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About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Do you love Canva? Canva makes a huge difference when it comes to creating visual content for our social media channels or for our blogs. However, there’s another tool, another great tool that can blow your mind when you get used to it. And it’s way lot better than Canva, at least in my opinion. That tool is Snappa. Today, we interview Christopher, co-founder and CEO of Snappa, an online graphic design tool that makes it super easy to create your own visual content in next to no time. You will understand why I love this tool after listening to this interview. Now let’s dive in. Could you introduce a bit about you and Snappa? My name is Christopher Gimmer and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Snappa. I handle pretty much everything related to marketing and operations. Snappa is the easiest graphic design tool you’ll ever use. We help marketers and small business owners create highly engaging images without the help of a graphic designer. Snappa combines a huge library of visual assets with a fully-featured graphic editor making it super quick and easy to create awesome online graphics. If you don’t want to design from scratch, we have hundreds of pre-designed templates to help you get started. What types of visual content we can create using Snappa? There are limitless possibilities for engaging your audience using Snappa since we make it easy to create any type of online graphic. However, the most common uses cases are images for social media, blog posts, online ads and email newsletters. Who can benefit most from Snappa? We’ve seen two types of people get the most value out of Snappa – marketers and small business owners. Marketers often need to generate images for blog posts, social media posts and online ads. Since they need the images quickly and the ability to make quick revisions, going through a graphic designer can often become cumbersome. Snappa gives marketers the power to create these types of images quickly and allow them to make revisions on the spot if necessary. Another great feature for marketers is our social integrations which makes it possible to post images directly to social media without ever leaving the application. Small business owners typically need images for a wide range of use cases but don’t have the budget to hire professional designers. With Snappa, they can use predesigned templates to create professional looking graphics without the price tag of a professional designer. In what ways Snappa will help our job way lot easier? Historically, in order to create professional looking graphics, you either needed to hire a designer or go through a huge learning curve in order to master a program like Photoshop. Even if you did learn Photoshop, you still needed to search the internet for photos, graphics and fonts to use in your designs. Snappa is not only easy to use, but it also includes a huge library of visual assets that is not included with a professional tool like Photoshop. Not to mention our social integrations that make it possible to instantly post your designs straight to your social media feed. How do you think Snappa is better compared to other graphic design tools? When we set out to build Snappa, we found that other graphic design tools fell into two categories. They were either easy to use but not powerful enough, or they were very powerful and difficult to use. With Snappa, our goal was to build something that was both super easy to use yet still very powerful. Based on customer feedback, we think we’ve been successful in accomplishing this difficult task. We also have a massive library of royalty free photos and graphics that is unrivaled by most other tools on the market. Do you have any tips or tricks to get more success when using Snappa to create our visual content? We have several resources available to help users become more successful in Snappa. For starters, we’ve created several video tutorials that can help users learn the ins and outs of Snappa very easily. Once users are comfortable with the software, they can check out our blog for additional tips on how to be successful with visual content. In particular, I highly recommend the following two posts: The 17 Graphic Design Tips All Non-Designers Need to Know 10 Clever Ways to Use Social Media Visuals to Engage Your Audience What do you think will be the trends for visual content marketing in 2016? I think the trend is that you’re going to see more of it. Content marketing is getting extremely competitive and the use of images is one of the easiest ways to stand out and make your content more valuable. Since tools like Snappa will make it easier for marketers and small business owners to create compelling visual content, I think you’ll see more and more of it in 2016. Additional Resources to Best Use Snappa We’re working on creating a FREE online course about how you can create better visual content with Snappa, we’ll keep you updated once it’s done. If you know or have new marketing tools that you want to share with Visual Contenting community, remember to give us a shout. Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud, MixCloud and Stitcher. Tweetable Statistics Visual presentations stick in people’s mind for longer.Click To Tweet The most popular presentations have an average of 37 or more images.Click To Tweet Visuals increase retention by 42%.Click To Tweet Visuals get 94% more views than text-based information.Click To Tweet What’s Prezi? Prezi is an online presentation maker that allows you to create unique and fresh presentations in minutes without having any advanced design skills. All you have to do is go to Prezi website, sign up for an account and there you go. Pros and Cons What I love about Prezi is that it can create a feeling of movement from slides to slides. Sometimes you can make your audiences feel like they’re lost in a maze jumping from slide to slide. This gives them an interesting experience. But I suggest you should know when to let them go deep in and when to guide them to go out to see the overview of your presentation so that they can keep up with what you’re saying. Sky is the limit when it comes to creativity on Prezi. Since Prezi is a cloud-based tool, it may load a little bit slowly every now and then. What You Can Do with Prezi Using other online presentation tools, you can only create static presentations. However, with Prezi, you create something different, an animated presentation that can be converted into a video. Additionally, you can also add music background to your presentations. With a little bit of creativity, you can turn your presentation into a masterpiece with Prezi like the following one. This is one of the best Prezi presentations that I’ve seen on the web. Additional Resources to Best Use Prezi In order to create effective presentations with Prezi, the first thing you need to do is to create your own story. Great presentations come with great visual storytelling technique. We’ve created a FREE online course about how to create effective presentations using Prezi which you can learn more here. How to Create Stunning #presentations with the Right Tools [Part 1]https://t.co/UpGrEGTiwK #visualcontent pic.twitter.com/mbdVFkjiM0 — Visual Contenting (@VContenting) June 4, 2016 If you know or have new marketing tools that you want to share with Visual Contenting community, remember to give us a shout. Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via MixCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Listen to our interview with Matthew Holden, Founder and CEO of MavSocial about how we can maximize visual content on social media using MavSocial. Let’s dive in. Tweetable Statistics Photos are liked twice as much as text updates on Facebook.Click To Tweet 37% increase in engagement is experienced when Facebook posts include photographs.Click To Tweet 14% increase in pageviews are seen when press releases contain a photograph. Click To Tweet They climb to 48% when both photographs and videos are included.Click To Tweet What’s MavSocial? MavSocial is a cloud-based visual content management platform which means that you simply signup for an account and there you go. No download, no install, nothing technical, extremely easy. Currently, MavSocial supports these following social networks: Facebook profile and pages Twitter accounts LinkedIn profile and pages Instagram accounts Tumblr accounts Youtube accounts Pros and Cons What I love about MavSocial is that it’s systematic; you have full control over your social media activities. You can plan your social campaigns in advance with scheduled visual posts and manage them all in one place. By allowing you to manage your visual posts on social media in specific campaigns, you have a feel of total control over your social campaigns and know which one works best for your business. You can also pull content from any websites or blogs that you like into MavSocial and curate them into your social feed. Isn’t this amazing? MavSocial is also a platform where you can store all of your visual content from videos, images and audio files in one place called digital library. This digital library will come in handy if you’re finding some images or videos to go with your posts. You can also purchase stock images to integrate into your content right from MavSocial dashboard. One minor thing that I don’t quite satisfy with this tool is that it’s a little bit confused to navigate through the dashboard and get used to it. Maybe because it’s packed with a lot of functionalities that sometimes we have to figure way out to get around it. But do not worry as we have done the heavy lifting work for you by creating a FREE course about how to improve visual content ROI on social media using MavSocial. What You Can Do with MavSocial MavSocial enables you to centralize visual content for easy management, scheduling and publishing your posts via a variety of social networks: Digital library to store your videos, images and audio files for quick access. Easy to curate helpful content from other blogs and websites. Purchase and include stock images into your posts right from the dashboard. Manage your posts in campaigns and can plan them ahead to your specific events or seasonal promotions. You have the ability to listen to what people are sharing and talking about on your social networks and can effortlessly comment, like or share what resonates with your brand. You can have reports on your published content to see which one works best and have plan to share similar content for more engagement. Additional Resources to Best Use MavSocial We’re working on creating a FREE online course about how to improve visual content ROI on social media using MavSocial, we’ll keep you updated once it’s done. Improve #VisualContent #ROI on Social Media Using MavSocialhttps://t.co/jdaDGaS6xb #socialmedia #smm pic.twitter.com/uAmrLhO6Bi — Visual Contenting (@VContenting) June 8, 2016 If you know or have new marketing tools that you want to share with Visual Contenting community, remember to give us a shout. Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Tweetable Statistics An infographic can drive 250% more traffic than an ordinary blog post with pictures. Click To Tweet Infographics shared on Twitter get 832% more retweets than images and articles. Click To Tweet From 2010 to 2012, web traffic specialists KISSmetrics enjoyed more than 41,000 re-tweets…Click To Tweet What’s Piktochart? Piktochart is simply a cloud-based design tool with drag and drop feature to help you create infographics, presentations, posters and reports. Cloud-based tool means that you don’t have to download or install any kind of software, just go to its website, create an account (which is 100% FREE) and that’s it. You now can freely create as many infographics as you want. Pros and Cons Piktochart is convenient and easy to use especially if you are working with steps by steps, how to guide or any simple infographics. If you’re using Lite/Pro account, you can pick one pre-made template among a wide variety of choices and start customize on your own. It’s that simple. One thing that I don’t like about Piktochart is that it’s less flexible if you want to create long form infographics and it really depends on your creativity to create something unique and fresh. As you know, with pre-made templates you may fall into the trap of “me too” infographics which do no good for your business. Infographics that You Can Make out of Piktochart Steps to Turn Fact-driven White Papers into Compelling Infographics How to Know If Your Infographics Suck? Courtesy of: Visual Contenting   Additional Resources to Create Killer Infographics with Piktochart We’re working on creating a FREE online course to guide you steps by steps to create killer infographics with Piktochart and other free infographic makers, we’ll keep you updated once it’s done. Steps-by-Steps to Immediately Create Killer Infographicshttps://t.co/Lp6kRDQU42 #visualcontent #contentmarketing pic.twitter.com/MUa6ywLbyp — Visual Contenting (@VContenting) June 6, 2016 If you know or have new marketing tools that you want to share with Visual Contenting community, remember to give us a shout. Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Whether you want to gain that first impression with your manager, nail your pitch and win over your potential clients or get maximum results on launching new products, presentations play a big role. In this digital era where visual storytelling is the key to any marketing success, good presentations are one of essential ingredients that contribute to this success. Tweetable Statistics Visual presentations stick in people’s mind for longer.Click To Tweet The most popular presentations have an average of 37 or more images.Click To Tweet Visuals increase retention by 42%.Click To Tweet Visuals get 94% more views than text-based information.Click To Tweet However, creating great presentations that won’t suck requires a lot of effort, time and resources. And that depends on how well you are with your Powerpoint or Keynote skills. Unfortunately, the outcome may not live up to your expectation. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work. So you have to look for other options. And the good news is, here they are. Today, I’ll introduce to all of you a great online presentation maker, a Powerpoint or Keynote alternative, Haiku Deck. What’s Haiku Deck? Remember struggling with Powerpoint to visualize your ideas on screen? You can’t easily produce amazing presentations with Powerpoint in minutes unless you are a graphic designer and you have other supportive software like Illustrator or Photoshop to design beautiful icons, elements and import into your Powerpoint. This process takes time and a little bit of talent here and there. For non designers like me, Haiku Deck is an incredible alternative as you only search for awesome photos that can resonate with your messages and Haiku Deck does the rest. I think we all know what’s beautiful and what’s not. That’s in our blood. Simply put, Haiku Deck is an online presentation maker that makes it extremely easy to create your own presentations in minutes. You’ve got your story, just put it into beautiful slides in Haiku Deck and you’ve done. Pros and Cons When I first used Haiku Deck, I was impressed with its huge gallery of images that you can pick one by one and include it into our slides. These images help us a lot in conveying our messages in a visual way. The second thing about Haiku Deck is it has a unique way of representing your content into beautiful slides. Of course, you should break your content down into one idea at a time for more clarity and easier for audiences to digest. Unfortunately, I think what makes Haiku Deck not so popular compared to other online presentation makers is that you have less control over your presentations in terms of text size and colors. Additionally, its library of fonts and templates is limited which sometimes prevent us from being more creative with our presentations. But all in all, if you’re looking for a presentation tool that is quick and easy, Haiku Deck is a great choice. I suggest you have some presentation tools in your arsenal and switch among them to have fresher look for your presentations. Presentations that You Can Make out of Haiku Deck Following are some presentations that we’ve created using Haiku Deck. Top 30 Must Read Blogs about Content Marketing from Catherine Pham Additional Resources to Best Use Haiku Deck In order to create effective presentations with Haiku Deck, the first thing you need to do is to create your own story. Great presentations come with great visual storytelling technique. We’ve also created a FREE online course about how to create effective presentation using Haiku Deck which you can learn more here. How to Create Stunning #presentations with the Right Tools [Part 1]https://t.co/UpGrEGTiwK #visualcontent pic.twitter.com/mbdVFkjiM0 — Visual Contenting (@VContenting) June 4, 2016 Some videos from this course: If you know or have new marketing tools that you want to share with Visual Contenting community, remember to give us a shout. Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from THE SEEN discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Here are the main ideas You know, videos have huge impact on how target audience gets engaged with your brands, join in social communities or become great brand advocates, you name it. The benefits that videos can bring to businesses are huge and unpredictable. Video allows you to communicate a large amount of information in a compelling and interesting way. So what kind of videos should we produce for more effective results? That depends on where visitors are in the sales cycles. Today, we discuss about videos to put at the top of your funnel to collect leads and grow your email lists. Explainer Videos at the Top of the Funnel At this stage, your potential customers are at the beginning of their journey looking for solution for a specific problem. They may know or do not know about you and your products or services and they want to delve into your brand to see if your company is a good fit for them. An explainer video at this stage gives audiences a few glimpses into the value of your products or services and how they can help them with their problem. Let’s take a look at reasons why explainer videos are the greatest marketing tools. Why Explainer Videos Are the Greatest Marketing Tools? Your Customers Want It Explainer videos create an emotional bond with your viewers and therefore, increase the understanding of your products or services by 74%. Research shows that 7 out of 10 internet users are watching videos right now with half of them watch at least one business-related video every week. Search Engine Loves It Explainer videos boost your website’s online visibility by ranking it higher on Google searches. They also increase your website’s click-through rates by 41%. You know that today’s human attention span just reaches a goldfish-like 8 seconds. Only 8 seconds. So how can you keep them hanging around on your website to get to know more about your products or services? Explainer videos can help you do just that, it make your visitors stay longer on your website and increase their attention span from an initial 8 seconds to 2 minutes on average. Social Media Favors It Did you know that? People share over 2000 videos per minute on Twitter. On Facebook, videos are shared 12x more than both text and image combined. In Youtube, the second largest search engine and the third social network, educational videos (explainer videos included) make 67% viewership. Explainer Videos Produce Sales Explainer videos increase conversion rates from 20% to 60% on average. Customers are 85% more likely to buy after watching an explainer video. 52% of US-based marketers mention marketing videos as the content with the best ROI. And half of customers take action like download, subscribe, like, you name it after watching these videos. Explainer videos when done right, can give you a huge advantage over your competitors in helping you convey your solution to a problem in an engaging and appealing way. Repurposed Webinar Content and Interview Videos You can also record your webinars and break them down into small chunks so that viewers who are looking for a solution for any specific problem can find them quickly. Slowly, this helps build your reputation and authority in the field. Additionally, thought leadership interviews with company executives or industry experts about a hot topic in your niche are widely shared and can bring a lot of leads to your funnel. When putting at the top of the funnel, explainer videos together with repurposed webinar content and videos interviewing company executives and industry leaders add a human touch to your brand and make prospects feel more connected with you. And this should end up in a call to action to help them determine what to watch or do next in later stages of the sales cycle. Once viewers feel interested in your videos, your job is to guide them and walk them down through the funnel. Listen to this podcast now! Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from THE SEEN discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Here are the main ideas Every new customer begins with the flow of leads into the top of your sales funnel. The more leads you fill the funnel, the more customers you will likely generate. As an inbound marketer, you should know how to leverage the power of visual communications to attract and educate more leads over the time. Following are 5 visual storytelling tips to drive more traffic to your website and fill the top of your sales funnel. #1: Add more visuals to your existing content It goes without saying that blog is considered a primary method to attract leads to your website via social sharing and organic traffic. Adding visuals to your blog posts can increase your credibility and make your personality shine through. Turning ordinary blog posts into images, slideshows, infographics or video is a great idea too. #2: Turn white papers into a series of infographics If white papers help you build thought leadership, infographics add personal touch to them and make your brand more authentic. And best of all, infographics drive you more traffic which can be turned into qualified leads for your business.   #3: Turn case studies into video testimonials Videos work like a charm when it comes to traffic generation. Instead of boring case studies with little to no visuals on your website, shooting video testimonials can help you build trust and authority. #4: Use explainer videos to talk about your services, how it works, etc Long are the days when you use long-form, text-heavy pages to explain your services and what you can do for your potential clients. Videos are on the rise. A well-crafted explainer video breaks complicated topics into simple, easy-to-understand components with eye-catching visuals and animations helping you connect and deliver your message to the heart of your audience. #5: Visualize your social media channels Your prospects get bombarded with boring text-based updates all the time, why don’t you stand out with creative, funny pictures or images? Get your creativity to work and wow your audience with visual social posts and updates. The bottom line? You’ll get more shares, likes, comments and referring traffic for your content marketing efforts. Listen to this podcast now! Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

About this podcast series The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from THE SEEN discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. You can subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes, RSS, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Here are the main ideas Let’s face it. We marketers are doing our best to find new ways to get in front of potential customers, engage them, build strong relationship with them and finally convert them. However, the competition out there is huge and tough. If not done well, our messages can never be delivered and our voices can never be heard. Visual content appears as a solution to this battle. That said, visual content not only captures the attention of your audiences from the first time but it also engages them and makes them share it with their friends and family. To make your brand stand out and be seen, you need to be aware of client and customers likes and dislikes. Know your market and what they want and need. Some of the best ways to do that are Infographics, animated videos, visual blog posts, slideshows, photos, visual guides and comics, cartoons and memes. While no brands can live and grow without their loyal customers, we believe that visual content is the strongest weapon the creativity can give you to build your loyal customer base even when you are new in your industry. Following are some effective visual content that can help boost your brand awareness and engagement. Infographics Internet has changed our life and the ways we learn and work today. The good thing to this is that it’s never been easier to search for information and learn new skills. The bad thing is we are overloaded. We’re drowning in words. Fortunately, Infographics come to life as a perfect solution. It helps us pack relevant information neatly in one piece of stunning design. Infographics are visual images that represent information of data. It is one of the most popular tolls and you don’t have to spend a fortune. Facts should be checked and any information used should be as accurate as possible. Know your target audience and focus on it. You want them to understand what you are trying to inform them of so make sure to keep the information as simple as you can. Be original and try to stand out. The first impression a potential customer or client has is your information. Let them see what you offer and help them understand it. Infographics help you present complex information in a simple way. Animated Videos Animated videos can be attention grabbing. They can also be used during presentations. These animations can be created with PowToon which is fairly easy to use. With animation, you can create anything from slideshows to comics and cartoons. Visual Blog Posts As humans, we are wired for visuals. It is just an automatic habit to look at anything visual first. Bloggers are getting more engagement per user, more leads and more followers when using visuals. Creating great visual components using logos, charts, images and graphics dominate blogs. Be sure not to create a visual just because you want to showcase one on your website. Slideshows Slideshows can be used for many things. Creating a photo slideshow can show your customers and clients your product or service in action. Using slideshows during presentations can grab your audience’s attention. Be sure to have accurate information and that the quality of any photo you use is good. Haiku Deck and Canva is a great tool to create stunning presentations. Listen to this podcast now! Ways to subscribe to Marketing Automation 101 Podcast: Click here to subscribe via iTunes Click here to subscribe via RSS Click here to subscribe via SoundCloud Click here to subscribe via Stitcher