How Best to Use Data Visualization to Engage Your Audience

Content marketers have found data visualization as extremely indispensable particularly when presenting information to a specific audience. This is the real reason data visualization is so popular among users who consume data that is presented using different data visualization tools. Additionally, marketers now know that individuals who follow visual illustrations perform a lot better than those who use text. What this means is that data visualization is a very useful feature particularly when used appropriately. Just like any other internet marketing strategy, you must be creative in the use of data visualization to make your work stand out among the huge competition.

Data visualization comes in very handy if you want to tell a great story to your target audience through the use of visuals even though not all the visuals you incorporate in your business data will attract the attention of prospects on the internet. Getting that attention is where your creativity comes in to help engage your audience better through data visualization.

You can better enhance your engagement when presenting different types of visuals to your audience through the following techniques.

Choose the Right Type of Data Visualization

Experience shows that when presenting your marketing materials using visuals, one type is usually not enough to meet all your marketing needs. For this reason, you need to choose the right format that will suit all the visualizations. Sometimes, to make your message better understood, you may be compelled to combine charts to bring out the deeper meaning of the data you are presenting. Here is how it works.
 
When comparing different categories within one measure, it is best to use bar-charts. If you want to connect different unique points and present them as a single entity, your best choice is a line-graph. You can use pie-charts when adding details to other types of data visualization.
 
Use Predictable Patterns and Layout

Human beings by nature are visual creatures due to how they process data through their eyes and their brains. Human eyes play a vital role in helping to deliver lots of information to the brain even at a quick glance. Next is to engage the human brain to correctly seek random patterns within the given data sets the eyes are seeing. This is why when the patterns displayed in any data are not random, it becomes hugely challenging for the human mind to understand the information so delivered. Therefore, if you want your target audience to easily understand the information you are putting out, you must consider applying predictable patterns and a layout they can easily comprehend. If you use a sequential method to deliver your message, it is so much better for your target audience to understand and comprehend. So, anytime you choose to use different graphs in your visualization, ensure that they are in a consistent order and offer a clear connection between different data points. Your target audience understands and connects with the marketing info better that way.

Use Text Carefully but Intentionally

By nature, the human brain can easily translate patterns and images faster than words. This is why the type of text you use in your messages can either help to improve the visualization or ruin it altogether. Crowding the entire message with bogus texts helps to ruin its visualization as well. Using text carefully but intentionally is the key to good results. Your focus should always be on applying text where it matters most and with adequate care to avoid crowding. If the text is used only to point to specific and important details about the visuals, so much the better. Positioning the text also matters a great deal. Because the human eyes are naturally drawn to the top left or right corner on the upper side of documents, it is safer to ensure you position the important view on either of these areas. This is because the human eyes are easily drawn to these areas even at a fleeting glance. This is the reason interactivity is better enhanced in this way. If you enhance interactivity in visualization, it eliminates confusing elements within the visualization. That helps to present the desired goal in a concise and more precise manner for good effects.

Use Clear Colors to Convey Your Message

It is difficult to talk about data visualization without talking colors. This is because the color you apply to visuals usually conveys a more vivid and significant message when compared to the written text. However, there is a delicate balance when it comes to balancing colors though. What you really need colors for is to use them to highlight your text messages. Excessive use of colors is however not advisable to avoid confusing and even distracting your target audience. It is best to apply initiative colors that are sensible and align well with your message. If the colors are attractive and make more sense to the target audience, they help to make it easy for them to process your data when reading through the displayed visuals. You must therefore endeavor to maintain color consistency at all times because the way you use colors in your texts directly affects the message you intend to convey to your target audience.

Practical Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

In digital marketing, content is king. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on the creation and promotion of quality content for a target audience. The reason it is now inevitable for small businesses to include content marketing as an indispensable part of their marketing plans. As for small business online marketing strategies, many rely on optimizing good content to enhance their online visibility through search and sharing. What many small businesses really need is to continuously create content that their audience needs. Such content that turns up if and when people search to solve a particular problem is it. If your content consistently helps searchers to solve their pressing problems, they are usually more inclined to trust you and to seek you out when they need help. By creating quality content therefore, it can help your business to clearly differentiate and distinguish itself if it explicitly shows people your expertise and business personality. This is the ideal scenario but many small businesses usually struggle to meet these ideals for varied reasons. These here practical content marketing tips can help small businesses out to overcome some of their content marketing challenges. 

