Why you should be putting visual content at the heart of your search strategy
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Visual content is the hot topic in content marketing in 2015, with visual forms of content attracting more engagement, more social interaction and proving more effective in attracting audiences. But, how do you make visual content work for your brand? Stickyeyes Director, Paul Hill explains more.
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Why you should be putting visual content at the heart of your search strategy
- 1. Visual Content: Why this should be at the heart of your Search Marketing Strategy Paul Hill Director, Stickyeyes @Stickyeyes #masterclassing
- 2. Sticky what? With a name like Stickyeyes, we’ve got some explaining to do. So what does it mean? Simple. When we started in 1998 only engaging content would keep your customers’ eyes stuck to your website. Now it’s come full circle. This is how we improve awareness, increase traffic and inspire engagement to enhance your retention and conversion.
- 4. Roadmap: Time on Site Search: Stickyeyes Google Phantom
- 5. Roadmap: Bounce Rate Search: Stickyeyes Google Phantom
- 6. Visual content is powerful, impactful and persuasive. Sources: Nilsson & Pelger, 1994; Merieb & Hoehn, 2007
- 7. Anyone know what this is?
- 8. It’s this… The Charge Of the Light Brigade, 1854
- 9. It’s no secret what people 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Keep me informed Improve my knowledge Entertain me Talk to me like a real person Give me a personal service Give me relevant content Inspire me with new ideas Be part of my daily routine Help me organize my life Percentage Source: Global Web Index UK baseline data want from brands.
- 10. Source: Global Web Index UK baseline data So all you have to do is give ‘em some of that, right?
- 11. Everyone’s doing it. You HAVE to cut through.
- 12. When it’s good, visual content is really powerful.
- 13. And when it’s bad…
- 14. Develop a process. Follow it. Strategic Planning Deployment Preparation Content Delivery Marketing Communications Measurement & Valuation 1 2 3 4 5
- 15. 1. Strategy: What are you trying to achieve here?
- 19. Incremental monthly clicks 3,550 Keyword coverage increased by 913 Position 1 for 62 keywords Average ranking up from 101 to 20 Market share grown from 0% to 4.8% OnStride – Results
- 20. poundstopocket.co.uk peachy.co.uk tescobank.com easyloanscompany.co.uk quickquid.co.uk onstride.co.uksunny.co.uk sainsburysbank.co.uk 0 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 12,000 14,000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 MaxMonthlyClicks # Keywords Non-Brand KW Set: 957 KWs OnStride – KW’s & Traffic
- 21. 2. Deployment preparation: Do your research.
- 22. Understand your audience. Who are they? Where are they active? Why are they interested? When are they online? What do they want from you?
- 23. What are people doing online? Paid channels. Source: Global Web Index; UK base 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Research/find products Research how to do things Stay up-to-date Stay in touch with friends Inspiration/ideas Entertainment Education Fill up spare time Research for work Update my friends Organize my life Share my opinion Percentage
- 24. Awareness Consideration Conversion Loyalty Advocacy Reach people & grab them: Off-site video, image-led social, PR-able visuals Understand their journey. Reasons to believe On-site videos, infographics, visual tools Turn interest into action Amplified UGC, Slideshares, benefits videos, infographics Reinforce and reward Visual storytelling, image-led blogs, visual games, useful video Encourage word-of-mouth recommendation Image-led social, curated UGC, visual storytelling, fun video
- 25. 3. Content deployment: Ideation for visual content.
- 26. Steal like an artist.* *HT to @AustinKleon for this nugget – read his book cos it’s awesome
- 27. What works in your industry?
- 28. What works in other industries?
- 29. What works beyond marketing?
- 30. 4. Marketing communications: Visual content only works if it moves
- 31. Bloggers / Vloggers Journalists Influencer Outreach Media Relations Bylined Articles Syndication Earned Paid Owned Biddable Media Content Networks Advertorials Affiliates Retargeting Networks Display Network Website Organic Social Email Paid social media ATL Know and use the right channels. and aim for the sweet spot!
- 32. Maximuscle: The Protein Project. Owned channel: Website.
- 33. Gala: Ice Casino. Earned channel: Media.
- 34. 5. Measurement & valuation: Did it do what you wanted it do?
- 35. Measure the right things
- 36. 3 top takeaways
- 37. Humans are wired for visual content.
- 38. Use data, insight and creativity to cut through.
