Creating Content: Using Clever Photography,
Video, and Blogs
How to get your story to stand out from the crowd through the use of clever photography? It is simple; begin to “think in pictures.” Visuals are essential to creating content that will help your business stand out and draw in an audience. Not only do images help make text-centric content more readable, digestible, and memorable, but they can also be used to craft compelling messages that speak volumes without using a single word. Plus, good images can also strengthen your press release, as journalists recognize the power of good images to accompany a news story. However, I find that many organizations and brands always seem to forget to invest in this aspect.
Posting a photo or video online and waiting for the business offers to start rolling in is not an effective strategy. Neither is hinging your visual content success on creating the next viral phenomenon. To ensure you are positioning your visual content to deliver business results, look at what you are trying to achieve with your visual content. Remember your audience and what they want from your feed. The best visual experiences are those that find a way to tap into the power of emotion; and of course, create content that is consistent and promotes your brand value.
Along with consistent brand values, it is important to keep your visuals as brand-consistent as possible, including using your logos and colors. The best visual is when you can identify the brand it belongs to in an instant, no matter where the content appears.
Stock photographs and illustrations may save time, yet they cannot tell as compelling a story of your brand as bespoke authentic images can. If you are low on designer resources and feel that you need to turn to a stock service now and again, try to find a way to put your own branded spin on the images you select.
Do not forget you can repurpose information and adapt your popular written content into attractive visuals of charts and infographics. It is a great way to draw fresh attention to your content, helping to make your brand’s insights more digestible, memorable, and shareable.
Another great way to generate content is to use your own follower content, as consumers love to snap their own pictures and share them with their friends. So, why not put their photography skills to good use by including their work in your content marketing and giving them credit. It will also strengthen engagement.
Video
Using video content in your PR and marketing efforts is an incredible way to create content that is personal and has a real impact on your audience. It has an incomparable ability to create emotion-driven sales and sales are always personal on some level. Buyers want to feel good about their choice and video marketing, when done correctly, is the best way to create this feeling. Tellingly, 92 percent of people who consume mobile videos share them with other people (Hubspot 2018); this is a big portion and is higher than the share rate of many other types of content.
So, when you use online video in your digital strategy, you have the perfect opportunity to enhance your brand’s message, through simple features like design and branding, to more advanced features like voice and content; video marketing is the ideal tool to strengthen your brand identity and make sure that your customers know who you are. To make your videos as memorable as possible, ensure that you are keeping them in line with your brand strategy. This means keeping colors, fonts, logos, and voice the same in your video marketing as they are in your blogs and articles. While videos do things text content does not, users should still be able to recognize the style and format of your brand’s videos online.
However, when a company’s content fails to perform well on a given device or browser system, the business behind it usually loses traffic and suffers decreased conversions as a result. Fortunately, video content is fit for consumption on all devices, ranging from computers to mobile phones. This expands video’s reach and makes it more user-friendly and consumer-focused.
Also, by adding video to your landing pages, website, and content offers, it is easy to improve your company’s SEO (search engine optimization) value and improve your click-through rates across the board.
Livestreaming
Livestreaming has become hugely popular and dare I say a phenomenon—it is real-time online video broadcasts that are available through mobile apps, as well as on the desktop. Livestreaming gives brands the opportunity to capture events and moments as they happen, which create uniquely engaging stories to share with their audience. It is one of the most genuine ways to connect with stakeholders and allows for levels of personalization that the PR industry has never seen. Backing this up, YouTube has said that mobile video consumption grows by 100 percent every year (Forbes 2017; www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/02/03/video-marketing-the-future-of-content-marketing/#39be0eac6b53).
One of the main reasons you might want to consider livestreaming is simply due to its large user base and growing popularity. It has the potential to reach thousands of new customers. When tactics like SEO and content marketing are taking up too much time and money, you need a new outlet to drive traffic; using livestream platforms is a nearly free way to drive revenue for your business. In May 2016 it was predicted that video streaming market will be worth 70.05 billion U.S. dollars by 2021 (Research and Markets 2018).
It is appealing because it allows us the chance to be a creator, a presenter, and be seen by stakeholders. You can broadcast anything you are doing across the world without delay or edit. With the popularity of livestreaming continuing to rise, other more conventional social media platforms have branched out into the world of livestreaming with Facebook introducing Facebook Live and Twitter launching Periscope. One of the most popular mediums is Instagram, which in June 2018 reported that it had reached 1 billion monthly active users, up from 800 million in September 2017 (Statista 2018). The app is one of the most popular social networks worldwide.
