Your business won’t grow if you’re not marketing it; but, there are so many ways to market a business that it can be hard to know which strategy will be successful. This is why a lot of businesses hire agencies that are experts at making these decisions and developing tactics to help brands meet their SMART goals.
For example, a home service business might hire an agency like ‘Home Service Direct‘ to help grow its online presence so it can generate potential leads that will convert and eventually become clients. Other businesses might take a more holistic approach and opt to work with consulting agencies like the Hook Agency – Minneapolis Web Design and Marketing, which offer additional specialty services like web design and development in addition to digital marketing.
Bottom line? There are a million ways to tailor your brand’s marketing strategy to help achieve your business goals, but visual content will always be the most popular way of marketing a brand online.
Think about it: As a consumer, you know what photos, videos, and GIFs grab your attention, so learning what types of content and mediums grab your audiences’ attention is a conscious, creative exercise that will help your brand’s content creators and collaborators learn what to create more or less of.
If you don’t have the team expertise or bandwidth to consistently report on data, you might miss out on the key insights that can help optimize your brand’s creative content.
That’s where professional help comes in. Check out the agency ‘This Is LD‘ to see how they help organizations like the W.K. Kellog Foundation, PayPal, Northwestern University, and The United Nations achieve their digital platform potential.
One common mistake that a surprising number of companies make when marketing their visual content is failing to harness the potential of their brand’s website.
Whenever we want to learn about a product or service, we all search online to get the facts and compare our options. Therefore, it’s crucial that your website be distinct and inviting. If you think your website needs a refresh, you might want to contact a web design expert to ensure you make present your brand’s permanent digital home properly.
Want more digital and content marketing tips from experts who have tried, failed, and then succeeded?
Here are five visual content marketing mistakes you don’t know you’re making:
1. Wasting money sourcing the wrong visual content.
Marketers are investing heavily in producing and purchasing photos, videos, infographics and more. But many of them are wasting their budgets by sourcing off-brand content or recreating assets they already have, but can’t find. Does the content you’re producing fit the message you want to share?
Pro Tip: Make sure everyone on your media team is familiar with and reviews the brand design deck.
2. Risking losing your assets by sticking with sub-par storage solutions.
If you don’t have a secure, centralized place to store all of your creative assets, you are risking losing your valuable investment. Sure, accidents happen—but in over 15 years in business, we’ve never lost a client’s assets.
Employees leave, take hard drives, close personal Dropbox accounts, and institutional knowledge leaves with them, but if you upload all of your standard operating procedure documents and one-sheets to a PhotoShelter for Brands DAM library, it’ll be safe and easily accessible forever.
Related Stories: Why Your Creative Team Needs Dynamic Asset Management
3. Wasting time and missing opportunities to engage your crowd.
You need to be able to find the perfect visual asset when a reporter calls or a brand moment starts trending. You probably know this scenario all too well: An opportunity comes up,and you know you have the perfect photo to share, but you have no idea where it is. Your visual assets need to be easily searchable so you can take advantage of every opportunity to engage your audience—in breaking news situations and on a regular basis.
4. Using inefficient ways of sharing content, crushing your team’s creative energy and morale in the process.
Creative people dread having to move lots of or large files from one place to another. No one wants to deal with the ‘lets-find-the-best-solution’ dance. A creative person shouldn’t have to concept, ideate, and produce the creative deliverables, while simultaneously panicking about the process for delivering high-resolution videos or Adobe project files on tight deadlines. Your organization’s creative teams need one easy standardized platform with a streamlined process for sharing content, so you can cut back on frustration and wasted time.
5. You’re putting your brand in danger by not keeping track of usage rights.
Oftentimes brands get in trouble for using content they don’t have proper permission to use and it’s the biggest, costliest mistake of them all. You need to know who holds the copyright to the content you’re using, and you need to make sure you’re using it correctly.
Want to learn some smart, but simple strategies to keep you from making these same mistakes?
Tune in to the on-demand webinar session ‘How to Prepare for the Visual Content Apocalypse‘ to learn:
- Staggering statistics about the rise of visual content
- Who the ‘zombies’ killing your productivity are and how to stop them from slowing you down and distracting you from hitting deadlines
- What brands are defeating these sluggish monsters by taking the innovative initiative to seize opportunities to engage their audiences
- Tips for improving your visual content marketing workflow to avoid succumbing to the pressures of the visual content apocalypse
