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Today’s audience has trouble focusing because of their hyperactive, commotion-ridden environment. Everyday, people are exposed to more webpages, TV shows, social media posts, instant gratification technologies and data. The Attention Economy records how one Sunday New York Times edition presents more factual data than 15th century readers could access in their entire lifetimes! According to new research, social media marketers are turning to visual content to get the job done. The power of visual content marketing isn’t a new concept. Graphic designers have always had a role to play in marketing and advertising, even on traditional media like TV and newspapers....
Whether you're reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar or a blog post, the lesson remains the same. For one, visual content increases memory recall. What's more, articles with images every 75-100 words tended to get double the social media shares of articles with fewer images in a BuzzSumo analysis. So needless to say, visuals such as infographics, videos, or images should be integrated into your content marketing strategy. There are a few hurdles to creating and promoting visual content, but there are big payoffs, too. Venngage surveyed 300 marketers to learn about their visual content marketing strategies in 2016 to predict trends for 2017. Overall, the marketers surveyed recognize the immense value of creating visuals to increase content quality and engagement but struggle with finding the time and resources to do it well. Read more marketing statistics and trends for the year ahead in the infographic below....
Is Instagram part of your marketing strategy? With 600 million users, Instagram’s growth is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. It’s become a prime place for brands to show off their personalities and promote their products to the world. We've put together 20 great examples of Instagram marketing from top brands like Disney, Nike, and Tesla to help give you the edge and inspire your Instagram marketing....
If you’re working to build up your social media presence, you know that images are essential to boosting your online engagement. In fact, content with images gets almost twice as many views. If you’re not sharing images your audience loves, you’re missing out on serious engagement.
You need visual content, but figuring how to get it can be a challenge.
- Which images are best for your business?
- How can you find or create them?
- How can your images stand out among the avalanche of others on social media when Facebook alone sees more than 300 million images shared every single day?
In this post, you’ll get three great tips on how to up your social game so you can get more clicks, likes and follows. You’ll learn the elements of shareable images, what works on each platform, and design tips to create engaging images for social media....
Daunting is the blank canvas. Even more daunting is a newer content format that has so much versatility and possibility. Though this is a very reasonable reaction to have, that doesn’t mean you should fully stand by it.Imagine seeing a bicycle for the first time. What is that thing? I’m suppose to ride it? Ride it, and not succumb to gravitational pull, slamming my body flat into the hard, indifferent earth? Ideally, you’d have a little help. Someone to say, put your right foot here, push down the pedal, and, with forward momentum, lift your left foot and place it on the left pedal – then continue! Look, you’re riding! And that’s exactly what I hope this post will do....
What about e-commerce brands or other companies that drive engagement and sales through their social channels with visual content?
A 10x content post doesn’t really help there, but if visuals are more your style, then there are plenty of ways to 10x your social graphics to boost your content strategy and capture your audience’s attention in the middle of their browsing....
Visuals are a key component of your eLearning course design. But what if your eLearning budget doesn't allow for high quality images? In this article, I'll share the top 10 free eLearning stock photo sites that you should check out....
These days, it’s no secret that high-quality images are important for any marketing strategy, particularly when it comes to social media. Images not only help brands stand out in busy social news feeds, but they also boost engagement and build brand awareness—and their importance is growing.
According to a WebDAM infographic, 84% of all communication will be visual by 2018. So, there’s no better time than the present to ensure you’re creating and sharing top-notch imagery. And that starts with following sizing best practices for each channel.
To help you do just that, below is a quick cheat sheet for sizing your images for optimal impact, complete with dimensions and some examples. In addition, you’ll also find some helpful tools that can help your resize, edit or create images....
Typographic characters don’t always need to come from font files. Many of today’s brilliant designs manifest typographic characters through drawing, squiggling and doodling.
Meet Shigeo Fukuda, a master of manipulating lines into playful concepts. In the example to the left, Fukuda creates the words, “The Sun”, from a playful and winding doodle of a power cord emerging from behind a minimal rendition of the sun.
