From Idea to Impact: How to Develop a Memorable Brand Story

Every successful company started as an idea. 

Whether it was a concept sparked by a business conversation or originally written down on the back of a napkin, every brand has a story to tell about how it evolved from idea to impact. As a marketer or business leader, your ability to tell that story (i.e., brand storytelling) affects how well your potential customers remember who you are, connect with your mission, and care about your products or services. 

Brand storytelling not only explains how you differ from your competitors; it also humanizes your brand in a way that allows people to relate to it. It helps customers understand who you are and why your business exists. 

For example, Green Apple Strategy was founded as a marketing and PR agency that builds marketing strategies with the entire business in mind. Rather than offering “one-off” marketing projects like creating a website or managing social media, we come alongside businesses to develop and implement marketing strategies with their “core” business areas in mind. As a result, a big part of our work has been helping businesses find their “story” and tell it effectively in today’s digital age. 


Develop a Blueprint for Memorable Brand Storytelling

After working with dozens of clients in various industries over the years, here are a few best practices we’ve learned when it comes to developing your brand’s story:

Discover your why.

To borrow the famous adage from Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Discovering your why when marketing your business should always be step one. Rather than leading with your products, services, or solutions, take a step back and examine the motivation behind your actions. It’s more than just making a profit (or at least, it should be). It’s the big, bold vision that motivates your company.  

Help your audience see themselves in your story.

While your brand story unpacks your origin and unique differentiators, it’s essential to remember that the best marketing makes your audience feel like the hero in the story. It’s important to make sure your audience can see themselves in your brand story. That means highlighting their specific challenges or obstacles and why you care about helping them solve the problem.

Make sure your brand story aligns with your business goals. 

Your brand story should align with your business goals and integrate into all areas of your business—including marketing, sales, and all internal and external communications. Potential goals to build your story around include revenue growth, clarifying what your business offers, differentiating from other companies, or growing brand awareness. 

Don’t forget to be human. 

Remember, people connect with people. Your brand story should have personality. Boring books don’t attract readers. In the same way, your brand story should be inspired by the presence of people who participate and develop your company — written with the specific personality that represents your company. 


Questions to Help With Brand Storytelling

As we work with brands, we get to know their history, unique value proposition, ideal target audience, and dreams for the future. Each of these impact the brand story we craft. While it’s important to create a unique narrative, here are a few helpful questions that could help you identify the important elements and narrative arc of your brand story: 

1. How and why was your company founded? What inspired its creation?

2. What were the specific challenges or problems your company sought to address in the market? How does that connect with the problems you seek to address today?

3. Were there any significant events, experiences, or turning points that shaped the early days of your company?

4. What were the core values, principles, or beliefs that guided the founders in establishing the company?

5. Did your company experience any transformative moments or breakthroughs that set it apart from competitors?

6. Who is your target audience? How does your product or service positively impact the lives of your customers? 

7. What is your company’s vision for the future? How do you plan to evolve and make a positive impact?


Take Your Brand Storytelling to the Next Level

Creating a compelling brand story is worth it because it becomes something to reinforce in every marketing campaign. If you’re struggling to identify a brand story or marketing message that resonates with your audience, our team can help. Reach out to our team to learn more about our process or schedule a time to chat. 

Marketing Planning and the Perfect Timing [A Guide]

Strategy is so important to us that it’s part of our name. So naturally, we are big proponents of planning ahead when it comes to your marketing strategy. The short answer to the question of this blog’s title is that it’s never too early to begin crafting your approach to next year’s marketing strategy. Today, we’ll take a deeper dive into the reasons why that’s true. We’ll also highlight a few factors to consider while you’re doing that advance marketing planning. 


Benefits of an Annual Plan

With sufficient planning, you can keep all of your marketing efforts organized, maintain audience engagement with quality content, and adapt to changes in your industry faster. All of this means you’ll give your business the ability to thrive and stay one step ahead of the competition. 

Ideally, a good annual marketing plan should be high-level, since things change all the time, and act as a guide for multiple stakeholders. This approach is especially helpful for large teams working to stay on the same page and obtain the same end goal. An overarching marketing plan can unite your sales team, your business development team, your in-house and outsourced marketing team, and your C-suite executives.  It’s a useful tool that can help create a streamlined and focused tactical plan that everyone can get on board with. 


