A creative mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open. We are always on the lookout for creative ideas for doing standard things. Standard things like annual reports of companies. Enter Warby Parker and its application of visual design content to its most recent annual report.
Ever heard of Parker Warby? As they write in their website, Warby Parker was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to create boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at a revolutionary price point.
Eyewear with a purpose
Almost one billion people worldwide lack access to glasses. This means that 15% of the global population cannot effectively learn or work – a problem that Warby Parker is determined to address. They’ve partnered with non-profits like VisionSpring to ensure that for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is distributed to someone in need.
Eyewear startup Warby Parker just released its 2013 Annual Report, a perfect example of how important tone is in creating great visual content. This very different approach to a year-end report uses a calendar format, highlighting company events on each day. Some events are significant company milestones; others are little anecdotes showcasing office life and culture.
Wow … what a change from the typical financial results and strategic initiatives that typically fill the pages of annual reports.
The report is an excellent example of a brand showcasing its ideas, creativity, and culture in a visually engaging way. At its core, the strategy of content marketing is not just about distribution and visibility. It is about telling the world who you are and what you stand for. This design goes a long way in turning customers into brand advocates.
Related post: Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
The design shows how to empower your content. So many companies just don’t take advantage of their great content or they don’t know how to present their content in a creative way. Often, in the end, they are fighting for survival like we all are.
However, the brands that can express their personality, creativity, and passion, and manage their content in a way that speaks to people will create loyal customers.
Here are 9 important takeaways all brands can learn from Warby Parker’s design approach to creating great content.
Visual design … push the edge to be different
What does the Warby Parker (http://www.warbyparker.com/annual-report-2013/#march-11 class trip have to do with eyeglasses? What does it matter? It is an interesting story and Warby Parker uses the story to illustrate its personality and culture.
Your content should be relatable, valuable, and interesting to your audience. If you capture these qualities, your marketing will create a captive audience with ever-increasing brand loyalty.
Utilize visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has a number of benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal. A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In the Warby Parker design the combination of photography, illustration, videos, and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page. More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
Visual design examples … apply data in comparison
If you are going to visualize data, display a comparison—that is what makes the visualization more meaningful. The infographics revolution has brought with it many missed data visualization opportunities in the form of single-data-point pie charts and big numbers with fancy typographic treatment.
Distilling data into a statistic removes the context and comparison that makes it insightful. Don’t fear complexity; take advantage of the opportunity to add clarity with many visualization design elements.
Business is becoming increasingly personal—not in the waiter remembers my name sort of way, but more in the way that we crave more personal connection in a web-based world.
People want to know that the businesses they support are run in a way they can relate to, that its employees are people they might hang out with, and potentially even someone who could become a good friend.
Marketing content is all about making connections. Your level of success has a lot to do with how your readers react to what you write. People connect with your brand because they relate to what you’re saying to them.
They want to feel that your content is specifically crafted with their interests and needs in mind. In other words, it should feel personal.
Showoff your people
Your customer community wants to know that there are humans behind your brand, and they want to know more about them as people. Don’t make the mistake of hiding your people, relationships, interactions, and office pranks behind a shield of professionalism.
These things are most often as interesting as your products and services … and certainly as how much money you made last year. In today’s marketing landscape, whether you are a product or service-oriented business, you are selling your culture, and your culture is your people.
The growth in content consumption is not just because people are looking for a satisfactory distraction from work. Customers have an appetite for real, interesting information. The vast knowledge-sharing that the web has facilitated has brought with it an increased curiosity and hunger for understanding.
Don’t believe that everything you do at the back end of your business is boring. Turn it into engaging content that will deepen your customers’ understanding of what your world is all about.
In his book, Contagious, Wharton professor Jonah Berger showed that one of the key reasons people share creative content is because it arouses a person’s emotion.
His point … content has to go beyond just being useful; it has to be unforgettable. Rather than trying to churn out quantity, take the time to figure out what kind of emotions move your audience.
