Graphic Design

Google and other major search engines continue to redefine their ranking algorithms, making it harder and harder for brands to create high-quality content that receives links and rank organically. Marketers need to continuously find ways to naturally generate authoritative and relevant links for their content and websites.

When link building becomes more about link earning, the focus needs to shift to creating exceptional and helpful or entertaining content. Bloggers and website owners rarely want to link to something that’s not valuable to their own business or blog. Nor do they want to link to your products or services, since such content is promotional in nature and in most cases doesn’t help their audience. One of the best and most popular ways marketers are creating this standout content is with infographics. An infographic is a visual representation of content and data, presented in an appealing, thought-provoking way.

Creating truly helpful and visually appealing content is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness, build your audience, aid in lead generation, and improve conversion rates across the board.

Growing brand awareness

You want your brand in front of your target audience, especially those that don’t know you exist. What’s a good way to do that? Infographics work so well on the web because we live in a world of instant gratification. People are more inclined to share visual pieces of informative content because it’s scannable and appealing—giving searchers a solution in the form of a graphic.

Searchers want instant answers. They’ve become accustomed to search engines returning the information they want in a matter of seconds.

When a brand is new online, or hasn’t been using content marketing or SEO, they’re usually not showing up anywhere close to the top of the search results. This means they’re missing the ability to answer the searcher’s problem, and losing the opportunity to turn them into a valuable lead.

Instead of only focusing resources on creating long-form content, no matter how valuable it may be, new brands should also focus on creating easily digestible content.

Infographics can help your content to stand out from the crowd, especially since there is so much noise out there. Your content, whether it be infographics, videos, blog posts, or anything else, needs to be better than whatever already exists online.

You can see from the Google Trends comparison above that searches for content like “white papers” continue to lose popularity, while searches “infographics” steadily rise in its place.

New brands and online businesses can actively benefit from creating and marketing an infographic. Infographics help turn your message into a visual, digital format that’s ideal for sharing. And when people can easily share your content, they help to expose more and more potential customers to your brand.

Increase in organic search traffic and rankings

When you create infographics that help or entertain those in your industry, influencers, bloggers, writers, and journalists in the same niche will share it with their audiences. By doing so, they mention and link to your site to credit the source.

The more authoritative websites in your industry that link to your site help to increase the overall organic rankings of your website. It shows Google and other search engines that authority sites trust your site by linking and mentioning you, and since Google recognizes those sites as authoritative, it passes along that trust with increased rankings for your site’s related keywords. Because, as mentioned before, Google is all about giving the user the most relevant information as quickly as possible when they search it.

For example, when our infographic on the evolution of arcade games went on Wired and other websites, a lot of their keywords related to arcade games all saw an increase in rankings.

Infographics are easy to post on your website by using an embed code that pastes the image onto you a page and includes a link back to the original source. The best kind of link is a contextual link; that is, one where a writer, blogger, editor, or journalist writes a piece and includes a text link to your source. But the easiest kind of backlink for infographics is the one from the embed code, since all that has to be done is to copy and paste the embed code to the site.

Aiding in lead generation

The best marketers know that right content needs to be presented to their potential customers at exactly the right time for every stage of the customer journey. A potential customer beginning to research a big investment, like adding a swimming pool to their backyard, probably isn’t ready for an eBook detailing different pool designs and features. Instead, presenting them with an infographic about interesting swimming pool facts can be the perfect way to expose them to your brand and move them through the sales funnel

Content like this is at the very top of your funnel and avoids diving right into a sales pitch. When you try to sell a potential customer on your product or service too soon, in most cases, they’re no longer a potential customer (as they weren’t ready to buy yet).

Informative infographics rarely turn potential customers off. They work to give these people entertaining, valuable information while subtly nudging them closer to your brand.

While a good infographic helps to move your potential customer through your sales process, it also works to generate leads in other ways. That customer may have found your infographic so useful that they want to share it with their friends on social media, through email, or maybe even post it on their blog. When your infographic is shared, your brand awareness goes up, and so does your ability to attract new leads to your business.