Planning for the Busiest Times of Year

While long-term planning is ideal, you should plan at least six months ahead of your busiest time of year. Regardless of whether your busy season is summer or the holidays, giving yourself ample time to prepare is a sure way to drive optimal results. If you’re not sure when your brand sees the most business, it may be time to run an audit on your social media, website traffic, and other indicators of surging interest. With the right data, you can create a solid marketing funnel that can translate increased interest and search queries into qualified leads and sales. 


Strategic Planning 

Rather than using last year’s ideas or “institutional wisdom” to drive your planning decisions, embrace a mindset of data-based continuous improvement to develop a marketing plan based on your organization’s long-term strategy and vision. Data analysis can also help you hone and direct your annual marketing budget. Although it can be tempting to follow a gut feeling about where your leads are originating, the data may indicate a different funnel. For instance, while social media is essential for building brand integrity, email marketing may have more ROI in your annual revenues.  


What Happens When You Need to Pivot?

The best laid plans of mice and men… often need to be reframed in the light of your analytics! While that’s not exactly how the Robert Burns quote goes, it’s definitely something we focus on at Green Apple. The best marketing strategies are nimble and should allow you to drop one strategy or double down on an effective tactic if the data backs it. Don’t be concerned if you need to scrap your current strategy and recalibrate! That should be an expected part of the marketing planning process, and it means you’re committed to an evidence-based approach. If you need help interpreting the data or you need help collecting more information points, we’re here to help. Don’t hesitate to turn to an outsourced marketing team to support your in-house team with all the initiatives they’re launching. 


Let Us Help You Achieve Your Goals

Need some help getting started on next year’s marketing goals? Check out this Green Apple guide to start planning! Our team is here to help you build an effective strategy to help your brand achieve its business goals.

5 Keys for B2B Content Marketing Strategy that Drives Business

Sticky notes on a board

Content marketing has become a crucial component of nearly every B2B marketer’s strategy. In fact, 91% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing in their overall strategy. The good news is that content marketing has become a proven way to reach ​​customers, earn trust, and impact the bottom line. The challenge for many marketers is identifying the right tactics and channels that work for their business and within their budget. It seems like everyone is competing for attention or popular keywords, and artificial intelligence is changing content creation.

 

In this blog post, we wanted to explore a few best practices we’ve used with clients when it comes to developing a content marketing strategy that directly impacts business development.

 
1. Take time to truly understand your audience. 

The first step in developing an effective content marketing strategy is to understand your target audience. If you want your content to resonate with potential customers, you need to know who they are, their daily pain points and challenges, and what type of content resonates with them. This ensures you develop content that addresses their specific needs and interests rather than guessing if you’re creating valuable content. 

 
2. Make sure your content is aligned with your overall business goals.

What are you hoping to achieve this year? Are you launching a new product or hoping to increase customers in a particular area of business? If so, you should incorporate those goals as you develop your content strategy. One key factor in this approach is giving yourself plenty of runway to educate and inspire your audience to take action. As the old saying goes, the moment you’re tired of talking about it is likely the time your customers are starting to recognize the message. Give your top-of-the-funnel content marketing plenty of time to work before you start expecting results. 

 
3. Be strategic as you diversify your content. 

In addition to creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience, it’s important to diversify the format in which you share it. Today’s digital landscape offers a variety of channels that allow you to get more out of your content marketing. For example, you can turn a white paper into a podcast or webinar. You can break down a blog post into a social infographic. As you explore ways to diversify your content, it’s important to remember what formats your audience prefers. The good news is that diversifying your content allows you to meet the different preferences and consumption habits of your target audience.

 
4. Don’t forget to promote your content.

You could write the most amazing blog post in the world. But it could quickly fall by the wayside without an intentional promotional strategy. B2B marketers must ensure that their content reaches their content audience by promoting it through a variety of channels. This includes strategically thinking about how to promote content on social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and influencer marketing. Promoting your content is essential for amplifying your reach and increasing the ROI of your content marketing efforts. 