In doing so, it’s important to remember that not all emotion is created equal. In his research, Berger identifies certain kinds of emotions – those that get people “aroused” like awe, passion, and anger.
They are much more likely to drive shares than those that make people feel toned down – like sadness, relaxation, or contentment.
Don’t be afraid to shake things up.
Integrate products/services naturally
Your products and services don’t have to be ignored. In the midst of all the other ways to add to your design, you often can overlook them. Feature your product or service naturally within content, but don’t make it an abrupt deviation from the other fun stuff.
This means that you will want to tone down your calls to action and any other hard-sell tactics. Use them as an opportunity to remind viewers what you do, without killing all those good vibes you have been building.
Share how you are awesome
One important element of marketing is about bringing attention to how awesome you are. However, this doesn’t mean your awesomeness-recognition abilities should be limited to your own pursuits.
Calling out the big (and little) wins of others—vendors, customers, ex-employees, maybe even competitors—shows that you are not afraid to give credit where it is due. This fresh perspective will add authenticity to your content.
Amplify who you are
Your content is a perfect place to let your audience know why you do what you do. Clearly articulating the values that give your company meaning helps you connect with people on a level beyond the business transaction, and it attracts people that share those same ideas.
This powerful means of communication helps truly differentiate your brand—more than low prices and fancy features could ever do.
Do you have a lesson about making your content creation more creative you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
Have you seen the latest Prudential ad design? You know … the one with the best graphic design central to their story. Quite clever isn’t it, and likely one you will remember and maybe even talk about, right? It is a commercial part of the Prudential Bring Your Challenges Campaign.
Employing the best graphic design?
You just can’t say it. You have to get people to say it to each other.
-James Farley
Ever written an advertisement, or thought about it? I’ve done marketing for my clients in small businesses for the past 4+ years and I’ve learned a few things about making advertising look professional even on a tight budget. And the true measure of successful advertising design is having customers remember and talk about the message.
Many small businesses don’t have a lot of time or resources to create ads professionally made. Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering.
Related: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Does a commercial have the power to encourage the right sort of conversations? That is the objective, isn’t it? Let’s explore why this is so important.
According to Nielsen, there are 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. And Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish!
We check our phones 150 times per day. We check our email up to 30 times an hour. And the amount of information in the world continues to double every 18 months.
All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and every one of us who creates marketing content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think more and more as creative designers. And designs where they utilize visual analogies to help carry their messages.
It has been said that advertising is the price to be paid for being unremarkable. That may be true, but I have noticed, despite the growth in online marketing, that even remarkable businesses also advertise the old fashion way. It is a key component of your marketing campaign, for awareness or consumer education of your value. If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?
And, oh, by the way, it must be more interesting than the millions of other advertisements out there. Now that is a daunting task, isn’t it? Prudential marketing has sought to overcome this dilemma with advocacy advertising as its power of persuasion.
Prudential is no stranger to using awesome visualization in ads. Or to breaking through the noise to capture customer attention and engage them. Check out our earlier blogs on some of their commercials here:
But note that this commercial visualization is the best yet for Prudential in my opinion … applying the best analogy and visuals. If you would like to see this commercial, you can check it out here.
Let me explain why I believe this commercial is so successful:
Prudential ad is very successful.
Ask thoughtful questions
The ad starts out with the commentator asking people a simple, yet thoughtful question:
How much money do you have in your pocket right now?
After he collects everyone’s answer, he asks a second, more probing question:
Could something that small make an impact on something as big as your retirement goal?
Most people have less than $50 in their pockets and don’t believe this amount of money could significantly impact their retirement goal.
One of my favorite experts in the field of creative advertising is Edward Bouches and Creativity Unbound. You’ll find lots of good examples and case studies to learn from in his blog.
Best graphic design … first mental impression
These are interesting questions and you are immediately wondering what the commentator’s point will be. But despite your views, it still grabs attention and your thinking.
Visual design … message
You know what … if you put away this amount consistently, or a regular basis for 20 to 30 years, well, that retirement goal may not be so big after all.
