Visual Marketing for B2B Companies - Here's how to do it
Marketing is in transition. First, social media transformed the way we communicate, stay informed, and make buying decisions. Mobile was the catalyst that changed the scale of social. And, content marketing is the way to win in these essential spaces. It's never been more relevant for B2B companies, especially B2B technology companies.Â
The biggest challenge for all marketers today is that they create / design content for mass distribution, but that content is being consumed on a single channel, unilaterally at the receiver's end.Â
This is where the fabric of a social enterprise makes a difference.Â
The Cloudaria visual marketing platform helps you connect with individuals and not with a demographic. It helps your key advocates - your experts, your customers and your partners to have a share in the corporate voice. It helps your brand embrace authenticity.Â
This is done in a few ways:
1. Social Visualization of Brand and Thought Leadership
Create online destinations with real-time social feeds of your thought leaders, evangelists and customers to create content destinations with owned and earned content. You can moderate the content, highlight the most relevant ones and personalize them to showcase content cards in snackable yet visually appealing form.Â
By creating such campaigns, you harness the social diversity of your company's networks to attract new clients, better understand current ones and create working environments with unprecedented innovation.
It also becomes the content hub - a dynamic visualization of the knowledge and expertise shared every day that positions your brand as a thought leader in the space that you operate in.Â
2. Bring culture to the fore with innovative hashtag campaigns
We all know about unique employer brand campaigns like "I'm an IBMer" or L'Oreal's "Are you In". You can use the Cloudaria platform to create compelling employer brand campaigns, make all your employees all in and drive brand affinity across all potential stakeholders.Â
An innovative hashtag campaign involving your best social advocates - your employees ensures you convey a real sense that underneath what might be seen as a monolithic (or boring) corporate facade lie many brilliant and vibrant individuals, allowed to be individualistic.
3. Social Campaigns on Visual Networks
B2B products don't tend to be inherently visual, so in order to ride the wave of visual content popularity, marketers usually have to go the extra mile and think outside the box.
And while it may be easy to ignore visual content creation, itâs been proven that compelling visual content increases engagement online, and that's not something you should ignore.
Look at GE, who relies primarily on photos instead of graphic designs. And if you think GEâs photos would get boring quickly, think again.
Cloudaria's campaign management capabilities will ensure you build a robust presence across all consumer touch points.Â
4. Online Brand Magazines and Newsrooms:
Not too different from #1, but you can also take socially wired brand publishing to another level, but curating and co-creating online magazines, using the Cloudaria platform. Highly visual, such channels are already used by marquee brands for information discovery & consumption, engagement and shaping the voice of the brand.
Sometime in mid 2013, @apnerve, @phoenixwizard and I, @axl_rich, met up for a freewheeling discussion on the current trends in brand publishing and how the solutions that existed are sub-optimal from a user experience point of view. That discussion never really culminated into anything specific, but sparked off a few thoughts in our minds.Â
Regular quality content creation is hard for brands. It's time-consuming, and it's costly. How can that process be made simpler?Â
A company or brand's ecosystem is not just fans on social networks, but experts, partners and customers too. How do you harness and curate that diversity to create regular content that speaks your brand's character?
How do you ensure your content has a much higher shelf life?
How do you manage the challenges of permissions, speed and brand consistency in user-generated content?
How do you seamlessly publish content that gets pushed to your target audience in a 1:1 setting in his choice of device in a friction-free manner?
