Visual Content Marketing

Leveraging Infographics, Video, and Interactive Media to Attract and Engage Customers

Stephen Gamble

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119157434
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119158547
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Your ticket to generating better results through infographics

Visual Content Marketing is a more than just a guide to infographics. Written for business people dealing with complex offerings, this is a hands-on, in-the-trenches guide to leveraging this emerging medium to reach bottomline business goals.

Uniquely, this book addresses the full range of visual solutions, with an emphasis on using these products to create real business value. Inside, you'll learn the ins and outs of infographics, interactive pictograms, video, animations, data-driven visualizations, and other conversion-generating graphical content. Get inspired by the groundbreaking examples showcased here, and learn how to manage every aspect of visual content, from sourcing suppliers to leveraging content on the appropriate media platforms.

Author Stephen Gamble is a leader in visual marketing solutions, with over twenty years of experience in the industry. Thousands look to his firm, Frame Concepts, for insider tips on generating revenue with the help of innovative graphics. This insider knowledge is at your fingertips in Visual Content Marketing. To meet your demanding business goals, you need new ideas. This book will show you how to infuse visual content where and when it counts.

• Generate high-quality leads and revenue with infographics, video, data visualizations, and more
• Identify the visual marketing and engagement strategies that will work for your business
• Source and manage talented content suppliers who will deliver on your strategic vision
• Integrate eye-popping visual solutions to update your brand and achieve your business goals

Focusing on the visual is the secret to success in the effort to win customer engagement and attention. Visual Content Marketing is applicable to every business function and industry. With this book, you have the start-to-finish information you need to leverage visual solutions to great effect.

Why Is There a Business Communication Problem?

• Is Business Communication Important to the Bottom Line?
• So Why Is There a Communication Problem?
• Information Overload
• Information Economy
• Attention Deficit Syndrome
• Innovation Requires New Understanding
• Differentiation in a Crowded Space Very Nuanced
• Offerings Becoming Increasingly More Specialized
• Buyers Have No Time
• Media Consumption Increasingly Visual in the Media/Consumer World

Is Business Communication Important to the Bottom Line?

I suppose if one wanted to pull back to a high level and just talk about business communication writ large and its relevance when one is concerned about business success, I have come to the conclusion that if one cannot make the marketplace (and employees and management and partners) come to terms with what you are about'what you and your offerings are about'and you furthermore cannot motivate them to engage with your offerings, you have little chance of business success. Going back to the introduction and putting a bit of personal viewpoint into our analysis: all of the companies I worked for, especially the startups, were concerned about the marketplace “getting” them. They were concerned about the VCs; they were concerned about getting the right talent onboard and excited about the new vision; they were concerned about the beta clients; they were concerned about the analysts and the media pundits; and of course they were concerned about the mainstream marketplace. From my experiences, it always felt like the company was on an inside track. They lived and breathed the new innovation'if only (and I repeat IF ONLY), the marketplace “got” them in the same way.

When I worked for a large IT consulting and services firm and we were pushing our new Security and Privacy practice that was integrating some of our new consulting acumen in the space with some of our new tech acquisitions, we presented to the chief security officer of a Tier 1 brokerage firm, a recent superstar hire from a large software vendor. He was VERY sharp. We flew in some of our top security talent, including a partner of the practice. The CSO was patient to a point during our capability presentation, and then he let us know what he really thought. He did not see that anything we were talking about had any value for his department. He asked a second time for us to explain what value we could offer to his firm. We did not satisfy him, and he suggested we come better prepared to communicate “relevance.” At least he gave us another meeting.

This theme is a pattern, especially for complex offerings'a nuanced solution that speaks to a very intelligent audience, if only we could get them in the right mindset, in the right frame of reference, to appreciate our new point of view and new offerings and not let them lump us into a traditional offering category.

This is no joke. If you have seen divisions and companies close and the impact it has, marketplace understanding and engagement is EVERYTHING. Of course, at the bottom, there has to be a differentiated offering that gives quantifiable value to its select marketplace. But once you have that and you have invested in the offering and the company's delivery capabilities, there is still just as big an issue (sometimes even bigger than product development itself): getting the marketplace onboard. And that does not happen unless they understand your offering and are motivated to engage. You have to capture their minds and their will and their hearts.

