infographics - Servant of Chaos

Generating Leads with Infographics

Visual content attracts people to your site and services. But visual content – and in particular – infographics -have a very specific job to do. They have to help progress your customer’s journey.

Around 60% of customers have already done research and are thinking about buying by the time they find your website. This means:

60% of your visitors need more information from you to help convince them to proceed
40% aren’t even at the “awareness” stage.

This makes for challenging messaging.

How then is it possible to:

Make a lasting and memorable first impression?
Keep your visitor’s attention long enough to begin a deeper engagement
Convince your visitor to provide some kind of contact information (eg email or phone).

The SEMrush folks have some great statistics on capturing attention:

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual
Captioned text is read 4x more than body copy
50% of your brain is active in visual processing
70% of your sensory receptors are in your eyes
We process images 60,000x faster than text
40% of people respond better to visuals.

But visuals are not a silver bullet. They are part of your engagement and lead generation toolkit.

Spiralytics have put together this handy infographic on creating infographics. It shows how you can use data, design, layout and messaging to create a relevant, shareable, lead generating infographic.

The next thing, of course, is to get your infographic in front of your audience. And that’s where your strategy will need to kick in.

Go #SocialFirst for Customer Care

Customer Experience, Infographics

Remember when “Digital First” was the marketing catch-cry? Or “Mobile First”?

Living in a world of constant change means that, as marketers, we have to continuously refine our approach. We need to test and tweak our messaging, adjust our spend and targeting, and reconsider and re-evaluate our technology stack. That’s right, increasingly, marketing is a tech game. The game of marketing, itself, has changed.

Recently, Qantas announced that Olivia Wirth will take on the role of Chief Customer Officer. This sees responsibility for the areas of customer and digital strategy being added to Wirth’s brand, marketing and corporate affairs portfolio. The reshuffle, puts Qantas at the vanguard of “Power Marketing” – where the head of marketing has responsibility for the end-to-end customer journey.

It also signals the arrival of customer care as a Board level conversation. A small scale survey of Conversocial customers revealed some interesting directions for social customer care. And while social customer care began slowly, it is gaining momentum with significant investments in social contact centre staffing, technology and process. Social is the “low hanging fruit” of customer service channels because it is:

Direct
Responsive
Public.

The very fact that social customer care is public brings additional pressures and attention to customer care – which in the past has largely been a back-channel activity. Now, as it shifts to “front of house”, the manner in which you deal with your best – and your most difficult – customers, is on display for all to see.

No Left v Right Brain – And Other Mythconceptions

Big Data, Infographics

I love this infographic on various urban myths that permeate our modern existence. By author, David McCandless, it visualises some of the most Googled myths and misconceptions – with larger bubbles indicating that it is a common search term. Some of my personal favourites include:

That you SHOULD wake sleepwalkers
That bats are NOT blind
There is no solid division between the LEFT and RIGHT hemispheres of the brain.

What surprises you?

Disrupt Your Strategy – Planning for Audiences not Generations

Audience 2.0, Big Data, Digital Disruption, Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Infographics, Marketing, Strategy

I have never been a fan of demographic profiling. Sure, this information, at scale, can reveal certain things about a population – and this can be useful to understand whether there might be a connection between our age and (for example) our propensity to over-eat. Or contract disease. Or buy new cars every four years.

But populations don’t interest me. They feel like a dead weight around my sense of, and interest in, humanity. Instead, I prefer audiences – which is perhaps why I studied theatre rather than statistics.

It’s also why I am continually fascinated by digital technology and transformation – and it is why social media continues to attract the attention of people, corporations and governments. For digital transformation is not just about bringing the non-digital world online – it’s challenging the very nature of what we consider “our selves” to be.

As marketers, we are constantly drawn to the idea of demographics – the cashed up profiling of the Baby Boomers, the anxious, try-harder Gen X-ers and the slacker Gen Ys. But like any generalisation, these labels are easily unpicked. There are plenty of Baby Boomers who are slackers and plenty of cashed up, power wielding Gen X-ers. And Gen Y are just starting to flex their creative, financial and intellectual powers – and there is more goodness to come. Rather than simply relying on this style of profiling, we should be working harder to understand these audiences. We need to map their behaviours, attitudes and interests, not just their age, sex and location.

This is why I quite like the work that marketing automation firm, Marketo, has done on Generation Z. And while, yes, they have started out with the age-focused label, the research carried out by agency, Sparks and Honey, reveals the patterns of behaviour, interests, attitudes and insights that can help build a deeper understanding of this audience. While the data reflects a US-based audience, there are cultural parallels that are useful indicators such as:

Do-Gooders – an interest in making a difference in the world
Shift FROM Facebook – Facebook lost its allure when the parents arrived. Gen Z are embracing newer platforms like snapchat, secret and whisper
Creation trumps sharing – Gen Z embrace the prosumer ethic of digital media creativity.

But to really understand this “Gen Z” audience, I would go further. I wouldn’t stop at the age of 19. I would ask:

Why would my brand be relevant to audiences exhibiting these behaviours
Why would these audiences choose to purchase my product/service/thing
Which values embodied by my brand augments the life, behaviour, experience or purpose of this audience
How do these behavioural profiles help me understand my customers regardless of age / demographics

And when it comes to planning, insight and future proofing your brand, I’d look to opportunities to self-disrupt your strategy. Ditch the path of lazy profiling, put the work in to really understand your audiences, and then invite them into the process of creating a brand that has a purpose. Start by delving into the data behind the Sparks and Honey research (below) – and then work on your own business by starting with the audiences you rely upon.