Make Your Content Strategic

Not all content is valuable for search purposes. Content that is optimized with the right keywords is most desirable. It takes strategic writing to get that. Small businesses need to research the important search terms and keywords to use in crafting content that search engines can find and index. Write content that answers questions searchers ask when they search. When this content has the right SEO from the use of appropriate keywords throughout the content and even the business website, it benefits from good organic traffic from search engines.

Promote your Content

It is of no use writing a great content if nobody gets to see it. It is advisable to put all of your valuable content on your website and then promote and share it as widely as possible. That is how it gets the much needed attention and readership. You can promote your content by emailing it to your subscribers, sharing it generously on the right social media channels and encouraging your followers on these platforms to help in sharing it too. If feasible, you can syndicate your content to give it a wider reach.
 
Have a Content Calendar/Plan

Small businesses are usually more successful with their content marketing strategies if they market with simple plans and content calendars. Your content calendar can be so simple as to just contain a list of topics and dates to publish. It can also provide monthly themes, topics and what type of media you plan to use. That it is documented is what enhances its usefulness and effectiveness for marketing purposes. Small businesses that document their strategies are more likely to succeed in their marketing activities than those who do not. The plans and calendars they document are the real practical strategies that help to shape their content particularly when such plans factor in the target audiences, the type of content that resonates with them, the relevant topics, the channels of dissemination, and exactly where and how they intend to further promote the content for best results.

Market with Quality Content

It is no longer secret that many small businesses are producing a very huge amount of content online. For this reason, it is businesses that create the very best content who manage to get attention in the very noisy and crowded online market. What that means is that if you want to stand out and get some attention, the content you publish must not only be good, it must be unique, informative and authoritative enough to get you some attention. Great quality is the watchword if you want good results.

Create a Blog

Blogging is readily the most popular content marketing strategy among small businesses. If you know what others don’t know and will like to know, you can create a blog to share your info. From such information, you can create blog posts with great visuals and share them widely on various marketing channels including social media platforms. To avoid monotony, you can blog on a variety of topics in your business niche provided such topics are sufficiently educational and informative. Once you are able to create a great piece of content, you can repurpose it into different content types and share it on different platforms. How-to videos, step-by-step guides, podcasts and business quizzes are great contents that can help attract traffic to your business. Somehow, a variety of content delivered on different media types manage to keep people interested in what you have to say. If you choose the right piece of content for the problem you are helping to solve, you can better connect with people who need what you are offering.

Tell Interesting Stories

Story! Story!! Story!!! Yeah, many human beings really love stories. The way you tell great stories to people can affect them differently depending on the situation they find themselves. Great stories are stories about business challenges, booms and bursts and how businesses managed to survive their ordeals. Stories about great business experiences that can help others to succeed are good stories too. You can tell stories about why you chose a certain solution and how it helped resolve a customer’s problem in the past. Stories that help people resolve serious problems can make an emotional connection, build trust or provide a good motivation for people to do something great.

Have a Call-to-Action, CTA Button on Your Website

Online, people generally need to be encouraged to take some form of action. That is where a CTA button on your business website is very important. With it, you are directly inviting your website visitors to do something and it kind of elicits an immediate response if it is effective. CTAs are not just any call to action. To avoid a possible disconnect, your CTAs must always match what your content is about. They could be a call to watch a video, sign-up for email list, enter a contest, bid for a token gift, learn more about products/services or just to download a useful piece of content.

Outsource Content

No doubt crating quality content continuously is hugely tasking and time consuming. Marketers have found a way around this challenge. They now outsource content creation to someone else or to some agency that also help to distribute it. If you outsource, it is advisable to directly oversee the process yourself to make sure the content being created aligns with the vision and beliefs of your business. You can also work with a reputable marketing agency that specializes in inbound marketing to help you incorporate content marketing in search and social media activities. Even if you have plenty of content to share, what matters most is that such content must align with what your potential customers want and in what format they want it shared. It is only by so doing that the content gets the expected results.

Market with Email

Marketing with email is hugely effective if you already have a reliable and dependable email list. You must therefore build an email list first and use it to regularly share content with your subscribers. If your email list has quality and is reliable, it will enable you to reach interested subscribers on your terms even if they are in their thousands. It is by far easier to market to subscribers in your mailing list because they have already shown some interest in your business as against your social media audience who merely see your posts some times. If you have an email list and you regularly share content with them, it helps to put your business in their minds. Regularly sending them newsletters with helpful tips and special offers helps to keep your business visible and remembered and the offers therein can somehow encourage your customers to make their buy decisions.