 
5. Let data inform your decisions. 

Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts is an essential part of marketing. But often, evaluating content marketing becomes anecdotal and causes you to question how to adapt your strategy. This is why evaluating the data and adopting a more agile approach to content marketing is key. Which content pieces are most popular with your audience? What promotional tactics seemed to be most effective? How can you use these insights to plan your content marketing and areas such as product development or customer solutions? These are all helpful questions that provide valuable insights for your business. 

 

Need Help with Content Marketing?

At Green Apple, we’ve used these principles to help dozens of businesses develop a content marketing strategy that creates a pipeline for business development. ​Our strategic, full-service marketing firm can help you plan and deploy an innovative content marketing approach to court customers and build brand loyalty. Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation. Our team is happy to sit down with you to discuss your marketing goals and how we can help you achieve each one of them.​

7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in the New Year

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The new year often provides a fresh start for people and companies. This is especially true for marketing. Many companies start the year with a fresh marketing plan (or at least a few adjustments from their current efforts). Most of the time, there’s a level of energy and excitement as you start the year with 365 days to achieve your marketing goals.

As marketing continues to evolve, it’s important to understand and implement the basic principles for earning attention and inspiring action. Failing to embrace the core principles of marketing might lead to mistakes that cause you to invest time, energy, and resources into marketing tactics that don’t move the needle. 

7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in the New Year

After more than two decades in the industry, here are a few common marketing mistakes that businesses are prone to make in the new year:

1. Focusing on “tactics” rather than your strategy.

One of the most common mistakes business owners make is to focus too much on tactics and not enough on strategy. As a marketing agency, people often reach out to us and ask for help building a new website or a stronger social media presence. While these are admirable goals, they must be based on a strategic plan to truly return the best ROI for your business. 

If you’ve struggled to generate results and wonder why your marketing isn’t working, it likely has to do with prioritizing tactics over strategy. 

2. Getting comfortable with the status quo.

“The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.” – Seth Godin

Doing things the way they’ve always been done is tempting because it’s safer. But in a world that’s changing faster than ever, sticking with the status quo only creates an opportunity to get left behind. 

It’s important for B2B companies and marketers to get out of their comfort zone. Embracing a mindset of growth and change is one of the best ways to ensure your marketing efforts continue to produce results year after year. 

3. Failing to recognize how marketing is interconnected with other areas of your business.

At Green Apple, we often say that “everything is marketing.” This is a mindset we bring to every meeting and every marketing strategy we create for clients. Failing to recognize how marketing impacts sales or operational decisions could quickly create breakdowns in other areas of your business. Additionally, developing a marketing strategy without considering other key initiatives in your company might lead to a lot of “spinning your wheels.” 

4. Being too rigid with your marketing plan and failing to adapt.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that businesses must be willing and prepared to adapt. In some cases, you can pivot your marketing tactics without abandoning your entire strategy. Sometimes, if there’s a major shake-up in your business or industry, you might need to overhaul your entire plan. 

5. Defining what your customers want without asking them. 

Marketing is all about helping customers understand how your business can help solve their challenges. It’s relational. And every good relationship is built on communication. If you want your marketing to resonate with customers, listen to them. Taking time to understand their challenges and create messaging built around their current reality is key to creating a more customer-centric culture. 

6. Talking about your products and services in a way that confuses an audience. 

Using complex phrases or industry jargon is one of the quickest ways to lose potential businesses. Customers will disengage if they can’t understand or relate to your message. 

If you work in a detailed industry, it’s important to find effective ways to explain the complex products or services that you offer. Making it simple for people to understand how they can become a client or customers is one of the easiest ways to gain potential business. 

7. Identifying the wrong KPIs or forgetting to measure results. 

Successful marketing initiatives often require the use of lessons learned from previous experiences. This means identifying the marketing metrics that matter most to the overall success of your business and developing the habit of measuring them on a regular basis. 

Green Apple Can Help Your Business Avoid Costly Marketing Mistakes

Everyone, from professional marketers to small business owners, makes marketing mistakes. But even if you make some mistakes, you should be ready to learn from them. If you’re looking for a way to take your marketing to the next level or simply need help managing everything that is required for reaching your goals, our team can help. Contact us to learn more about our unique approach and schedule a discovery call with our team. 