And what is the subject of the marketing message that Prudential wants to promote? It is an issue with a simple motivational message to be consistent with your goals and never give up.
Best graphic design … create a visual analogy
Now to make this point with a visual analogy, the commentator points to a series of dominoes, smallest to largest. When he makes his point on putting away investments consistently over time, he knocks over the smallest domino, which causes the chain reaction to topple all the dominoes.
A great analogy to the retirement goal being achieved … as the dominoes fall the emotion rises.
A good emotional story provides a very good connection between the issue and the company promoting their message. The ad does explain the action in the story for the audience. And it allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action and the emotion.
This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information boring.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that they are important to remember. And create a good reason for you to want to back the Prudential message, yes?
Making powerful motivational messages to your target audience, as in this ad, is very effective in getting the viewer to relate to the issue in their own lives and to inspire.
So simple that the reader will quickly grasp the motivation. Keep in mind that the analogy is far more valuable than words.
Say exactly why people should contact your business and what you can do for them. For example “Let’s prepare today to do what we love tomorrow”. These ads make the desired call to action a part of the story.
Key Takeaway
It is a simple concept. People don’t read ads, they read what interests them. So if you are going to generate advertising and design, you are going to have to create an interesting copy. Prudential marketing has sought to overcome this dilemma with advocacy advertising as its power of persuasion.
So if you remember one thing from this article, remember this:
Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. And stand for things that potential customers value.
We believe this Prudential ad is interesting, entertaining, and stands for things viewers can stand behind. We believe it is persuasive and certainly creates the right kind of conversation.
So, how much money do you have in your wallet?
Heard enough? I rest my case.
What do you think?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your innovation and creativity in ad designs. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts
How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Jaw Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
Lessons of NASA social media and marketing design have been around for more than a decade now, so it should be easy to figure out how to leverage it, right? And avoid social media marketing mistakes, for sure. But hold on for a minute. How does it create a NASA winning marketing solution?
What is the importance of social media in your business? Can you learn from NASA? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Marketing? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line goal is relationship building.
How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that social media marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media design tactics? Or perhaps little to no value at all.
In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social media. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social media is worth using at all. And all of this misinformation creates more and more social media design mistakes.
Here are 16 social media design strategy lessons from NASA that we have all lessons at one time or the other. We’ll review them here in hopes to learn them in the future:
NASA social media focused on fans, not relationships
What would you rather take? More fans/followers or an engaged community that’s ten times smaller? I hope you’d pick the engaged community. Social sites look at how much traction your post generates in relation to the number of followers you have. If the ratio is good, they will start showing your content to more people outside of your circle.
That’s how you generate more traffic: focus on getting the right followers who will become your engaged community.
Hold secrets close to the vest
Google is probably the king of holding secrets close to the vest, but they’re big and can afford to. The rest of us need to reach out and give away the farm. And avoiding secrets at all costs.
Don’t be afraid to email companies and potential customers that you think you can help. What’s the worst thing that they can do… ignore your email?
NASA social media meant more focus on traffic compared to conversion
If social media traffic didn’t convert, do you think Facebook would be worth over 100 billion dollars? And it’s not just Facebook; it’s all the good social media sites. These companies are worth a lot of money because their user base spends money. The users spend enough money to make advertising on these sites profitable.
I’m not saying you need to start spending money on paid social ads, but you should leverage these sites because their visitors do convert.
It starts with traffic, of course, but that is the means and not the ends. The ends are the conversions.
Not only does social media traffic convert, but you can also measure that conversion. By setting up goals within your Google Analytics, you can see how much each of these social sites is generating for you.
It’s always appropriate for a brand to show its personality and some fun. If it’s a personality that wants to be a little weird occasionally, go ahead and get a little weird.
KLM is a great example of this tactic. Yes, most of their posts are about making customers have some fun, and it’s working very well.
Whether you’re a product-based or serviced based company, ask your users to send photos of them using your product or service in exchange for a shot at a prize, or for the honor of being featured on the page.