However, while the inspiration to livestream takes its lead from reality TV and YouTube, it is uncensored, unedited, and unrehearsed. Used in positive ways it can be a campaigning tool, creating identity, showcasing talent, and developing skills in communication. However, in spite of the clear opportunities and gratification that livestreaming presents, it is important to remember that livestreaming can be both unpredictable and hard to moderate.
Blogging
Blogging has grown into a varied form of communication, which can be short story collections, helping businesses advertise, educate customers, inform shareholders, or inspire community interactions.
The length of content is varied, and I always suggest that posts should be at the very least 500 words long. If you do write longer pieces, make sure that your long posts are easy to read and to skim. Avoid creating walls of dense text at all costs. Plus, adding an image brings your blog post to life and does better with engagement, when it is shared on social media.
There are some basic SEO skills you can apply to any blog post you publish that will help improve your search engine rankings on search engines like Google. Some things to do are:
- The more links your blog has from high-quality, popular sites, the higher Google will rank you;
- Try to have other websites link back to your website through guest posting, blog comments, or just by publishing quality content others want to mention on their own site, so Google and other search engines can reward you for being authoritative and rank your blog posts higher.
- Have a good title and the closer your title relates to keywords people are searching for, the higher your content will rank;
- Take time to research what keywords relate to your content so that, when people search for them, your website appears as one of the most relevant results. Do add keywords to the title of your blog post in the content body.
- Easier said than done, but try to publish consistently, as it will teach web crawlers to return to your site regularly and improve your rankings over time. Publishing regular content for site visitors to enjoy also means you become a source to rely on for consistent content.
Case Stories
A professor I was working with had just published his book on geopolitics, a weighty subject, and, while he was producing great blogs and written posts, his engagement online was low. We wanted to reach a wider audience and create a relationship with possible readers. Plus, the professor had a great personality and could explain a complex subject, which would come across well in videos, so we decided to create short videos, taking geopolitics topics that were in the news and breaking them down for businesses and business leaders to understand.
The videos were filmed easily on a smartphone and we always ensured that we had the branding of the book in the background, including all the credits at the end of each video. But the unique selling point (also known as USP) was that each video was no longer than three minutes—short and snappy. The videos did not just go up on the website, but were also uploaded on to YouTube to help push engagement, which they successfully did.
Another great example of how strong video and livestreaming can be is this example from a wonderful online community platform that connected local people to local community events, news, and businesses. The platform called Loving Local Enfield with 16,000 plus members within its Facebook group, ran on Instagram, and via its own website. People from the community post daily about things they need answering or local news. There are moderators monitoring posts and comments. To shake things up and make it fun, occasionally Loving Local would livestream from local events. They also videoed local products and produced and interviewed local businesses—helping local traders get their personality across. All the videos had three key features—fun, passion, and community!—and are very popular.
A women’s network based in North London, called the Buzzing Business Club, that works both off-line and online with a global online audience does something called the “Knowledge Hub” where they live interview business experts on topics from branding, to sales, to how to present and pitch. These interviews are livestreamed on Facebook for their female business community, who can watch and ask questions in real time. This is a great way to share knowledge, build an online presence, and be engaged with your followers. It also is adding value.
A well-being event’s company would do a quick “vox pop” of video content, capturing the audience as they were leaving the events, asking them how much they enjoyed the evening. Not more than five minutes long, these videos helped reflect how worthwhile the events were and also provided the opportunity to promote the next forthcoming video at the end of the video.
Finally, a women’s annual international conference in India, called the Women’s Economic Forum, understands the power of livestreaming and video perfectly, where the use of video also attracts speakers. All the sessions at this four-day event are livestreamed, driving global engagement.
Summary
Somethings in life are a constant, irrespective of how fast things are changing around us, and the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is as true today as it ever was. No matter what industry you are in, images sell. Creating interesting content helps you find clients, which helps to grow your business. We can see from the case stories here it does not need to be complicated or difficult to do. All that is required is some planning, action, and an element of creativity, which can be fun.
The purpose of creating content is not to be underestimated, especially when using social media to promote your business with your stakeholders. Social media is where your business blogs, images, and videos come alive. However, social media for many can be daunting; in Chapter 6, I take the fear out of getting online and using social media for PR.