 

7 Ideas to Get Your Employees Involved in Marketing

In today’s world, everything is marketing. Subsequently, every area of your business has valuable insights or perspectives that could be beneficial for your marketing efforts. Taking the time to get your employees involved in marketing creates opportunities to connect with your audience on a human level.

While other teams and departments might not be responsible for your marketing goals, they can all play a valuable role in enhancing brand perception, improving lead generation, and creating more meaningful connections with your customers. 

7 Ideas to Get Your Employees Involved in Marketing

Here are seven effective yet fairly simple ways to get your employees involved in your marketing efforts: 

1. Invite Your Sales and Customer Success to Speak into Marketing Messaging

No one knows the challenges that your audience faces every day more than your sales and customer success teams. Knowing these challenges—and how you’re uniquely equipped to help them—is essential for sharing a clear and compelling marketing message.

There are several important questions your marketing team can ask sales and customer service to help improve your marketing copy and connect with your audience. 

2. Equip Your Customer Relations Team with Easy Ways to Share Positive Feedback & Reviews 

Customer reviews are powerful marketing tools. Yet many marketers don’t have direct access to feedback or testimonials from customers. This is where equipping your customer relations team with resources to capture feedback and reviews can really help. 

It could be something as simple as an email template they can use to ask permission to share a positive review or implementing a customer survey platform to capture feedback.

3. Share your Team’s Expertise through Your Content Marketing.

If you offer a professional service, your team likely has knowledge and experience that can be beneficial for your audience. Finding ways to empower your employees to create content for your marketing can be a powerful way to position your brand as a thought leader in the industry and earn the trust of your audience. 

4. Build an Employee Advocacy Plan

Your employees can also be your best promoters. This is one reason why many businesses have started creating a dedicated employee advocacy program within their organization. Helping employees understand their role as brand ambassadors can create tremendous dividends for the overall health and success of your company. 

5. Make it Easy & Compelling for Employees to Share Your Social Content

Your marketing team spends a lot of time, energy, and effort to keep your social media platforms running. And yet, most employees don’t recognize how helpful and powerful it can be to simply share the content that you’ve created. While there are many reasons why people might not share your social content, the best way to overcome all of them is to create social content that your employees actually want to share.

6. Create an “Employee Spotlight Series” on Your Blog

At the end of the day, people connect with people, not brands. Consumers like hearing from real people more than sales campaigns that aren’t designed with a personal touch. Employee spotlights are a powerful way to share stories from an employee’s perspective. These spotlights can be very powerful tools when it comes to building trust and loyalty among other employees and even customers. They can also be helpful in recruiting new hires.

7. Acknowledge Social Responsibility or Volunteerism In Your Marketing

Many companies have a corporate social responsibility platform or promote ways for employees to give back to the community throughout the year. Promoting these activities through your marketing channels can be a great way to highlight your employees and create meaningful connections with your audience. When you share content that is focused on your team, employees are also likely to share the event and the content with their family and friends, generating goodwill and increased brand exposure.  

We hope these ideas create an opportunity to integrate your marketing into your company rather than keeping it siloed. Finding ways to get employees involved in your marketing can be a powerful way to leverage your company’s community to create deeper, more personal connections with your audience. 

Copywriting Tips that Inspire Your Customers to Take Action

Two Women Typing on Laptops

Inspiring customers to take action is the goal of any marketing campaign. Achieving that goal requires knowing the words that will resonate with your audience and motivate them to take the appropriate next step. This is why copywriting is such a powerful part of marketing.

There are dozens of things to take into account whenever you’re writing marketing copy. You’re thinking about your audience, the medium you’re communicating through, and what you’re trying to achieve. You’re also trying to determine what will capture their attention and keep them engaged. Most people don’t realize how challenging it is to accomplish such a feat.  

How do you inspire your audience to take the action you want in a way that doesn’t come across as a hard sell? In this post, we wanted to highlight a few tips from our writers in Orchard when it comes to creating marketing copy that inspires people to take action. 

Copywriting Tips That Inspire Your Customers to Take Action

1. Identify and solve a problem.

Great marketing copy creates tension that resonates with the audience and then provides a release. During the attention-grabbing phase, it’s essential to identify your audience’s needs or problems so that you can ultimately present a solution.

