3 of 5 Story-Telling - Looking Ahead

Looking Ahead

Once you’ve re-worked your visual storytelling approach and integrated video components and interactivity into your content, it’s time to re-engage people with your new and improved offerings. Things like remarketing campaigns or retargeting ads can open doors that were previously shut—and with content that’s more compelling and visually engaging, your chances of success will grow exponentially.

Check out some tips for repurposing your content here and here, and remember—visual storytelling is one of the most effective, engaging strategic approaches you can use in today’s increasingly fast-paced markets. Don’t get left behind!

Visual storytelling has been around for a long, long time. Forever, in fact. At its most basic, a visual story is a narrative that’s told with the help of visual media, such as photos, videos, or illustrations. For our ancestors, this meant cave drawings and shadow play. For us, it means a whole host of stunning, immersive experiences complete with all kinds of graphical and audio enhancements.

While the bar has certainly been raised over the years, the result of good visual storytelling has remained the same: a captive audience, fully engaged right from the start and eager to hear how the story ends. That’s why the importance of applying this technique to modern-day workflows can’t be overstated. Visual storytelling is tried and true—it’s as useful today as it was hundreds of years ago. Done right, it will continue to serve us far into the future.

Visual Storytelling In Business—Where It Is, And Where It Needs To Be

You’ve already seen, and hopefully used, visual storytelling in the workplace. It can often be found in webinars, sales pitches, various presentations, and even more static occurrences, like landing pages and infographics. And while these efforts over the years have certainly been valiant, the fast-changing landscape of technology and the evolution of attention spans have created a demand for something, well, more.

An image doesn’t automatically make a presentation more engaging. A graph doesn’t automatically make data more digestible. A like button doesn’t automatically make a broadcast more interactive. Rather than simply tacking on visual media and features, marketers should consider tweaking the strategy behind what they’re already using. 

As a marketer, you’re already familiar with the value of repurposing content, so let’s start there. Consider the assets you have at your disposal and let’s look at them with a new lens.

5 Easy Ways To Create New Videos From Existing Content

Even though creating videos has gotten much cheaper and accessible in the last few years, it can still be time-consuming to create videos from scratch. That’s where repurposing your existing content becomes a powerful strategy for putting out more great video content in less time. Here are five ways to get started with repurposing ideas from your current content into videos:

• Break up webinars into smaller video clips. To get more value from your webinars once they’re over, try breaking them into smaller video clips.
• Capture quick testimonials and case studies during customer calls. Even though video testimonials and case studies can be one of your best marketing assets, most marketers don’t seem to prioritize them. If you just capture your customers’ authentic feedback, then you’ll have all the video you need — just make sure to ask them for permission before you hit record.
• Turn internal videos into educational videos. Each of your company’s teams spends a lot of time teaching your prospects and customers how to do things on personalized webcam or screen share video software. Repurposing these types of videos can be a huge marketing opportunity.
• Turn videos into GIFs. On Giphy, you can break down your videos step-by-step, capture and highlight the most animated and engaging moments, add captions, adjust resolution, export, and embed. 
• Create a video from your text-based content, such as a blog post or guide. If you’ve been writing blog posts for a while, you likely have a ton of valuable content hidden in your blog archives. Just remember, video language should be relaxed and conversational. Avoid using complex sentence structures.  

Images That Make An Impact

Nobody wants to see a stock photo of five men in dark suits, sitting in a sterile office around a white table with a cityscape in the background. When visuals are meaningfully chosen, they can trigger deep emotions and result in stronger brand engagement. Eye-tracking studies prove that when images are relevant, a reader will spend more time looking at them than they do reading text.

Going forward, focus on triggering your audience’s emotions and creating meaningful connections through carefully curated photography. Keep an eye out for images that convey cultural relevance and humanity over technology. When it comes to placing the images in your content, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Simplicity is always key 

This rule shouldn’t surprise you or anyone else in the marketing game, and yet it’s the one that’s broken the most. An image that’s loaded with color and multiple subjects does not automatically make it more engaging or memorable. Instead, choose something that gives your audience the mental and cognitive space they need to focus on the core message.

Keep images consistent

If your content contains multiple images, it’s important to make sure they’re all part of the same visual theme. A bunch of different visuals in quick succession is confusing, difficult to process, and worst of all, disruptive to the overarching message. Clean, consistent colors, fonts, styles, and organization create a clear story arc that resonates.

Compose wisely

Similar to consistency, the composition is about clarity and impact, but particularly in how you present each image. Hierarchy matters, so use your visuals to convey the importance of different data or features through size and other types of emphasis. You can also break the information down and order it in such a way that it tells its own mini-visual story, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.

Please Like below: or If you implement one or more of these ideas, I would love to hear how it worked. Get in touch with me at any of the comment below – Thank you.