Don’t Ignore Visuals and Formatting

Good content must always have clear visuals and formatting to enhance readability. When you post content whose text is in very small font sizes, it will certainly not be inviting enough to read. Such content is usually read with some difficulties if read at all. When content users who habitually scroll by in a rush hit content like that, it is usually not powerful enough to arrest their attention for a while at the very least. Naturally, human beings are are visual creatures. That is why good images, graphics and videos are very useful to help break up a text to make it easier for people to consume. When your content has good visuals and it is well formatted, it helps to enhance user experience.

Top Social Media Marketing Tips for Aggressive Marketers

Social media marketing is increasing in popularity among digital marketers because of the ease-of-use and huge popularity of social media platforms. It now appears that nearly everyone around the world is on social media. Marketers have quickly latched on to this huge popularity to promote their brands and products. For marketers who have challenges with technology and other forms of digital marketing, social media marketing is easy for them to handle. Aggressive marketers will find these social media marketing tips top range preferences to grow their businesses. 

Create Accounts on Different Social Media Platforms

Yes, there are many social media marketing platforms out there. They all come with peculiar characteristics and advantages. Depending on your type of business and the products you are marketing, it is best to have accounts on more than one social media platform. For some marketers, the more the number, the better for their promotional efforts. For aggressive marketing, you must therefore endeavor to create a number of different social media accounts since each social media network comes with its own peculiar advantages and disadvantages. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like are great social media networks where marketers can easily market content, share videos, photos and even do promos to a very wide and diverse audience. Some of these social media networks do have their own in-house analytics that are very useful for aggressive marketing.

Stimulate Engagement

If you need reminding, social media is all about being social. As an aggressive marketer, you must have great and outstanding people skills. These, are the skills you can take good advantage of to stimulate engagement on social media. If you open an account on any social media platform, it is just not enough to occasionally make a post and forget about it. You must take additional steps to interact more with your audience by way of inviting comments and responding to such comments. That is what stimulates interaction and more engagement. Most social media users always want to know the real personalities behind the contents they are consuming on social media. That further helps to stimulate more interactions and engagements that can lead to beneficial business relationships down the road.

Generously Share Videos

Many social media users tend to be more interested in videos than in graphics and images. The reason videos have become great marketing content on social media. For aggressive marketing, it is better to share more videos than any other type of visual content on social media. For effective social media marketing therefore, marketers must endeavor to generously share, very good and captivating videos of what they are marketing. That is what gets the best results.
 
Post Attractive Visuals

Millions of people are active on social media posting whatsoever catches their fancy. With millions of new social media posts each day from everywhere around the world, what easily catches attention in such scenario must be very unique and outstanding. That is why aggressive marketers must deliberately focus on particularly very attractive visuals. That is what helps to grab the attention of potential leads as they scroll through their news feeds on the networks. Social media marketing depends heavily on very beautiful photos/graphics to get leads and customers.

Post Local Content

Even in this age of the internet, many businesses remain local. Google tends to give good attention to “near me” searches in its search results. If you post marketing content that clearly shows your business as a neighborhood business, you will attract more local patronage. Many people make their buy decisions based on interrelated considerations. Nearness to the business location is one of those considerations. If you post local content on social media, you stimulate local audience and you get local patronage.

Schedule Posts Regularly

To establish a solid presence on social media, aggressive marketers must endeavor to share good content on a regular basis. Social media is interactive and millions of people are out there at any point in time posting stuff. Regular and reliable postings help to build trust through expectations. With that, marketers can build huge following, leads and even sales. If as a social media marketer you worry about the time you need to spend on social media making posts, there is a solution. You have access to a myriad of online social media management tools that can help you schedule your posts. A good social media scheduler helps you to reliably schedule, your daily, weekly or even monthly social media posts at once. By doing so, you can free up your valuable time for some other important marketing activities.

Use Hashtags Correctly

On some social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, hashtags when used correctly help your posts to get to the right audience. Even though hashtags are hugely important on all social media platforms, they are an absolute must on Twitter and Instagram. On these platforms, hashtags are very reliable to help social media users find your posts. Many users rely solely on them to search for and find products/services. Hashtags help your tweets or posts reach out to the target audience to generate leads and even sales.

