Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

This blog offers suggestions on how to better interact with audiences with visuals that will engage them.

• Use team pictures: viewers like to see the people that work behind the scenes to deliver the products and services they buy. Social media is all about humanizing the brands we deal with after all! We frequently use photos of our team on Facebook, but I'll have to remember to bring images of the Affinity Express team into our blog as well.
• Help people to remember your product and look different: this makes a lot of sense when you are trying to differentiate your company and products. If all your competitors use straightforward product images to promote their chocolates, can you use images of people at different scenes to illustrate how your chocolates make customers feel transported?
• Show your product in a real world context: eliminate the possibility prospects can't envision themselves using your product and show them what real customers just like them are doing. Testimonials come alive when you have photos to reinforce the benefits in an instant.
• Get media coverage with great visuals: screen shots, standard product images and head shots are boring. If your news is accompanied by a different or better way to convey the message visually, the odds are better it will be picked up by bloggers and other media.
• Display pain points with a fun analogy: there's no faster way to communicate you get what drives prospects crazy or their biggest challenges. We used this tactic in a PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate that we not only understand the many disparate systems and administrative tasks required to offer a full suite of digital marketing services to advertisers, we streamline for clients with one workflow for all products.

How to Make Awesome YouTube Videos for Your Small Business

I was glad to read this post on creating videos for small businesses because the case has been made that video is highly-effective. However, knowing this information doesn't make it work for you--it's nice to have a little guidance. The post tells us that videos should be: highly-educational/informative, sincere and fun. Fortunately, it delves in deeper with more specific recommendations:

• Start with a preview (i.e., tell 'em what you're going to tell them)
• Display website information (the phone number, call to action, etc., as most people don't watch the entire video)
• Use pop-up text (to clarify, add details and reinforce points)
• Add humor
• Involve customers (see the point about visual marketing above)
• Integrate still shots and slow motion (varying the pace enables people absorb the content better)

I would add to this advice that you should think carefully about the right length of your video, as people buying a new pair of pants need less information than those buying an accounting system. Regardless of the subject, we all have short attention spans these days, so I think shorter videos are better.