Use Images to Sell Your content, but Be Smart About Visual Choices

Is a picture really worth 1,000 words? That’s debatable, but there’s no doubt that adding visuals to your blog posts, newsletters, case studies, research reports--and even your tweets--will substantially improve engagement. If you can include images of people, that will push the engagement needle even further than simply images of things and places. So forget about writing and just publish photos and video content right?

Not so fast.

Since 2010, we’ve been co-publishing a newsletter, website, magazine and annual research report for trade association execs with our client, Naylor, LLC. It’s all under the Association Adviser brand. Last month, in the Association Adviser eNewsletter, we decided to see for ourselves if images really made a different. As Naylor’s Brianna Lawson explained in The Power of Visual Content in Association Communications, we published two versions of the monthly newsletter--each version had identical content, but one version included images and the other did not. We ran an A/B test in which each email was first sent to a small number of subscribers. Then, our mailing system measured which version earned more engagement in terms of opens and clicks.

The result? The email with images garnered 33 percent more clicks to articles on our website.

The newsletter with images was also more likely to be forwarded and more likely to be shared via social media. Naylor repeated the exercise with some of its own clients and found similar results.

According to HubSpot, twice as many people prefer emails with images than prefer text only emails (65% vs. 35%). Tweets with images receive 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites, and 150 percent more retweets than text-only tweets. And according to Social Bakers, which looks at the top 10 percent of posts made by more than 30,000 brand pages. Facebook posts with photos saw the most engagement – accounting for 87 percent of total interactions.

Conclusion

People like to look at people and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, according to Market Domination Media. But don’t go overboard. As we’ll discuss in next week’s post, new research from Carnegie Mellon University, the brain makes mistakes because it applies incorrect inner beliefs, or internal models, about how the world works. So, take the time to find the right images to complement all the hard work you put into your writing and presentations. Just as a stunning photo, can keep people interested in a poorly written article or post, a dull or poor choice of images will kill potential interest in a brilliantly crafted post.

Have a happy Holiday and think before you post.

Best, HB

Our blog has more as well as the FREE Resources page of our website.

Tags: adding images to email, Hubspot, Carnegie Mellon University, Social Bakers, Market Domination Media

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Think Blog, Not Slog

Think Blog, Not Slog
Still not sold on blogging? Think it’s too difficult, too old school or too “consumer-y” for your organization? Think again.

New research from marketing firm Hubspot found businesses and professional organizations that blog just once or twice a month garner 70 PERCENT more leads than those who don’t. If you can post more frequently—say several times per week—researchers found you’ll generate on average 5 TIMES more web traffic than competitors who don’t have blogs.

But wait, there’s more! Unlike many other online marketing tactics, blogging is scalable. For instance, researchers found that doubling you posting schedule to 21-plus times per month from 11 to 20 times per month resulted in a 45 percent boost in traffic.

As we mentioned last week, a new survey by the Custom Content Council and ContentWise, found that brand content (aka brand journalism, sponsored editorial or thought leadership content) is getting a bigger slice of the marketing pie: a 13 percent increase in spending for the last two years.

But, you have to be relevant

What’s hard for many organizations to understand is that blogging isn’t the same as email blasting. It’s not the same as aggregating, scraping, tweeting, pinning or Facebook posting, either. You don’t have to be a seasoned journalist. But, you do have to commit to your own point of view and you have to be relevant. Why else would your time-pressed clients and prospects take time out of their busy days to read/watch/view what you have to say?

Be a thought leader

Blogging is about being a thought leader. You don’t have to be first with the news. You just have to put an authoritative spin on it so you can showcase your expertise. You want to be arrogant. You do want to give readers short nuggets of intelligence that can help them solve a problem, unlock a new opportunity or make their jobs easier.

There’s no ideal post length and no ideal frequency. Just commit to a schedule and volume that you and your colleagues can consistently maintain. But, if you take shortcuts and put out stale, over-used content your numbers will suffer and your reputation as well.

First impressions

According to the good folks at Gadzoog you have about 10 seconds to capture a potential customer’s attention before they click “back” and move on to your competitor. There has to be something of value offered to keep them not only interested, but coming back. Whether it’s an informational video, blog post, or a free consultation, there should be some element that helps you stand out from the crowd.

They want to find as much out about you as they can, before the commit to a phone call, demo or in person meeting.

Remember, your prospects go through a due diligence process before making a final decision about you. This time should be seen as an opportunity to inform, engage, and most importantly, offer value to your prospective audience. This poses a major advantage over the competition when considering that most businesses with a website usually lack a blog and the ones that do have a blog, rarely maintain it.

Conclusion

Blogging is not a magic silver bullet. But if done even reasonably well and consistently, it will elevate you above the clutter. It’s pretty simple to do, but just hard enough to separate the thought leaders from the pretenders. Just remember to be relevant and make sure you integrate blogging with your other marketing initiatives. You’ll be glad you did even if you don’t get the same boost in traffic (or leads) that researchers claim above.

