be transparent with your audience, leverage people-based images and make sure to strut your logo and brand to encourage recall. As digital video consumption continues to increase, so will the power of short, native video and auto-start ads. Marketers should consider adopting these new formats to keep their brand top-of-mind for consumers.

By: David Iudica, director of strategic insight and research at Yahoo.

As Director, strategic insights and research, David provides support to more than 3000 sales and marketing executives spanning the globe. He is responsible for digital insight initiatives designed to help Yahoo create more meaningful connections between its advertising partners and its consumers. This includes overseeing a group of researchers challenged with providing thought-provoking research to the industry around topics like mobile, video, social, native, and audiences.

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5 Proven Ways to Leverage Social Proof for Your Brand

Does publishing engaging content make people want to buy from you?

While this is important, effective content creation is only one piece of the puzzle.

After your target audience has read your blog posts, downloaded your eBooks, and visited your website – they are looking for validation. They want to validate the thoughts and feelings they have already formed about your brand with consensus.

Consensus is one of the six universal principles of persuasion – people will look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine their own actions. In today’s digital landscape consensus comes from social proof.

An ounce of psychology: Why social proof works in marketing

Social proof simply means that people conform to the actions of others, under the assumption that these actions reflect a correct or acceptable behavior (in other words, what the “cool kids” are doing). It takes the form of feedback, reviews, and approval from other people who have tried your product or service.

Although a marketing environment is different than the halls of a high school, much of the psychological influence behind social proof, and why it works, remains the same. When prospects look at a solution that will answer their pain points or solve their problems, it’s human nature to conform to the actions of those who’ve been there before.

Leveraging social proof can push your brand to new heights, whether you harness its power on your website, in your social media posts, or as part of your content marketing strategy. A number of ways exist to establish social proof, but below are a few that can undeniably build your brand’s trust and credibility in the minds of prospective clients – making them want to buy.

5 Ways Your Brand Can Leverage Social Proof

1. Turn employees into brand ambassadors

Your marketing team may be writing engaging and helpful social posts on your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter account – but when posted on a company page, they feel far from personal.

The easiest way for a company to create social proof is through its employees – one of its most untapped resources. When coming directly from employees, posts about how great the company culture is, an upcoming sponsored event, or even a new job opening will always feel more authentic in the eyes of prospects than a corporate post ever will.

Employees have access to fresh and unique audiences that a marketing team has difficulty reaching, and their posts are much more likely to be considered real and trustworthy.

Quick tips for encouraging employees to share on social media:

• Launch an employee advocacy program and create a set of guidelines to keep employees informed.
• If your company is recruiting, ask employees to share the news on their personal social profiles.
• Incentivize social sharing by rewarding employees who have generated the most likes, shares, or clicks, or found the next hire for your company.
• Use employee advocacy tools such as Addvocate or Social Chorus to get everyone on board.
• Create a company culture hashtag, such as Adobe did with #adobelife (see below), and encourage employees to share social posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using it.

Example of employee advocacy using the #adobeLife hashtag:

2. Capture real-time social proof by listening

Social listening is an essential part of better understanding your target audience. On Twitter for example, you should track brand mentions and respond to any questions, comments or feedback as promptly as possible.

To start monitoring your brand mentions, download a free tool such as TweetDeck, and create a stream to follow mentions of your Twitter handle. Then, start favoriting, re-tweeting or interacting with any tweets about your brand. For example, this could be a prospect tweeting about helpful customer support, or an existing customer sharing feedback on one of your new products. The tendency at this stage is to only respond to positive messages, but it is also important to proactively respond to negative comments where possible.

Here is an example of the favorites timeline from KISSMetrics, a brand who regularly interacts with prospective customers on Twitter:

You may also like to track industry keywords on Twitter; if anyone is asking for suggestions on a product or solution, look for a way to get them to check yours out.

Social listening is powerful because it not only builds your brand’s image, but also offers website visitors an interactive and real-time experience. Look to leverage this form of social proof by embedding tweets on your website for prospects to see.

3. Collaborate with customers & influencers

Content marketing and social proof go hand-in-hand. There are countless opportunities for bringing customers – or even influencers, into your content marketing strategy. Partnering with another company or individual compounds the effect of promotion and amplifies your exposure. As this positive energy gains momentum it acts as “proof” that your customers and thought-leaders support your brand.

Ideas for joint content marketing initiatives:

• Co-host your next webinar with a customer, or if possible, an industry influencer. Figure out a way that the event will benefit both of you, and then ask them to help promote it on social media by creating an event hashtag.
• Contact one of your most active customers, and write up a case study. Publish it on your website, upload the slides to SlideShare if relevant, and share it in your nurturing emails.
• Reach out to an influencer via Twitter to request an interview, and publish it as a blog post.
• Ask a customer or influencer to contribute a quote to your next eBook or white paper.
• Create a “Clients Page” for your website to feature testimonials (with logos and headshots).

Here is an example from the HubSpot customer testimonials webpage:

4. Ask your customers to write online reviews

When was the last time you purchased a product – or even went to a restaurant, without first reading a few reviews?

Studies show that 70% of consumers say they look at product reviews before making a purchase, while 79% of them trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Reviews can make or break a brand, and motivating happy customers to share their experience online – particularly on social, can generate some much needed social proof. So be proactive about generating positive reviews by asking your best customers.

Take some time to research the niche review sites in your industry – such as Yelp, TrustRadius or G2Crowd – and seek to reward the people who have reviewed your product or service. Ask to showcase their photo, company logo, and part of their review on your website or landing page.

Here is an example of a customer review from TrustRadius:

5. Add social share counts to your site

This last one is more obvious than the others – but sometimes it’s the basic ideas that count most for social proof. Adding social media share buttons, such as the AddThis widget, is the quickest way to give readers the chance to share content on their personal profiles.

Here is an example of social media share buttons from JeffBullas.com:

If you’re new to blogging, it might be best to only have share buttons – with no counter – since share counts will probably be low. But, when you start gaining a dedicated readership, placing a counter on your blog posts shows readers that others find your content worthy of sharing, subconsciously nudging them to follow in the footsteps of their peers.

When done well, these five actions will transform the perception of your brand. Leveraging social proof is a powerful tool for marketers, as it demonstrate to prospective clients that your solution is a legitimate part of your industry’s conversation.

Of course you need to talk about your brand – but it’s far more compelling to showcase how current clients and industry players are talking about your products and services.

About the author: Valerie Levin is the Director of Inbound Marketing at Penguin Strategies, a B2B marketing agency focused on bridging the gap between sales and marketing, and leveraging inbound marketing to generate qualified leads for clients.

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