These were some of the thoughts that we grappled with, and by July 2014, we decided to start working full-time on a small niche in the digital marketing automation space, and Cloudaria was born.Â
We are launching as a visual content engine for brands, publishers and broadcasters. As we've noted before, visual content (images and videos) are the primary mode of communication nowadays and is increasing at a breathtaking rate. Our minds are wired such that visual content registers faster, leaves a more lasting impression, and is 10x more effective in communicating any message. Given the scope of creating value and enormity of the opportunity, VOICES was built to help brands understand visual conversations, seamlessly publish owned and earned content and identify trends, ROI for each piece of content and even ambassadors that are more relevant for content distribution.Â
Cloudaria provides 4 key benefits:
It turns brands into publishers - by helping create unique interplay of owned and earned content across any customer touch point - from mobile phones to bill boards.Â
It helps increase your conversion rates by making your customers the hero, the model, the ambassador in the purchase process.Â
It helps you create a steady stream of visual content for any channel and engage your network in lasting ways.Â
It helps determine the ROI of each content piece - from a tweet or a pinned photo to the revenue that generates.Â
Get in touch with us if you want to see the product in action - we will be happy to help you amplify your brand voice.Â
Increase Brand Engagement through Visual Storytelling
We've all seen the statistics, and we all know that content marketing becomes doubly effective when interspersed with powerful visuals, visuals that resonate with our personality, circumstance or ambition.Â
4 key factors determine whether your brand is headed towards visual storytelling awesomeness:
1. Authenticity:
In the age of selfies and the ubiquity of photo-sharing apps, people crave for personal connection. Digital natives and internet-savvy users instantly recognize and reject staged images or press shots in a story context. Independent tests clearly revealed that ârealâ images of real people are what draw visitors deeper into the content. User-Generated Content (UGC) reveals real people and places, meaning real moments and emotions that establishes a heightened digital intimacy.Â
Dove is an example of a marketer that has nailed authenticity and benefitted from it. And MasterCard â real people, real moments. The hair isnât perfect, the lighting isnât perfect. But it works.
2. Cultural Relevancy
Diversity and inclusiveness are issues that are very culturally relevant today. Forward-looking content marketers always strive for local, cultural connection while maintaining the brand's global appeal in visual communication. The best visual content (pictures and videos) are immediate and timeless.Â
3. Sensory Currency
We spend our lives almost entirely online, but most of us have had it up to here with digital. People want to cut through the screen, and let themselves be engulfed by visceral experiences.Â
4. Classic Storytelling Archetypes
Archetypes are classic characters that have been used to tell stories for hundreds, if not thousands of years - and the 12 classic archetypes are still just as powerful of a storytelling tool today.
In any good story, a powerful character, a strong persona with emotional connection has fueled the narrative. Through understanding the archetypal stories that shape our culture and values, brands can create more engaging content and better connect with their audiences.
See how P&G used the "Caregiver" archetype for its "Thank you, Mum" campaign.
The Hunter campaign uses the "Explorer" archetype by focusing on the âEveryday Pioneerâ and connects the brandâs heritage in interesting ways to a modern interpretation of this archetype that involves the audience in the content creation on social channels using the hashtag #beapioneer.
And, as all of us become creators, curators and publishers of content, and technology companies provide us with the tools to create and share our work, companies are increasingly using the "Creator" archetype, as the current Apple iPad Air campaign highlights.
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So, how does a brand go about effective visual storytelling? We at Cloudaria believe that this cannot be achieved in isolation, and needs to be integral to the overall digital marketing strategy. While platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are leading the way for brands to connect with prospects and consumers in more personal ways, and Twitter and Facebook get more and more people hooked on with snackable content along with visuals, native reach of each of these platforms are diminishing, as these platforms strive for more monetization. More on this, in the next few posts...Â
Images are Eating the Web - The Rise of Authentic Visual Content
Seeing is believing. Whether we like it or not, we always judge by appearances - judging whether a fashion statement is appealing by looking how my friend looks, judging a book by its cover, judging a place to explore by seeing pictures, and judging a company by its website. We rely on visual content because our brains are wired to - we read no more than 20% of text in any page.Â
The web has also gone through a fundamental shift - from text web to pixel web. The growth of the visual web hinges on a few key developments.
1. THE EXPLOSION OF VISUAL CONTENT
Customer photos are the most authentic and compelling brand assets available today. Thanks to the mass adoption of smartphones and visual networks like Instagram, they are also incredibly abundant.Â
500 million photos were shared per day in 2013 and 1.8 billion photos are being shared per day in 2014. Thatâs 75 million per hour, 1.25 million per minute and 20,833 per second.