Effectiveness of Visuals on Blog Posts

 Every blog is designed to attract traffic and eventual leads. The reason it must be informative, educating and even entertaining enough to attract readers. Experienced digital marketers now know that blog posts which contain a lot of visual content are a lot better for generating traffic and leads. The selling point of visual content on blogs is that most people like looking at something attractive and captivating. That is what visuals provide in blogs which helps such blogs with better depth and insight. Many people actually gauge the meaning in blogs through visuals like videos, images and pictures. 


 
Visual illustrations are vital keys to help blog readers know how to take some important steps at blog sites. These are steps like call to action either to sign up for a special offer, download content or whatever and wherever the blogger wants to lead the reader. Great leads usually come about from such developments and leads are highly needed in marketing efforts.

If you are desirous as most marketers do to keep your readers interested in your content in order to help establish your brand, great visuals usually come in very handy in that quest. What images do in blogs and do really well is to enhance the posts by boosting their appeal and thus make many more people read the entire post as a consequence. Some visuals are also very helpful to expand on the ideas in a blog post. They also serve the very useful purpose of providing an emotional connection and a deep, personal connection with the reading audience of any blog.

Some very interesting visuals in digital marketing are Infographics. These provide an excellent way of getting all of your information across to your readers in a way that’s visually impressive and succinct. If you have a blog and you’re not significantly generating leads from it, you may be missing out on a lot of competitive advantage that other businesses are enjoying with blogging. Most marketers get more leads when they use a blog than when they choose not to. Visual content helps out a great deal to attract the much needed traffic and eventual leads. The real reason they are considered highly effective.

Visual content contributes a great deal to make a blog content great. By the time you have a great content on your blog, such content automatically becomes a resource for both your market and your industry. Such content easily goes viral with time. Over such period of time, more sites will be able to link to your useful posts and attract potential leads towards you. That is actually one of the hassle-free ways of generating good leads. If you blog, your biggest challenge most times is how to ensure that you get good and attractive visuals on your blog content to help attract organic traffic and eventual leads.


 

4 Creative Marketing Campaign Ideas to Promote Your Business

Expert marketers tell us that visual marketing involves using images, videos, infographics and memes to deliver valuable and relevant information in an engaging visual format. It simply means marketing with visuals/pictures. It is highly effective because visual content usually has a higher impact on people’s minds than written content. The real reason it manages to get more people to visit your website, know your brand better and patronize your business much better than with written content. With the increasing use of social media sites like twitter, facebook Pinterest, Instagram and a host of others, visual content marketing is becoming more and more popular by the day. The real reason smart digital marketers and business owners now use these strategies more profoundly for their visual campaigns. 


 
Here are 4 main benefits of visual content marketing which your own business can take full advantage of.

#1: Increased Website Traffic

Every online marketer wants traffic, traffic and more traffic. What gets this traffic best is what is best for the business. Visual content is uniquely important at giving a unique touch to any website/blog thereby helping to grab the reader’s attention fairly easily. Even though online marketers like playing with words to show the value of their products and services, making use of visuals in addition to words always manages to have a greater impact on readers. That translates to the much needed traffic every online business needs.

#2: Better Customer Engagement

The more customers’ attention is engaged on a site, the higher the chances of their taking positive action. Characteristically, visual content is more engaging and powerful than written content. A combination of both works well to attract better attention from customers. If you add pictures and graphics to your written content, your marketing campaigns become more interesting. That translates to better traffic.

#3: Increased Conversion Rates
 
There is research evidence that a brand’s video usually influences over 80% of viewers to buy a product or service from the brand. The real reason it is smart business to use visual content as a marketing strategy to generate leads and increase sales. In practical facts, a very high percentage of people usually get to know about a product faster by simply watching a video. Exactly why smart marketers have come to realize the real importance of visual content marketing strategy as it relates to increase in conversion rates particularly when such visuals are incorporated in the landing pages of websites/blogs.

#4: More Brand Recognition

Experienced marketers now know that many more people learn faster mostly by way of visuals. That most people comprehend better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words. Therefore, you can easily raise brand awareness among your target audience if you incorporate visual content marketing strategy in your marketing plans. A sustained effort at that usually helps to gradually increase the much needed recognition for your brand. Updating your business website and landing pages with compelling graphics, icons, photos, and videos helps brand recognition much better and faster on the long run.