If your potential customer is finally ready to buy, they’re more likely to go with a company that has helped them with informative and useful content along their journey. Infographics not only help to present information in an appealing way, they also help increase trust with your potential customers. Customers are more likely to buy from a company they trust over someone they’ve never interacted with before.

Improving conversion rate

Now more than ever, gaining the attention of customers online is about earning it. Rather than bombarding potential customers with spam emails, irrelevant offers, and overly “salesy” tactics, you’re allowing them to discover you in their own way.

Infographics aid not only in the discovery of your products and services, but also your ability to convert leads into sales.

Content should be created to fill a need in your industry and/or to entertain, to answer a common problem or concern your customers have in the best way possible. Using an infographic to communicate content is one of the best ways to naturally draw people into your site or blog.

Good content tends to cause a chain reaction: people share your infographic, link to it or embed it on their website, exposing new customers to your brand, gaining links to your site, improving your rankings, leading to more traffic.

“Businesses who market with infographics grow traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t.”

This chain reaction ultimately leads to increases in traffic to your site from other relevant sites in your industry where your target market is visiting. And, when more people from your target audience are visiting your site, your chances at gaining a conversion are that much better than before.

Few long-form pieces of content have the ability to gain customers’ attention, encourage shares, and increase brand trust as much as infographics. When you take the time to build an infographic with valuable information, you’re filling a void and giving customers exactly what they want. There’s no better way to encourage a conversion and build a strong long-term relationship than that.

For help with defining and creating your overall digital marketing strategy, contact the marketing professionals at EZMarketing today.

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Content is no longer the pawn of SEO experts and their optimization tactics. The likes of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies have become powerful lead-generation tools for marketers and businesses everywhere. A solid whitepaper will effectively drive high-value leads by educating and engaging them. And a great whitepaper will become a powerful viral teaching tool once others begin to share it.

The three different kinds of collateral (eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies) can be used as part of an opt-in offer, as an incentive to lure in new subscribers, or in the case of case studies, illustrate how something was accomplished. Take a closer look at each one to understand the value and impact they can have on you, your business, and your industry.

EBooks

What can help your marketing efforts without seeming like a marketing tool?

An eBook.

These digital books allow you to reshape your content and direct its tone, increasing its overall value and demonstrating the worth of your business, service, or product—but in a very non-marketing way.

Not only are eBooks subtle on the sell, they also boast two very important benefits:

• Short production time
• Fast deployment

Their value comes from how easy they are to implement into current campaigns, and the minimal time and monetary expense associated with their production. EBooks can be turned out relatively quickly with the right content and be put to use almost instantly, giving marketers the opportunity to reinforce a campaign or promotion with the smallest expenditure of resources.

Besides being cost-effective, eBooks are an efficient way to reuse and repurpose larger pieces of content. For example, a collection of quality blog posts on the same topic could be turned into an eBook. This allows you to deliver your expertise to a targeted audience. From a technological standpoint, eBooks are all about convenience.

Companies can track URLs placed in eBooks to determine ROI of marketing costs, while providing an almost immediate call-to-action that readers can follow. Prospects won’t have to remember URLs when they can consult an eBook filled with offers, coupons, and checklists. Further, they can be tied to your brand, making eBooks a valuable brand image enhancer.

Whitepapers

Some might say that the value or relevance of whitepapers has diminished, but they would be wrong. More and more businesses are using whitepapers to engage their industries, by either teaching with them or learning something new. In Q2 2015, 78% of the content leveraged for lead generation were whitepapers.

As the goal of a whitepaper is to educate, they often do so in a thorough, accessible manner that provides only the most relevant of information to the reader. They’re also extremely influential in helping decision makers in evaluating purchases. For example, a whitepaper outlining the top five best tablets could be useful in weighing the pros and cons of each device and helping you reach an informed buying decision.

Because of their educational potential, whitepapers are also used to generate leads. They can outline the steps of the decision making process, highlight key benefits, and explain subject matter in an easy-to-digest fashion that speaks to your ideal customer. Their ability to drive top-of-the-funnel leads is what has made whitepapers so consistently popular among businesses.