How would you create playful typography from an illustration or drawing? Think about ideas like creating words like “health” from illustrations of vegetables. Or create a rendering of a word like “summer” out of illustrations of melting ice cubes.
Get playful!...
The Nikon Small World contest celebrates the most amazing microscope photos from around the world, and 2016's competition was as amazing as any of the years before it: more than 2,000 entries from 70 countries. (I was a judge for the 40th year of the contest.) Nikon will release the winners on Wednesday, October 19, via its Instagram account, @NikonInstruments. Until then, soak in the finalists below — and cast a vote for your favorite....
Whether you promote content that is fresh or seasonal, evergreen or topical, your endeavor will be meaningless if it doesn’t make your readers sizzle and pop with excitement. How do you capture the attention of your audience without crafting content from scratch?
Perhaps all you need is a high-quality photo. Not a bland, lifeless image, but an attention-grabbing picture — one with a story behind it. Maybe you need a series of compelling images if you’re marketing a lengthy content piece.
Research shows that:
- Color visuals increase a person’s willingness to go through a content piece by 80%.
- Posts or articles with images receive 94% more views than posts or articles without images.
- Understanding of content jumps from 70% to 95% with the integration of images....
Do you use your smartphone or tablet to post images to social media? Looking for mobile image apps to enhance your visuals? In this article, you’ll discover four mobile apps to help you create and publish outstanding social media images on the go....
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When you are marketing a variety of products to 170 different countries, content production time is of the essence. With this in mind, Heineken partnered with Grip, an online platform that automates the production of visual content for physical goods, for a beta test for its first solution Still Shots. Grip processes photo input and generates virtual version of the product (like a beer bottle) that can be edited, manipulated, and downloaded for use...
It’s only a few months into 2017, but brands are already making their presences known – in a big way. Concepts and visuals are stronger than ever in this year’s content marketing efforts. “We’re in a golden age of visuals, and content is king,” says Pam Grossman, Getty Images’ Director of Visual Trends. “2017 is all about images that are bold, impactful, and evocative. ”Each year, Getty releases an annual trends report on the types of images that most resonate with viewers and leave lasting impressions. Here’s a look at the 2017 list, inspiring examples from brands, plus tips on incorporating these new visual cues into your content marketing. ...
We are a visual culture. People respond better to visual content and even process information more efficiently when presented in a visual way. With so many performance advantages, it’s clear how design can elevate written content. With the convincing out of the way, let’s talk about specific ways to introduce design and visual storytelling into your content marketing strategy. We all know that blog posts need images but are you using enough? One of the best ways to increase the reach of your content is with the right amount of images. BuzzSumo did the math for us, and found that the right amount of images is one every 75-100 words: “In a study of over one million articles, BuzzSumo looked at how many blog posts with images were shared. Then they looked at how many images, per how many words, got the best results. What they found was articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.”...
Twibfy is an inspirational platform and marketplace for creative professionals. Discover and purchase high quality digital visual content curated by creatives for creatives and organize it in the Twibfy cloud. The marketplace offers an environment for talented people to showcase their work and instantly sell it through the platform.
The New York Public Library just released a treasure trove of digitized public domain images, everything from epic poetry from the 11th century to photographs of used car lots in Columbus, Ohio from the 1930s. Over 180,000 manuscripts, maps, photographs, sheet music, lithographs, postcards, and other images were released online Wednesday in incredibly high resolution, and are available to download using the library's user-friendly visualization tool. It's a nostalgist's dream come true....
Visual content has become so prevalent that it’s no longer just a piece of the marketing industry, but its core. The widespread adoption of video across almost all platforms means that marketers need to refocus their efforts throughout 2017. An infographic from Venngage examines how marketers are using visual content and the challenges they face. Venngage surveyed more than 300 marketers and found that the percentage using visual content as part of overall strategy is increasing. 53 percent of the survey participants said that between 91 and 100 percent of their published content contained visual material, and more than 90 percent are using visual content in at least one-half of their posts. There seems to be a disconnect between methods and outcomes when it comes to which content marketers select. While 35 percent of the survey participants reported choosing stock images most frequently, fewer than 8 percent reported high engagement related to those photos. More than 40 percent reported infographics as most engaging, while 25 percent said the same of data visualizations and charts and 20.2 percent saw the most engagement with videos and presentations....