Editor's Notes
- There’s a contradiction at the heart of content marketing. On one hand, nothing changes. For several thousand years human beings have largely remained the same – social creatures who live, love, laugh, cry and fight. But on the other hand, in a digital world, nothing stays the same. What worked yesterday might not work today. What is right today could well be wrong tomorrow. To deliver GREAT visual content you have to work with both those truths.
- The human visual system is the product of at least half a million years of evolution*. It’s hard-wired and we’ve been using it since before we were human beings. Language – and written language specifically – hasn’t been around nearly as long. Apparently 50% of the brain is devoted to processing visual signals and 70% of all your sensory receptors are in your eyes*. So it makes sense that all human beings are predisposed to visual content.
- Who knows what this is? That’s right – it’s a newspaper. A newspaper from 1854 actually. Now you’d never know just by looking but this is actually one of the most powerful pieces of content ever.
- It’s this. The Charge of the Light Brigade. One of the most dramatic moments in British military history. Now both the painting and the newspaper article are about the same thing, but it’s the painting – the visual version - which has the most immediate impact. You don’t get the same level of detail, but it communicates an awful lot very quickly.
- So psychologically, visual communication can be incredibly effective. The next step is to work out WHAT to communicate visually to have the right impact on customers and prospective customers. Thankfully big data now makes that achieveable. At least when you have room full of clever insights people at your disposal… At a macro scale, it’s just content marketing 101 – inform, educate and entertain. This is the UK base line data from Global Web Index – of course it changes considerably when you drill down to specific audiences for specific brands.
- So just give them some of that. And make it visual. Thank you very much!
- Unfortunately it’s not quite that easy. Everyone is doing it. To really succeed you HAVE to cut through the noise. You have to be true to your customers. You have to be different. You have to be awesome. And that is definitely not simples.
- There are plenty of examples of what awesome visual content looks like. And when it works it can make a real impact - like Oreo’s famous ‘Blackout’ tweet which generated 525 million earned impressions.
- But sadly there are many, many more examples of poor, lazy, boring, derivative visual content. And that achieves nothing. In fact, you’d be better off NOT doing it at all. For every image or video that makes you think ‘wow – this brand is really great’ there are a thousand videos and images that make you think a brand is annoying, boring, patronising or out of touch.
- You start with a process. Boring, yes. But seriously essential. This is the one we use at Stickyeyes. Five simple steps we go through every single time to make sure that what we’re delivering hits the nail on the head.
- First up – strategy. You CAN do pretty much anything with visual content – the trick is working out what you should be doing. It could be awareness, brand-building, acquisition – pretty much anything at any stage of the marketing funnel. This is where you need to be specific and develop a strategy that will make a difference to your bottom line.
- Are you trying to get people talking? Paddy Power certainly did that with this – a brilliant piece of photoshop where they convinced thousands of people they’d actually cut down a load of trees in the rainforest as part of a marketing stunt. They nailed it – 35.5 million impressions on Twitter, the most read story on Reddit that weekend with 836 million views and thousands of users driven to Greenpeace’s dedicated landing page. A genius idea. Totally on brand. Flawless execution. Incredible results.
- Are you trying to communicate personality? This was a little Vine video I worked on for Asda last Christmas. The idea was essentially to communicate that Asda understood the time pressure families were under at Christmas. The six second ‘magic video’ – inspired by Vine star Zach King – shows a mum chucking a box of Christmas decorations at the tree and they miraculously arrange themselves perfectly before the lights ping on. All done with clever visual effects. It worked a treat – generating 5.1 million views, 43 thousands likes, 75 thousands shares and 14,000 clicks to Asda’s transactional site from Facebook. And on Vine it got 348 thousand loops.
- Are you trying to boost search rankings? This is an interactive visual piece we’ve delivered for financial services company OnStride. This interactive is all about how far £1,000 can get you in various European countries. This was about creating interesting, highly visual content that would generate SEO value in terms of high-quality inbound links, engagement. Having deep, rich, good looking visual content on site was crucial – it wouldn’t have generated half as much SEO value had it been a text-heavy blog post or a flat infographic. And it’s worked a treat – this was part of a wider campaign that’s driven a 500% growth in traffic, 48 page one rankings including four position one rankings.
- Aggregators in the market have been removed from the chart, only direct competitors remain. Onstride Financial started without a website, therefore demonstrated no visibility within the market. They now sit in a position rivalling large brands such as Sainsbury’s Bank, also demonstrating a large keyword coverage than the market leaders.