2. Use short, simple sentences.

You need to make it easy for people to read your content. This is especially true for writing copy that will be published on digital platforms. Reading from a screen is hard. When you write long, meandering sentences, your readers have to work harder to make sense of it. 

3. Don’t bury the lead.

This old adage from journalism also applies to marketing copy. While creating tension is important, you also don’t want to lose your audience’s attention. If you want to inspire action,  it’s best to get to the point. Your audience should know the next step they should take to resolve their issue within a few minutes of reading. 

4. Make sure to emphasize the benefits your customer will experience. 

A common reason marketing copy doesn’t inspire action is that the focus shifts from the audience back to the product or service. While it may be important to highlight the unique features of your product or service, your audience cares more about how it will benefit them. 

It’s important to start with benefits before you dive into whatever features you want to highlight in your copy. 

5. Read what you write out loud before posting.

The best marketing copy makes you feel like you’re having a conversation. It’s personable, relatable, and easy to follow. Reading your copy out loud before you post it is one of the easiest ways to improve your copywriting skills. 

6. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. 

Many times, marketers can be so close to their product or service that they forget what it’s like for their audience to experience it. This is where it can be helpful to take a step back and try to read your content from your audience’s point of view.

As yourself…

  • Would I click this link?
  • Would I find this helpful?
  • Would I enjoy this content?

Any response other than a quick “yes” might indicate that you need to spend more time on your copy.

7. Provide an appropriate call-to-action.

Part of our role as marketers is to guide people through the buying process. In the same way, you don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, it’s important to know the appropriate “next step” to offer your audience. 

Writing copy that inspires customers to take action is both an art and a skill. It requires that you understand your audience’s core challenges and needs. It also involves knowing how to guide them toward the right next step. 

If you’ve struggled to inspire potential customers to take action or you suspect that your website copy might be a reason you’re not attracting new business, our team can help. You can subscribe to our newsletter for marketing tips or reach out to learn more about the ways we can support your marketing needs.  

How to use SEO Best Practices to Get More YouTube Views

Video is no longer just another tactic to help you get the most out of your content marketing. It has become an absolute must if you’re serious about getting your product or service in front of the right people. According to a recent Hubspot report, video was the most commonly used form of content marketing in 2021, overtaking blogs and infographics.  However, simply creating videos doesn’t mean your customers will find or watch them. Developing a strategy to increase YouTube views is just as important as creating videos. This is where understanding YouTube SEO best practices come in handy. YouTube SEO, as the name suggests, is optimizing your videos to rank higher on the YouTube search engine. 

4 SEO Tips to Get More YouTube Views

If you’re looking for a way to increase your YouTube views, here are four SEO best practices as you add and upload your videos:
1. Incorporate Keywords Strategically
Keywords play a valuable role in any SEO campaign. Whether you’re optimizing your website or uploading videos, identifying the right SEO keywords for your business is the first step. When it comes to YouTube, there are several places you want to strategically incorporate keywords for your videos. You want to include your keyword in the video title, description, tags, and file name. It’s helpful to identify one or two main words that describe your video and feature them prominently in your description and title.
2. Add a Custom Thumbnail Image, Cards, and End Screens to Your Video 
The video itself also plays a key role in SEO for YouTube. A custom thumbnail image for your video can make a drastic difference in the click-through rate.  Cards and end screens are also helpful images to create and add to your video. YouTube cards are preformatted notifications that encourage people to take desired actions during your video. End screens appear after a video finishes and tell a viewer what they can do next. Both cards and end screens can optimize the viewing experience and encourage viewers to watch another video or take further action when they’ve finished.
3. Use Subtitles in Your Video
Using subtitles and closed captions is another tip for success in YouTube search. Both subtitles and closed-caption files contain the text from the video in a transcript. This is where using keywords while talking is important. By including keywords in your video and adding subtitles, you’re able to reach our audience and increase your rankings. Make sure you provide accurate captions and subtitles and don’t indulge in keyword stuffing.
4. Creating Engagement and Ask for Comments to Increase Rankings
Engagement is one of the biggest factors in your video rankings. Comments on videos also appear to be an influential ranking factor. As you create your videos, consider how you might ask for feedback or comments. Another thing you can do to increase engagement is directly replying to comments on your videos. Responding and creating a dialogue will help you create a community from the ground up.  All these components may seem a bit complicated, but they’re incredibly easy to deploy. Remember: there’s a huge audience on YouTube, and when you optimize your videos for YouTube, you also increase your chances of your brand reaching your target demographic. Discover our unique approach to helping small businesses optimize their SEO efforts through Green Apple’s SEO Silo.