So Why Is There a Communication Problem?

We will not spend too much time on this question for fear that most of us are on the practical side and want to get visual solutions in motion. For some of us, lack of marketplace understanding and engagement can be felt in one's business life every day, and we want not so much to appreciate why but learn how to solve the problem. But again, for our readers who are onboard the visual solution train and want to steer their organizations (and their budgets) toward a visually centric approach, they may want to appear reasonable; and that this is a problem that is everywhere in today's marketplace. The most conscious CFOs want to get the marketplace onboard and have clients writing checks for services as quickly and efficiently as possible, so they want the client to appreciate the offerings so they keep renewing, right?

If this is the immediate and end goal, it is best to take a look at the hard realities of the marketplace to see it is not easy and to come back with an approach (a visual approach, of course) to meet this problem head on.

There are lots of reasons why it is difficult to enable understanding and engagement in today's marketplace. A slide from one of our webinar presentations provides some key reasons. I do not think there is anything controversial here, and one could provide stats to back them up but, again, I think we just need to remind ourselves that this is the mountain we are trying to climb. We are clamoring for marketplace attention and, of course, understanding and engagement as we drive through our content funnel starting with raw awareness, to consideration, to evaluation, and to final negotiation.

Let's quickly remind ourselves what we are up against and perhaps tuck in some suggestions with how we are going to deal with the issues, at least at a high level. You can see detailed examples in the third part of this book and how to execute in the second part.

Information Overload

The increase in specialized programs in colleges does not stop post-graduation. The average businessperson is faced with a myriad of typical learning curves. The marketing person in a technology company, for example, has to come to speed with the technology itself and think of how technical features translate to business value and then come up with positioning and creative ideas on how to get the point across. There are technical aspects to message delivery: social media, blogging, SEO, SEM, retargeting, email, and marketing automation and A/B testing of landing pages, trade shows and special events, white papers and client case studies, product road maps'and the list goes on. If the organization is targeting specific professions or industries, then the marketing person has to come to terms with their jargon, how they cut up the world, pain points, and relevant points of entry when communicating the new offering. Most professions are in a similar, layered learning curve juggling act.

Then, with your communications outreach program, you want to add to the pile they need to come to terms with. Let me tell you one thing not to do. Do not throw at them a twenty-page technical document with content and a stock photo of two executives jumping up for joy on the cover. Why not make it easy and, with one crisp visual, bring the readers' eyes and minds in and cleverly situate them and their business challenges within that visual and THEN bring your offering into the visual to show how it solves the issue and delivers that value.

Information Economy

As we move to a more information-based economy, surprise, surprise, the offerings are very information-based. That compounds the information overload problem as more competitive offerings are struggling to get their own information-based offerings to the marketplace. As we shall see in Chapter 2, information design is the perfect tool for the information economy. But everyone else's information and solution are running through the same information-based economy, and one needs to cut visually through the clutter.

Attention Deficit Syndrome

This is more perhaps a symptom of our audiences suffering from information overload. But it's a catchy, perhaps over-used term to remind us that those moments you get a marketplace member to even consider your offering are few and far between. Those eyes are scanning over meeting notes, emails, websites, presentations and reports every day. Yet you want to put your communication about your offering under their noses. Again, a piercing visual'even a static print piece or an interactive or animated communication'CAN grab attention while at the same time carefully bring people to a state of understanding and engagement. The simplicity of the visual can convince the viewer that it will only take a moment to learn the point at hand.

Innovation Requires New Understanding

The whole point to innovating is to disrupt the marketplace with something it does not have and sometimes ask others to approach the problem in a different way. You need people to come to a new frame of reference'YOUR frame of reference. You need to provoke. You don't want them to lump your approach and your offering into a traditional category. Visuals can carry the reader along. By simply visually scattering disparate traditional solutions across the world'all visually onto one circle, one platform'you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Content
• About Frame Concepts
• Foreword
• References
• About the Author and This Book
• About This Book
• Introduction: Notes from the Underground
• Part 1: Why Visual Solutions for Business?
• Part 2: Planning and Managing the Visual Solution Process in your Business
• Part 3: Showcase of Visual Solutions
• In Closing: A Sobering and a Positive Note
• Index
• End User License Agreement