Until recently, few brands understood the true breadth and depth of the customer photo opportunity, but nowadays more and more brands use a unique interplay of owned and earned visual content in their commerce experience.Â
2. SOCIAL PROOF HAS GONE VISUAL
Savvy audiences have learned to tell the difference between a studio photo shoot and an authentic experience. While both owned and earned visuals still have a place in your branding strategy, user generated visual content endorsing your products reinforce your emotional connection and tells the story of your brand as a social-first, mobile-first entity. Nielsen statistics indicate that nearly two thirds of us make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from other consumers.Â
3. IMAGES WILL OVERTAKE TEXT AND UGC WILL SURPASS PUBLISHED CONTENT
Because attractive images on the Web increases propensity to share and collect, it is breeding a new tribe of highly engaged brand advocates and influential users. Visual web democratizes influence. Users donât have to be celebrities to cast influence. They just have to have taste. Taste is intent.
Instagram got 5 million photo uploads for #thanksgiving only only Thanksgiving Day.
400 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every day
Etsy gets 100,000 pins daily on Pinterest
Facebook made the web social. Instagram created a photo based social network. Pinterest is creating a network of sharable and ownable visual hyperlinks i.e images that are connected to web pages. Pinterest makes the social web, visual.
4. VISUAL EARNED CONTENT IS MONETIZABLE.Â
Visual Web helps brands and social enterprises achieve 2 key goals:
Generate traffic and sales - any owned and earned user-generated content can be made shoppable using the right friction-free approach.Â
Generate hyper brand engagement â Via social hubs, photo galleries and contests, retail displays, unique UG Content widgets and innovative mashups of owned and earned content.Â
However, scaling user-generated content comes with a troika of challenges - Speed of garnering user rights, Scale of Content and Managing Automated Brand Consistency.Â
Cloudaria believes that brands, retailers and forward-looking marketers can overcome these challenges while also improving sales and engagement âand nearly every aspect of the brand experienceâby collecting, curating and creatively showcasing fresh, authentic visual content and making it shoppable.Â
Every new consumer behavior trend brings with it significant challenges and incredible opportunities. By embracing these opportunities, brands become more social, and migrate from transactional relationships with consumers to emotional relationships with fans. Visual storytelling helps your shape the brand's voice and take community conversations a few notches further.Â
For further details on how we can help your brand enable visual conversations and commerce at scale, please get in touch with us.Â
10 Learnings on Content Marketing from leaked NYTimes Memo
Since AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million, it was a signal that news is never going to be the same again. With change in consumption patterns, news creation patterns were also undergoing a dramatic shift. Websites that initially came across as pop culture blogs have now become the fast-emerging definitive sources for global news and op-ed.Â
A cursory look at Buzzfeed shows you list posts and videos like:
24 Awkward Engagement Pictures that will make being Single feel so Good
This is How to Put Pants On without using your Hands
29 signs you are not a Cat Person
Love them or loathe them, you just can't ignore them. The numbers stand testimony to this: Buzzfeed, the socially wired content website, is viewed by brands and media alike as a serious long form journalism site. The numbers are freakishly awesome, according to Quantcast:
375+ posts per day (staff + external contributors + syndicated content)
162 million+ unique visitors
The NYT is 150 years old. It's struggling to reinvent itself. And it recently had a document leaked outlining the future of their digital strategy.
The NYTâs Innovation Report was the result of six monthâs worth of head-scratching, and fortunately for anyone interested in the future of journalism.Â
The revelations from this report into their challenges of facing upstarts and competitors (like HuffPo, Mashable, Buzzfeed, Vox, First Look Media, The Atlantic, etc.) is a compelling insight into publishing and also content marketing. Some key takeaways for content marketers are as follows:Â
1. Experiment - The "age of influence" is well upon us.Â
The merit, the voice, the passion and the intent is now the weapon. The medium is no longer the weapon. Mediums do give exposure, yes, but the playing field is now more level than ever before. The slow to adapt will dwindle, and the cunning will thrive.
Coca Colaâs content marketing strategy is built upon a 70/20/10 investment principle. 70% is low risk content, 20% should innovate off what works and 10% is high risk ideas.
2. Packaging, Reusing and Promotion get Pageviews
The report is full of a number of examples of other media outlets repurposing New York Times content and getting MORE pageviews than the NYT. The examples ranged from Gawker promoting 161 year old news article on 12 years a slave that originally appeared on the Times, to the NYT âgetting crushedâ by an aggregation of its own content around Nelson Mandelaâs death appearing on the Huffington Post. On a whim a reporter at the Times created a Flipboard magazine of the most important obituaries and it became the best read collection in the history of NYT.Â
So take your content and turn it into videos, images and even presentations and podcasts. Everyone has different media consumption habits and preferences.