We are hardwired to be visual. Science has proven vision is the most powerful of all our sensory systems for cognition. 90% of all input in our brains is visual. People remember 60% of what they see, but only 40% of what they read. What’s different nowadays is the shift from functional charts and graphs to more beautiful, interactive infographics. Boring designs increasingly fail to engage our audience; people crave for more art-like visuals. For the vast majority of non-designers out there, the challenge is to strive for a balance between beauty and functionality. In our quest to learn how to make sense of all the information out there, we asked 25 experts for their best advice on how to tell visually compelling data-driven stories. We hope these experts’ tips will help you communicate data-driven information in an engaging way....
As a marketer, you are probably already aware that images are important. They're easier to digest than a bunch of words on a page and can help support your other content by telling a story in ways that words cannot. Whether in social media posts or in blog posts, images help your audience to better understand what you are talking about, plain and simple. Cinemagraphs can take things a step further. What is a cinemagraph, you ask? The artists over at Cinemagraph.com – where the cinemagraph was essentially born – describe them as "an image that contains within itself a living moment that allows a glimpse of time to be experienced and preserved endlessly. "In plain English, a cinemagraph is really just a fancy GIF – a file format often used to create short, infinitely-looping animations for the web. Check out the example below....
Small pictures can make a big difference in a mobile-driven world.
Quite often other photographers tell me “I don’t have time for another social network and I don’t need Instagram.” Yet they spend hours posting on Facebook, 500px and Flickr where almost zero potential clients will see their work.
They’re basically getting followers, likes, and comments coming from other photographers. Instagram can be useful in ways you might not have thought of before, and it shouldn’t take you too much time to build a presence on it.
In this article, I’ll try to share a bit of my experience on this social network as a photographer (@zellersamuel 12k followers) and how it benefits my work....
In a study published by the Content Marketing Institute last month, 70% of B2B marketers stated they will produce more original content in 2017 than they did in 2016, and 39% plan to increase their content marketing spending over the next year.
Meanwhile, user-generated content is also expected to explode. The global Internet population grew 62%, from 2.1 billion to 3.4 billion, in just the last four years.
All this means that the amount of content online, including visual content, will only increase exponentially with time–not decrease.
So, with so much noise out there, how can can you still create unique visual content that stands out?....
I’m sure I won’t blow your mind by saying that visuals are essential to creating content that will help your business stand out and draw in an audience. Not only do images help make text-centric content more readable, digestible, and memorable, but they can also be used to craft compelling messages that speak volumes without using a single word — just ask anyone who has posted a photo on Instagram or created a “Snap” to share a memorable moment with friends.
Nearly a year ago, I compiled a collection of best-practice tips from some of the industry’s most creative and design-minded content experts, along with helpful imaging tools and examples. But, considering how rapidly visual trends come and go, we at CMI felt it was time to take another look at how to let your brand’s photos, videos, and graphics do the talking.
Of course, we wouldn’t want a retrospective on such an image-conscious topic to show visible signs of aging; we’ve freshened up the discussion with a few new tips, tricks, and takeaways....
It’s no secret that visual content is powerful. Numerous studies show that our ability to recall information increases significantly when it’s presented as an image rather than plain text.
That’s why infographics, despite the fact that they are everywhere, are still effective when done well.
Infographics are still effective when done well says @sujanpatel. #contentmarketing CLICK TO TWEET
What that means, as summarized by Jeff Bullas, is that an infographic (and visual content as a whole) should:
- Blend seamlessly into the user experience
- Fit the platform used to share it
- Offer genuine value — never an aggressive attempt to sell
- Be bite-sized — quick and easy to consume
- Relate to the things your audience cares about
- Be consistent in style and tone
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Check out 16 types of visual content that can ramp up your readership.