Striking visuals are a highly engaging form of content for businesses, and they're essential for building an SEO friendly website. That is why they are so valuable to your B2B blog posts. In a 2019 survey of more than 500 digital marketers, 88% said they used visuals in more than half of the articles they published.
With that in mind, here's some inspiration for content marketers who are on a mission to make their blog posts more visual.
As a writer with oodles of interesting ideas and creative flair you might be tempted to explore your artistic side every now and then and create custom visual content that will complement your copy. So, if you're in the mood for some light experimentation, what tools are available to you, and how easy are they to pick up and give a go?
Here's a short guide to the best free assets for your visual content toolkit.
If you have ever trawled through a stock photography website in search of images to represent your business, you will already appreciate that it can be a bit of a minefield. On the one hand, stock image sites give you easy access to professional photography (or illustration) and save you valuable time and resources.
The flip side is, frankly, there is such an excess of naff material out there. It can take some effort to source images that truly reflect your brand.
Are your website designs sensitive enough to modern SEO tactics?
Incorporating SEO best practices into your website from the ground up will help you to increase the quality and volume of website traffic, and deliver a more pleasing user experience for your site visitors.
Follow these tips to build a business website that both bots and people will love.
Great planning and foresight can elevate your video marketing content from good to brilliant.
In this blog, we explore how filmmakers can make creative decisions that save time and effort in the editing room, resulting in a video campaign that engages and delights.
Video is becoming easier, and cheaper, for marketers to create or commission. Here, we delve into the top 5 reasons to focus on video content.
Image optimisation can heavily influence the way search engines calculate your site rank, and, consequently, control how easy it is for searchers to find your site. Behind-the-scene elements such as page load time and keyword usage come to play here. If you want to be the number one search result for your product or service on Google or other SERPs, you really have to get a reign on your images.
In this post, we take a look at the benefits of a website image audit, and identify a handful of best practices.
If you’re a savvy marketer, it’s likely you’ve already invested in your video marketing strategy. However, with so many channels and site pages primed for distribution, you may be wondering what your next steps should be, and where you ought to place your video content to achieve the highest conversion rate.
The buyer’s journey and who your video’s target audience is will be major deciding factors in the end delivery of your content.
Before you embarked on the project, it’s highly likely that you defined SMART goals for your video marketing strategy. Remind yourself, was your purpose to increase brand awareness, to celebrate a product, or rather to encourage prospects to purchase?
'Call-to-action’ (CTA) describes a website element that is designed to promote an offer and guide visitors toward it. Typically, they come in the shape of a button, image or textual hyperlink. CTAs are a powerful marketing tool that help to increase awareness and invite meaningful engagement from potential - or existing - customers. They can be thought of as a directional cue that shows interested parties where to head next.
According to visual content marketing statistics shared by HubSpot, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging tailing behind in second (27%). When images play second fiddle to copy you have a recipe for disaster.
87% of marketing professionals use video as a digital marketing tool. And Cisco has predicted that by 2021, more than 80% of internet traffic will be video.
The demand is there, as is the accessibility and affordability. The big question is, where do you start?
Here's an introduction to the 3 most impactful B2B videos your business can create.
Case studies tell the inside story of your business partnership with customers. Typically, they delve into the initial challenges a user grappled with before finding you, and then share an honest, detailed account of how your business helped them to overcome those issues.
Video is just one of the ways you might choose to chronicle your customer’s experience. Here’s a summary of why case studies are an asset that can be folded into your B2B video marketing strategy.
Picture me as an art student half-way through a still life class. I'm focussed on the drawing. I'm frowning and fussing - erasing and redrawing the same area of the page over and over.
I'm totally over-invested in the minutiae.
And, every week, as the tutor paces the room, he invariably pauses behind me and says something along the lines of...
As a creator of online content, it’s important to have a keen awareness of your audience. Not surprisingly, this includes people from all backgrounds. The internet is for everybody - and businesses have a social responsibility to strive for more inclusive design.
People tune in for more than pure sound or image. Videos carry a message, and viewers with hearing or vision loss shouldn’t be made to feel excluded from global communications. Screen readers are making it easier for people with poor vision or hearing to browse the web, and content makers need to step up to the mark.
Marketers strive for healthy organic reach. And when it comes to video marketing campaigns, this is heavily effected by engagement rates.
On social media platforms, like Facebook for example, news feeds are designed to favour content from people or brands that users have previously engaged with.
As a B2B marketer, you already have a strategy in place when it comes to social media - you may even have established a social media policy for your workplace. But the goalposts are always changing.
So what challenges will 2019 bring?
Last year there were several announcements that promised to affect social media marketing in 2019, for example:
And that's not all.
Images are a key component for almost every website - it’s hard to find a page online that doesn’t contain at least one.
For this reason, image optimisation plays a vital role in B2B website housekeeping. The benefits are plentiful. Optimising your images helps them to rank higher on SERPs, makes them more voice search friendly, funnels higher quality traffic to your page and ultimately improves UX.
With that in mind, alt-text is one of the most obvious places to start.
