Building Visibility
One of the greatest challenges for many consultancies and educators is creating and sustaining visibility among prospects and clients.
This is a common problem for most organisations and is compounded by the information overload we all suffer from.
The only effective solution to the threat of invisibility is to create a steady stream of irresistibly captivating, relevant and useful content. Why? Because that is what people want and are asking for. However, it’s not very often that ‘irresistibly captivating’ is used to describe a PowerPoint presentation, talking head video or text overloaded website. To become truly visible requires a whole lot more than text and a few stock images to stand out from the avalanche of similar content on the web.
This is an example of a basic, clean website design but there is nothing on this site that visually differentiates it from thousands of similar sites.
We all know that having top-of-mind awareness is one of the surest ways to convert leads to sales and increase the value-per-transaction of existing clients.
There are two main reasons for this:
Prospects are seldom ready to act on your call to action at the precise moment you send it to them or they stumble upon it. Your message gets buried with every new piece of information, from everyone else, that gets dumped into their minds. If you don’t do something to stay at the top of the heap you’ve lost a potential sale.
Engaging content, spread through word-of-mouth, ensures that your content starts circulating within the social media network of your target audience. As your knowledge, skills, experience and personality are shared, liked and discussed it not only becomes endorsed by that social group but it remains alive for much longer.
So you really, really, need this type of wow-factor content to increase and maintain your visibility. It is your knowledge, skills, experience and personality compressed into easily digestible portions and packaged in a visual-driven narrative.
Even though the words on the left attempts to describe the image on the right it can never capture all the 'sensed' information - such as the character personality, colours, body language and facial expression - contained in that single image.
Why does it need to be visual driven to make it really effective at lead generation, retention and conversion?
Visual communication is effective because it is:
more effective at grabbing attention
more effective at engaging people
better than any other format at communicating your message
easier to share with others
more memorable
easier to re-purpose and distribute across multiple channels
Visuals are not meant to replace words, but rather act as its communication partner. Without visual communication, an idea may be lost in the inherent limitations of words. Without words, visuals may be lost to ambiguity.
The big challenge is producing a steady stream of amazing content.
According to a Content Marketing Institute/Brightcove 2013 report, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing. However, it is unrealistic to expect SMEs to have the internal expertise, skill and required artistic talent to cope with the challenges of creating effective visual driven content. For this reason many organisations outsource part of their content creation.
Another key considerations is making sure that your visual content can be re-purposed for different media formats such as video, slide shows, blogs, social media, newsletters, presentations, and lead nurturing touch points. This helps maximize the reach and ROI of the content.
As more and more companies pour high value content onto the web in an attempt to capture and retain users’ already overloaded attention, those who wait too long will find it difficult to catch up. Today’s winners are those who realize that the visibility game is all about quality content packaged in visual driven and engaging formats.