Like eBooks, whitepapers are easy to deploy. Prospects can be directed to download links, or you can share the whitepaper content piecemeal as social media posts. Sharing segments of your latest whitepaper on Facebook or Twitter is useful for smaller businesses who need help populating their social media pages. Posts will engage their followers while driving focus back to the business’s website or a download link to the larger whitepaper.

Case studies

The purpose of a case study is straightforward: to prove what you’ve done through visuals, facts, and figures on how a given product or service has worked for a customer. Case studies also build trust with potential and future customers. This allows businesses to show, rather than tell, how their service or product can benefit prospects. Case studies act as clear narratives that move from problem to strategy to solution.

Case studies help build relationships through proven results. When you can hand or email a client a piece of collateral that shows them what you offer and how it has helped solve the problems of your clients, they gain a better understanding of how their relationship with your business will play out. They’re given an impression of what they can expect. And matching expectations with results is a powerful thing in marketing.

The specificity of case studies is another reason why they work so well. Not only do they address very specific subject matter, but they can also illustrate the problem, strategy, and solution process in a “how X helped Y do Z” way. This makes the content of the case study much more appealing and searchable to prospects who may be having the same problem.

Case studies can be printed pieces or accessed through a link on your website, such as a gallery page filled with case studies, or a news piece written about a recent success you or one of your clients have had. If testimonials are powerful, then case studies are exponentially more beneficial to share with customers and prospective clients.

A case study can illustrate, through hard numeric data, the benefit of your product or service. Not only that, but case studies can be used to demonstrate your business’s ability to solve very specific problems, further highlighting your given expertise.

True value of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies

EBooks are a subtle marketing tool capable of providing marketers with actionable deliverables that are both convenient and inexpensive to produce. With whitepapers, the value comes from how powerful their ability to engage is, and how valuable they become to others as educational tools. Finally, case studies provide specific, in-depth content that contributes to better relationships between businesses and prospects.

The one thing these pieces of collateral share is their ability to engage prospects in meaningful ways. Ultimately, their value comes from the amount of control businesses have over the content, allowing them to target their ideal customer in effective new ways.

If you’re struggling to find a better way to start a dialogue with your customers, talk to the experts who know marketing collateral. We can help find the right combination of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies to grab your customers’ attention—and keep it.

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Professional images show a level of quality and detail you just can’t get with your old flip phone camera. Websites in particular benefit from high-quality, professional images, especially since today’s consumer is more visually oriented. People are naturally drawn in by visuals such as photos and graphics. Prospects want to be able to imagine themselves using the things they’re interested in buying, so naturally, images depicting the use or application of a product or service is instrumental in pushing them towards making the purchase.

Product images that demonstrate scale, multiple perspectives, colors, and quality can easily persuade would-be buyers to click the ‘add to shopping cart’ button.

Why?

Because images are actionable. They illustrate function and benefits, and often without many accompanying words. In marketing, this may take the form of an infographic or case study, or a screenshot of a website a marketing agency created. These things demonstrate the scope and potential of the firm’s work to prospective clients, giving them the mental image of how their own website or infographic might turn out.

The emotional impact of professional images in sales and marketing

Take ecommerce stores, for example. If you went to an online store and checked out their products only to find images that were stretched, blurry, and clearly outdated, wouldn’t that make you skeptical or distrusting of the business?

And if they mentioned a particular product coming in a range of colors and designs but only displayed a single image, wouldn’t that annoy you?

Ultimately, images reassure customers about what they will be getting; but they also reassure them that they’re doing business with a reputable company. If ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’ then prospects require quality, actionable images to understand the benefits of making a particular purchase.

Effective marketing appeals to a lead’s emotions, rather than their sense of reason. Your choice of image composition or effects can be used to trigger certain emotions, such as motivation, sympathy, happiness, or regret.

Colors also contribute to the mood of an image, and all of those variables together make for a strong buying influencer.

When a prospective customer connects with an image of your product or service, you’ve brought them deeper into the sales funnel. By that point, you’ve made them emotionally invested in the idea of owning or subscribing to what you’re selling.