5 Ways to Repurpose Your Outdated Content

Let’s face it. You put a lot of time, energy, and effort into creating content for your audience. As time goes on, it can be deflating and frustrating to see the shelf-life of your content become outdated. But that doesn’t always have to be the case. Finding ways to repurpose your outdated content is a great way to get the most out of your content marketing and be more agile in your marketing efforts.  

Why Repurpose Your Outdated Content?

Here are a couple of specific reasons we love helping our clients find ways to repurpose content:
1. Repurposing content enables you to maximize the investment you’ve already made. 
Rather than crafting every single piece of content from scratch, repurposing outdated content enables to you tweak what you’ve already created. This saves time, energy, and money. In most cases, you don’t have to do a complete overhaul, (although that’s also an option). Repurposing content enables you to take what’s already there and make sure it appeals to today’s audience. 
2. Repurposing allows you to maximize your best content for new audiences. 
Repurposing content can help you take your great, old content and give it a breath of fresh air (and some much-needed visibility). It’s also worth considering updating calls-to-action to articles that are still generating traffic to help you increase lead generation potential.

5 Ways to Repurpose Your Outdated Content

There are several approaches you can take to repurposing content. Here are a few tactics we’ve found to be most valuable. 
1. Conduct an SEO Audit to Determine Which Content to Update
The first step in repurposing outdated content is to identify which blogs or resources are the most beneficial to refresh. This is where a content audit can help. An SEO content audit is a process of assessing existing content on your website to determine how you can get more and better quality organic traffic to each blog post or resource.
2. Add New Ideas or Project Examples to Your Content
One simple way to make outdated content more relevant is by updating it with new insights or portfolio examples. More than likely, the majority of your content is evergreen. Why throw out the whole post when only 20% is outdated? Updating your content could be as simple as adding a few recent statistics or highlighting a new “tip or trick” based on the latest industry insights. 
3. Turn Content into Infographics, Videos, or Podcasts
Transforming written blog posts into videos or podcasts is a great way to extend the shelf-life of your outdated content. These are also helpful ways to repurpose content for different audiences. Some people prefer visual infographics over text statistics. Others choose podcasts over ebooks. Reformatting your content for different mediums means appealing to more audiences and extending your reach.
4. Utilize Content in Email Series
If you’ve written a few blog posts on the same topic, consider repurposing them into a newsletter series or email course. An effective marketing E-newsletter can showcase your best blog posts and resources. You can send this on a monthly basis or create custom email journeys for different personas as they’re added to your email list. 
5. Add Guest Posts or Third-Party Articles to Your Site
If you’ve already been guest blogging as part of your digital PR campaign, why not maximize that content by adding it to your site? All you need to do is to ask the owners of the sites if they’re comfortable with you republishing the content on your own blog. This also provides them with added exposure to the post if you include a link back to it saying where it was originally published. When it comes to maximizing your content marketing effort, find ways to work smarter, not harder. These tips will help you develop a strategy to repurpose outdated content and reach more people. Any effort will be worth it as it gives you a chance to help others, build your audience and grow your business. For more help in optimizing your content efforts, reach out to us to schedule a strategy session.

What are Social Infographics and Why Do You Need Them?

Social media logos on phone

The social media landscape is constantly evolving and changing. One of the newest and most impactful trends? Social infographics. According to the latest research, the average attention span on the platform for video content is just about 2 seconds. On a desktop computer, the average attention span is 2.5 seconds. On a mobile device, it is 1.7 seconds.

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok are all valuable ways to stay connected to your audience. And yet, it’s become increasingly clear that your audience’s attention on social media is getting shorter and shorter. Social infographics provide a solution.

What are Social Infographics?

Social Infographics are short-form, visually-engaging content. They are designed to communicate a message as quickly as possible. There are many different forms of social infographics, including photos, videos, or micro-videos. In essence, social infographics are intended to be quick, easy to digest, and convenient to share. 