Happy customers?
NASA social media meant happy customers
Too many companies create happy customers and then fail to leverage their happiness. That is truly missing an awesome opportunity to turn those customers into advocates.
Contact a few of your happy customers and ask them if you can do a case study for them. This is essentially how MarketingSherpa built their business.
When a successful campaign occurred, they would then flip them into a case study. As they generated interest in their company more and more companies started signing up. Eventually, big companies came calling after seeing all the success they were having.
But you don’t have to do a formal case study to leverage happy customers. Testimonials are also powerful tools. Satisfied customers are eager to share their excitement about your company, so make sure you capture and promote that excitement.
NASA social media … many choices
Ever heard of Hick’s law? This law states that the time required for a customer to make a decision is a direct function of the number of available choices. Too many choices are not a good design as they make decisions more difficult. And that is not a good idea, is it?
NASA social media was the best design
Don’t use every inch of white space because you can. Leave some “breathing room” so people can digest your message. We believe the more the better.
Remember people will take away only one or two things from what they see. The clutter of design keeps them from spotting the takeaways you desire.
The whole point of the story in social media design is to effectively deliver the desired call to action. If the audience does not clearly understand the desired call to action after seeing the ad, then you are missing the real opportunity.
Social media was too ambiguous
Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. If the information is ambiguous it certainly won’t be remembered.
Take advantage of a visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has a number of benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal.
A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In visual design, the combination of photography, illustration, videos and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page.
More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
Lessons for visual distractions
Abstract or conceptual visuals tend to distract viewers. People prefer symbolic language and images that relate to the senses. People are far less receptive and responsive to language and images that relate to concepts.
Life is experienced through the senses and using symbolic language and images that express what people feel, see, hear, smell or taste are easier for people to understand
The more you publish, the better off you are
If you have great information to share on a daily basis, that’s awesome. You should use the social web on a daily basis.
But if you don’t, then consider using it less frequently. Don’t publish average or repeat material. It can actually harm your efforts.
Focus on creating high-quality updates and interactions instead of being on these social sites because you have to.
B2B strategies are different than B2C strategies
Every time I write about social media marketing, someone will comment:
“Those tactics look great for companies who target other businesses, but what should I do if I have a consumer-based company?”
Whether you have a consumer-based or business-facing company, you use the same tactics. From sharing great information to respond to people who have questions to promoting your own products and services, the tactics are identical.
What works for one usually works for the other.
Ignoring negative feedback
The worst thing you can do is ignore negative feedback. If someone isn’t happy with you or your company, you shouldn’t ignore that person. Instead, you should embrace criticism and try to improve.
Just look at Comcast. They even have a Twitter channel dedicated to supporting. Every time anyone tweets something negative about them, they apologize and try to help. It doesn’t matter if it is their fault or not, they are continually trying to improve.
As a business owner, you should embrace negative feedback. Respond to it, and try to solve the problem without getting emotional. It will help your business get better.
Not focused on building trust
The world has a trust problem, and according to Nielsen, we marketers are a big part of it. Only 40% of consumers trust marketing content, but 90% trust content from their social networks.
Compounding the problem, there are troublemakers among us, who have flocked to social media to expand their marketing reach, promoting the same alienating content they use in other media. And then they wonder why they don’t see a return on their investment.
It’s time to enlighten our brethren and teach them how we can collectively participate in social media in a way that puts us in a more trustworthy light.
This sin is closely related to the one on lack of trust. When you make a promise to a potential customer in an ad, and then don’t deliver, you most often lose the customer for good. Not a desirable outcome is it?
The bottom line
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true.
Always do your own research, and try to improve. Social media marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
There is more opportunity to fail in social media than to succeed if we treat it like any other design process. Social media requires us to get away from being promotional and sensational and instead treat our customers with special attention to including their thoughts in our offerings.
It means being truly interested in what they have to say in the real world and communicating about the things they care about — with a vocabulary that illustrates they can trust us.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of social media design. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your social media design efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media lessons from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