3. Create Content Templates
Buzzfeed has perfected the template model so that they can quickly create new content without having to custom build from scratch as bespoke content. Publishing content quickly  is important on the social web that doesnât tolerate the old 24 hour news cycle.
4. Adding structured data led to a 52% increase in SEO traffic
This really drives home the importance of taggingâââwithout structured data like theme-based #tags, location, descriptions of images and article type, the Times had a huge archive of essentially useless content. Adding tags, as well as improving discoverability on search engines, also helps internal discoverability and feeds into many of the useful features being developed for the digital ageâââfor example you canât show someone a review of a restaurant in their area if you donât tag the review with geo-coordinates.Â
5. It's not about the headline; it's about social
Only 10% of NYT traffic comes from social!
This was a remarkable revelation for a brand with such a large following on Facebook and Twitter. It is especially crazy considering social is responsible for 60% of Buzzfeedâs traffic. Social media is the new SEOâââif you donât figure out how to leverage it, youâre leaving free money on the table for your competitors to pick up.
The savvy publishers and content marketers realise that the content creator (reporters and even editors) to be socially savvy and fully fluent in social media. Often writers are chased down by even traditional publishers because they have large social networks!
6. There's no place like the Homepage.
Producing a story that makes it onto the front cover of the New York Times was every reporters dreamââânaturally this obsession was carried into the online world. At the Times reporters are promoted based on their homepage contributions and hours are spent every day deciding what goes on this holiest of pages.
The vast majority of your readers donât go to the homepage because they come to your site via social or search? In an era when competitors like Quartz donât even have a homepage and most people get their news through their automated Facebook timeline, obsessing about homepage placements seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
7. To do content marketing at scale, you need a "marketing platform"
The digital media world is many moving parts and splintered tactics. The only way to do it âat scaleâ is to have a âmarketing platformâ
The marketing platform needs to automate a few key ingredients for long-term success:
Collaboration between content writers and marketers - everyone needs to be on the same page, and everyone needs to be socially savvy.Â
Collaboration between Content Team (Newsroom) and the Advertising Team (Marketing / PR) -Â What was made clear by the report was that this division was behind almost every major issue at the Times (and conversely is a competitive advantage at companies like Buzzfeed who rely solely on ânativeâ advertising).Â
Content Marketing Workflow - How easily can your editors and contributors and senior management can post and update and share and schedule content, in a friction-free manner? Can you do it real-time? Can you respond to your end-user real-time?Â
Poor collaboration between the newsroom and the business departments generally has another (perhaps bigger) casualtyâââlack of innovation.Â
Indeed, the report states that the central reason that organisations like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed have succeeded with âlacklustre contentâ is because of their excellent analytics, product and technology teams being fully integrated with the newsroom.
8. Tap into the power of User-Generated Content
Your most powerful stories are told by your customers and fans. Ranging from Instagram and Pinterest to YouTube, terabytes of content are being uploaded and shared every minute. Octoly provided some research that revealed that some brand content creation just on YouTube alone was 99% of all brand conversations.
Again, this needs to be the function of the "marketing platform" that you use to amplify your content efforts.Â
9. This Time It's Personal!
Personalisation is a hot topicâââparticularly for content sites. It's not just about subtle personalisation, like showing a locally relevant story based on your IP, or graying out stories youâve already read, but brands need to employ deeper analytics to understand the user. Buzzfeed and the Washington Post analyse what channel a user is coming from, for example Twitter, and in real time surfaces stories that have been popular with other users from that channelâââthis practice significantly increases the likelihood that a user will keep reading.
Based on such analytics, distribution and publishing tactics need to evolve. Automated email notifications are also equally important - email communication tailored for the individual user.Â
Social networks have given users the expectation that they can âfollowâ interesting users or content and not miss anything they have notified you is important to them. All such features MUST be baked into your social content hub.
10. Adopt a 'digital-first' focus
At the risk of sounding cliched, this is probably the most important nugget of learning from the NYT report.Â