Why is Short, Image-Driven Content Important? 

Here are a few specific ways social infographics have become an effective way to create engagement for brands in every industry:

  • Social infographics are easy to digest. In an age of information overload and busy work lives, effective communication often requires the essence of the message to be delivered in the shortest time possible. 
  • Social infographics are incredibly effective on mobile devices. According to Google, more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Social infographics are often created with mobile in mind, so they quickly capture an individual’s attention as they’re scrolling on their phones. 
  • Social infographics are more memorable. According to Forbes, adding infographics boosts credibility since 90% of all information we remember is based on visual impressions. Social infographics provide a way to help the content you create stick in the minds of your audience. 

 

Easy Ways to Create Social Infographic Content

One of the best things about social infographics is that you don’t have to look far to create countless content ideas. Here are a few specific ways we’ve worked with clients to create infographics for their social accounts:

Today’s consumers are craving short, easily-digestible content. (No pun intended.) Social infographics are a great way to create engagement and get the most out of your content. Take some time to think about the unique ways you can repurpose content into short, visually engaging content and discover the impact it can make on your content marketing efforts.

When to Use A Professional Photographer Instead of Your Smartphone

Capturing the attention of your audience is essential for any marketing campaign. Photos and images have become essential to achieving that goal. While technology has made it possible to take high-quality photos with a smartphone, there are times when hiring a professional photographer is important.  Over the past few years, Green Apple has worked with our clients to hire professional photographers for employee headshots, Google My Business pages, marketing collateral, Google 360° tours, and drone footage. While hiring a professional photographer can sometimes be expensive, the quality of the images often provides a greater ROI in the long run.  Here are just a few important statistics that highlight the importance of your photography:
  • 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing the product. (Source)
  • 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos when deciding on a potential purchase. (Source)
  • Good visual content is 40% more likely to get shared on your social accounts (Source)

4 Reasons to Invest in Professional Photography for Your Marketing

If you’re trying to decide whether or not to hire a professional photographer for your image needs, here are four factors to consider: 
1. Professional photography helps elevate your brand. 
Poor quality images, outdated images, or obvious stock photography can hurt your business. Having your own proprietary images to communicate your unique values, services, and products are invaluable. Good photography helps people to truly get a sense of what your company offers. 
2. Professional photography helps tell your story. 
Having high-quality, personalized content to market your business is so important to standing out online. A good photographer knows what customers want and can provide ideas and insights to elevate your images. 
3. Professional photography can equip your business with marketing assets. 
Great images are a long-lasting asset that can be reused over time and repurposed for many different applications. Whether you need a new piece of marketing collateral or want to build a library of images for social media, taking the time to hire a professional photographer can be an invaluable asset. It allows you to create high-resolution images that can be used on marketing assets for many different platforms and purposes. 
4. Professional photography can help you increase conversions. 
If you want to attract attention and customers to your brand, you need to have an impactful first impression on your audience by having great personal branding photography. Professional high-quality photos allow your customers to have a better understanding of you, your products, or your services. If a high-quality photo builds brand confidence, leads are more likely to purchase from your brand. 

When to use a Professional Photographer instead of your Smartphone 

Here are a few specific times we recommend clients hire a professional photographer: 
1. Team headshots
It looks professional when your team page uses similar images. A professional photographer ensures all of your headshots are consistent — from the lighting used, the background chosen, and the size and resolution of each shot. Taking the time to hire a professional photographer for your headshots instills the value of quality.
2. Images for your new website
The images on your website make a significant impression on your audience. It’s more difficult to create a good first impression with low-quality images or stock photos. If you’re investing in developing a new website, it’s valuable to set aside room in your budget to invest in new images that support a website redesign.  
3. Marketing collateral
Brochures, catalogs, or annual reports all need high-resolution images to build legitimacy and trust. Memorable images can help you tell a more compelling story and paint the picture you’re trying to create. 
4. Corporate events
You put a lot of time, energy, and money into your corporate events or parties. Why not invest a little more to ensure it is captured through compelling photography? Photographing your parties and outings is integral to showcasing your brand as a relevant and engaged community partner. In marketing, photos add a component to communication that written and verbal methods do not. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words continues to hold true, even in the digital age.