- OK – so once you know what you’re trying to achieve you need to do your research And that means diving into the data
- These are the kinds of questions to ask before you start thinking up cool ideas We use a tool we’ve developed called Pinpoint to give us all the answers Pinpoint uses Experian, ONS, Global Web Index, YouGov and social data to deliver audience profiles and insights into consumer trends and behaviours. You should still listen to you gut though, and test ideas out on people in the office.
- The data gives brilliant insights into behaviour too Here’s an overview of what people use the internet for in the UK This is exactly what you need to understand about YOUR audience to decide what kind of visual content to focus on
- Understanding the funnel is also important. Different content types can do different things for people at different points. I’ve included a few examples, but again there’s very little point being generic here Again, you need to dive into the data for YOUR audience to understand what will work
- OK – so now you know what you’re trying to achieve and you’ve done a deep dive into the data so you understand your audience. So how do you actually turn that into some world-class ideas?
- You steal like an artist. This is the title of the one book that is ALWAYS on my desk by a chap called Austin Kleon – you should look him up. All art is stealing – you study broadly, you take inspiration, you take ideas and smash them together with other ideas. You remix, rethink, remake – and you do it armed with all the insight from your research.
- So start by looking at what other people are doing in your industry. What works? Why? What DOESN’T work? Why? Where are they doing it? Why? How could what they’re doing apply to YOUR brand, to YOUR audience, to YOUR objectives? But that’s not saying you should copy your peers – that is the LAST thing to do if you want your visual content to cut through. You need visual content that communicates YOUR brand – in the blink of an eye – both cognitively and emotionally.
- What works in other industries? What ideas can steal and apply to your own? Where are the similarities? Where are the differences? Just because GE is about power, aviation, engineering and healthcare, it may well be doing some cool things that could work for you. For example, GE Reports is a brilliant example of using gorgeous, visually-led, magazine-style and video storytelling to create a compelling, powerful and accessible narrative about a pretty dull business.
- What’s happening OUTSIDE of the marketing microcosm. What content trends are emerging that you could learn from? BuzzFeed’s visual quizzes - huge impact over the past couple of years and brands can certainly capitalize. Asda’s Valentine’s Day ‘Which movie or TV couple are you’ - 120,000 click-throughs… Study, take inspiration from the good stuff, avoid the pitfalls of the bad stuff and mash it all together into something new.
- So you know your objective, you’re armed with a pile of data-led insights, and you’ve blended up a load of inspiration into some genuinely groundbreaking content that’s JUST right for your audience. The last thing to do now is to hide it in a dark, dusty corner of your website You need to unleash it on the world! Visual content has to move – it has to be distributed.
- Visual content works on all three marketing communications channels The best visual content – like Paddy Power’s rainforest stunt – hits the sweet spot for all three. But you don’t need to do that every time – different visual content works in different ways in different channels. Don’t forget how few owned channels there are – you need to be able to respond to algorithm changes or trends in earned channels. What worked yesterday might not work today.
- So here are a few owned channel examples. The Maximuscle Protein Project, which we worked on with GSK, involved finding and following three everyday guys on a nutritional quest to transform their bodies. The Maximuscle website built a dedicated content hub to follow them through the process. But it wasn’t JUST an owned media campaign – it leveraged owned, earned and paid to reach 12 million people, increase user engagement by 100% and increase site traffic by 150%.
- Visual content works in the earned channels to – this is a fun April Fool’s stunt we commissioned for Gala Casino. The world’s first ‘ice casino’! It worked only because the visuals were brilliant. And it delivered 16 links from sites including the Telegraph and the Mirror – as well as generating a big buzz on social. Perfect for SEO!
- So there you have it. You’ve set your objectives, you’ve dug into the data, you’ve come up with some awesome content that hits the sweet spot for your audience and you’ve distributed it on exactly the right channels. Time to put your feet up. Well it is as soon as you’ve done all the measurement and reporting.
- I’m not going to bang on about this, but it is really important if you want to be given budget to try it again. Did it do what you wanted it to? Did it do something slightly different. With visual content, as with all content, you have to measure, learn and iterate.
- So that’s it. Here are my top takeaways.
- 1 – We’re all human and we’re hard wired for visual communication. That means visual content can pull some very powerful levers inside us, cognitively, emotionally – and quickly.
- 3 -To avoid that, you need world class data, insight and creativity
- And don’t forget to measure, learn and iterate. The best strategies rarely end up as they began.
- So that’s it from me – I hope that’s given you some idea about the hows and whys of visual content, and some practical tips you can take into your next project!