Time after time, clients tell us the process of blogging gave them a great new idea for a presentation, video, brochure or new product that wouldn’t have occurred to them otherwise.

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TAGS: Gadzoog, blogging, Hubspot, Custom Content Council

Glimmers of Hope Within Tepid 2012 U.S. Ad Forecast

Tech spending holding steady despite gloomy economic indicators. Digital now on par with TV. Display and email still working. Is mobile cutting into paid search revenue?

While forecast after forecast comes into our inboxes projecting another humdrum year on the ad spending front, we thought we’d point out a few glimmers of hope.

2012 is a quadrennial Olympic and election year. That means we get plenty of juice from the networks sports media and political campaigns regardless of which media properties you own.

Digital media—which includes online, social and mobile--has approached parity with TV as the most important medium among agency executives, according to the latest quarterly survey from Strata, a media data processing provider. Asked what their No. 1 medium of choice was during the third quarter of 2011, more than one third (34%) of agency executives cited digital, only one point lower than the 35 percent who cited local TV. According to Media Post’s Joe Mandese, that's the closest point of parity in the three years since Strata began querying its agency clients on the dominance of various media in their workflow and budgeting, and represents a 43 percent leap from the second quarter of 2011.

The findings, which are based on a segment of more than 900 agencies. In fact, the survey indicates that digital may be at the tipping point of overtaking all other media in terms of importance, especially if the economy becomes any more unstable. While the third-quarter survey indicated that advertising budgets remain relatively stable and continue to grow overall, the agency respondents said print (52%) and local TV (24%) are the media most likely to take a hit by ad spending cuts.

“The economy is forcing many advertisers to look for more affordable ad avenues--i.e., digital and radio,” said Strata President John Shelton. However, Only 56 percent of the agency execs said they believe their clients “understand the value” in digital, while 44 percent said they don’t see the value.

Corporate profits, spending decoupled from rest of economy

As expected, last week’s post “Financial Markets Decoupled from Economy” got us a lot of attention and some naysayers, but IBM’s strong quarterly profit reported earlier this week gives more credence to our argument. Corporations continue to spend on information technology despite the lousy economy. They’re hording cash and investing in systems, infrastructure and efficiency—not in people—to cut costs and get more productivity out of the headcount they already have in place. The IBM’s of the world sell to big corporate customers, not to Main Street, so that’s why they can report solid profits at a time when the jobless rate is still so painfully high.

Lots of analysts consider IBM a bellwether of IT spending because it’s the largest supplier of computing technology, hardware, software and services to corporations. IBM’s results mirror what we reported to you from Oracle, Salesforce.com and others corporate technology players over the summer.

Our take: In a tough market, there’s always a flight to quality. Smart media owners will find a way to pry that cash out of CMOs’ and their agencies, tightly wadded fists by stressing audience quality, editorial integrity and measurable ROI.

Display advertising shifts from direct response to branding media

Most media buyers and some media owners still think clicks, impressions and conversions are the way to measure performance of online display advertising, but researchers say the more important metrics often point to return on ad spend, online searches for brand names, product recall, and sales.

"The Digital Advertising 2011: A Portrait of Conflict" study released by Collective finds that 57 percent of agencies believe the majority of their display objectives are to build the brand, yet only 11 percent cite ad creative as critical to the campaign's success. Still, three in five (60%) of agencies cite brand recall and intent to purchase as the most important measures of online success. However, clicks and conversions remain the key criteria agencies say they use to evaluate media, according to the Collective study.

OUR TAKE: Through a combination of laziness, arrogance and feeling overwhelmed, agencies tend to fall back on McMetrics, things that are easiest to measure rather than business-building metrics that are harder to measure, but derive real value from a campaign.

Is mobile cutting into paid search ad revenue?

More searches being done on mobile phones where people are less click on ads and the ads cost less. Even mighty Google received 5 percent less for clicks in the second quarter of this year, vs. 2nd quarter last year according to a New York Times report late last week. E-mail remains most popular way to market events. Social media, the least effective.

On average, business use 5.5 different methods to promote their events and email remains the most popular, according to a new eBook released jointly by HubSpot and Constant Contact. More than 70 percent of marketers surveyed by the two aforementioned organizations cited email, followed by word-of-mouth (65%). Social media was deemed least effective.

Just as in a sluggish stock market, there’s always a flight to advertising quality in a tight economy. Savvy marketers and media owners know they have to keep their minds open to new ways of reaching—and measuring—their target consumers, but they should ignore time-tested legacy media such as display, print, broadcast and live events. Those legacy media have been around longer, but they’re still improving at the same rate, if not faster, than some of the new kids on the block.

Resist the urge to go “EITHER/OR” in your media planning process. Just go with a balanced portfolio of media options and make sure you’re always using best in class. Not cheapest in class.

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