Social media platforms connect businesses with prospects and existing customers. They paint a picture of your audience's needs, spread your brand message and inform future marketing goals.
And, with social media marketing, you can position your product or service right in front of the very people who need it. Sounds great! But how can you gain more reach?
Growing an audience is one of the biggest challenges for businesses on social media.
Think about your channels. What’s really in it for your followers? Unless you are creating content that genuinely delights, people won’t be prepared to follow or subscribe.
The world can be a pretty noisy place. We're constantly bombarded with messages, advertisements and stimuli online. Today, consumers are becoming increasingly hardened against traditional marketing tactics.
However, personalisation can play a key role in making your brand stand out, and advancements in artificial intelligence technology are designed to support this. AI is flourishing across website design, social media, email campaigns, customer segmentation and content optimisation.
Artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning and data analytics are helping businesses to become more responsive to consumer demands in real-time.
Web video is widely used by digital marketers as a way to influence B2B purchase decisions. And, as a leading advocate for your brand, you might on occasion be asked to step into the spotlight to share your thoughts and expertise.
Whether you are comfortable with public speaking or not, the idea of appearing on-camera can seem daunting. But genuine, helpful testimony will greatly enhance your viewers' product understanding - as well as their readiness to buy.
The internet is full to the brim with video marketing statistics proving just how powerful it can be as an inbound tool. On occasion, you might be faced with a campaign that has surprisingly under-performed. If you take a second look, you might see glaring areas for improvement. How can you be sure your next investment in video will grow revenue for your business?
Here are some of the most common video campaign mistakes, and how you can avoid making them.
Knowing when and where to publish your B2B content is every bit as important as producing it in the first place. Inbound marketers are experts at developing a deep understanding of buyer personas, with the aim of forecasting likely behaviour, and this can be used to levy impressive results when it comes to video marketing campaigns.
Information regarding the online activity of your potential customers can be used strategically to improve the delivery of your business message across social media.
This is an oft-overlooked factor in corporate video distribution.
More B2B companies are using video marketing than ever before. That makes sense considering the force with which a successful campaign can attract, qualify and convert new customers. But how can your business maximise on this creative venture?
There are three stages to video production:Pre-production - planning your video, writing the script and coordinating activities
Production - producing the raw material for your video. This could consist of filming, recording audio or creating graphical assets.
Post-production - assembling the footage, editing and reviewing.
Whiteboard videos are a prime example of an educational video that benefits buyer personas in the awareness stage of the inbound sales funnel. They come under the genre of explainer videos and use both illustration and animation to communicate concepts in a fun and unexpected way.
Investigation reveals that 45 per cent of companies who champion video as a valuable marketing tool feature an explainer video on their homepage. An overwhelming majority of those companies find great success with this content.
The following post explores the video production process behind making a whiteboard explainer video.
Choosing suitable imagery is a pivotal - and sometimes painful - point in the B2B marketing blog process. But there are valid reasons why marketers spend so much valuable time and effort selecting the right visual content for their posts.
Stunning visuals capture attention, improve the memorability of your post, provide variety and inspire emotion.
Marketing campaigns can sink or swim on the back of images. They reinforce your message and provide readers with context. In addition to this, they vastly improve website traffic: studies on visual content marketing have shown that articles with images get 94 per cent more total views.
More than 87 per cent of online marketers now use video content. And on Facebook, video is the top performing content type - over 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day.
Social media video steams ahead of photos, links and status updates in terms of user engagement.
So what can your business do to improve your video marketing metrics on Facebook?
Facebook controls what people see on their newsfeed using algorithms that predict their interests.
The way that Facebook ranks video was updated earlier this year. Video content that gets sought out and returned to by viewers is now ranked favourably. Additionally, social media video that has visibly inspired interaction and conversation is given greater prominence.
Consider how many people are using social media on a daily basis - it’s such a staple in modern living. Marketers can take full advantage of this audience by providing video content that resonates with them.
When you’re ready to embark on a video marketing campaign, you will need to write a script and formulate a plan as to how and where you will share your content.
One of the most common questions to arise in any video creation process is this: just how long should the video be?
It's not always easy to predict the future, but it's worth a shot. Video marketing is ever on the rise. In one survey, 64 percent of marketers admitted that video is set to dominate their content marketing strategy.
Video marketing is a venture with high ROI and buckets of creative potential.
In this blog, we will have a look at some of the most alluring new trends when it comes to video marketing.
You might be missing out on an easy opportunity to improve your company’s website performance: image optimisation.
Google recommends image optimisation as one of the top three fixes for slow page load time. Images make a staggering difference and often account for most of the bytes downloaded on a page.
Including at least one image in a post can potentially double share rates, and help readers to retain more information than text alone. Images deliver the core message of your content.
Removing images from your site isn’t viable, but reducing their weight is.
The rising popularity of mobile devices has changed the way consumers search for information online, and marketers are already adapting their search engine optimisation tactics in response.
In 2018, SEO needs to consider the prominence of AI-powered voice search too.
According to Google, 1 out of 5 searches come from voice queries. 50 percent of smartphone users use voice technology on their device, and 33 percent use it daily.