Images and the guided customer tour through the sales funnel

Buyers need the guided tour, and quality (professionally done) images take prospects by the hand and provide that convenience.

The old saying goes, “show, don’t tell” and that’s exactly what high-quality graphics and images will do: they will show the buyer why they need to make that purchase in a way words can’t.

If you have professional images, they will:

• Feature powerful composition and adequate lighting (highlights and shadows).
• Captivate with interesting subject matter or tell a story.
• Be imaginatively done, possibly capturing something never seen before or thought of.
• Create a 360-degree view of a product or service to answer a lead’s questions.

Mediocre images tend to signal that a site is outdated, cheap, or worse, untrustworthy. People easily equate websites with no images, or low-quality images, with shady businesses—stores too risky to do business with.

What high-quality images say about your company

Good, quality images have a lot to say about the company that uses them. Most important: you’re a professional that cares about the image of your company. To your potential buyer, you know what you’re doing. You’re someone they can trust and do business with.

Closing the sale with images

In marketing, the simplest promotion is also the most basic function of an image: to show the product. By providing an image, you’re making it easy for the customer to know what you’re selling. There are many ways your professional images can be used to entice buyers to make the purchase—ways of using imagery to close each sale.

Tell a story

Photos and graphics can both be used to tell a story. Capturing a buyer’s interest or emotions with imagery that tells a story is a surefire way to gain their attention, and can make the purchase much easier once they can picture themselves using or wearing your product.

Illustrating action

 

 

Images can also be used to convey action, which can be similar to showing contextual use. Illustrating how something can be used or showing it in action, such as a car being driven down a highway or a baseball bat being used to hit a homerun, makes it clear what a product’s function is. It also provides a very basic ‘how to’ for potential buyers.

Aligning products with brand

A professional can edit images to properly reflect the company they’re being used for. Even the style of an image might be used to highlight their values to better speak to their ideal customers.

It’s important to understand the power of professionally taken/edited images. They can mean the difference between convincing a customer to make the purchase and losing their interest and business altogether. You should be doing everything in your power to make the decision process easy for your buyers. Giving them the information to make an informed buying decision with only an image means your copy has to do less work.

As more people become visually oriented, professional images really make a difference. Online businesses and ecommerce stores that want to sell a service or product can’t afford to miss out on sales because of image quality (or a lack of images entirely). They give your products and site a unique presence to help them stand out better.

The future of visual marketing

With the advent and popularity of smartphones, and the diverse supply of digital cameras on the market, almost anyone can play photographer. Expectations have become lax as individuals become increasingly receptive of more spontaneous, instant photos. Image editing software apps and free-to-use services provide the means for amateurs to create brilliantly simplistic images that intrigue and inspire.

We are still very much visually inclined as consumers; however, the standards by which we judge those images will continue to change as technology and software enters the mainstream.

All successful marketing campaigns need visuals that produce results, and our agency knows how to implement professional images into an integrative marketing strategy. Contact EZMarketing to embrace the story your images could be sharing with leads.

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What do you think of when you see a logo? The Golden Arches, perhaps, the Nike swoosh, the mermaid on a cup of Starbucks coffee. The power of a logo is not to be underestimated: your logo communicates many, many things about your business. Everything from the typeface to the color to the placement of various elements says something, which is why poor logo design is something to be avoided at all costs.

Here are four things that your logo communicates about your company’s branding.

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Today, buyers of a business’s products and services are searching for the authentic. That’s why it’s critical that the products and services a business provides are consistent with its image.

“Image” in today’s culture is generally only important when it is steeped in reality. In other words, people are far more inclined to do business with an organization when they’re certain that “what you see is what you get.” The age of hype is over! Say what you are. Be what you are. And be very sure there is tight correlation between the two.

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Designing a great logo is a little bit like coming up with the perfect recipe. All the right ingredients have to be combined with precision to make something more appealing than the ingredients on their own.

After 30 years of doing graphic design, I’ve learned that developing a recipe perfect for any business isn’t easy. But I’ve also learned that, by following some rules of thumb, the chances of designing a successful logo that communicates a brand’s identity are improved. Here’s my master list of do’s and don’ts when designing a logo.

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