How to create embed code for your infographic

Posted by on April 15, 2012

An emerging best practice with certain types of content — especially infographics — is to make that content available to share with embed code.

This ensures that people come back to your site to download the original content. In this example, we’re going to use the Noob’s Guide to Interactive Marketing – a fabulous infographic created by Unbounce, which is one of our technology partners. (We use Unbounce for landing page development and testing).

Step 1. Create two versions of your infographic.

The best practice that is emerging is to create two versions of your infographic generally in .png format:

  • Full Monty – 1800 pixels wide – all details are evident
  • Teaser – 600 pixels wide – some details not evident at this size

Generally speaking, the full-monty version with be 1800 pixels wide and as long as it needs to be to contain your content. The teaser version should be created no larger than 600 pixels wide. Ideally, you’ll want to create an infographic where some of the detail is not evident when viewed at 600 pixels wide. This encourages visitors to visit your site and download the full-monty version of your infographic.

Step 2. Create the embed code

While there are code generators floating around the web, code itself is really pretty simple. It’s a link and an image. Note that the image is the teaser while the link goes to the full-monty version of your infographic.

Here’s the generic format which you can copy and paste to customize for your infographic.

Step 3. Optimize the embed code for SEO purposes

Your intent here it to create traffic and links back to your site. So spend time on the following elements optimizing the following elements of your embed code.

For reference purposes here is the embed code from the Unbounce Infographic:

unbounce embed code illustrated

Note the elements you will want to optimize by using repetition:

The link to the infographic

Links to the full-monty version of the image.

The name of the teaser image

Note how the name of the image is benefit oriented

The alt text for the teaser image

The same as the name – helps with SEO

The title text for the teaser image

The same as the name & the link – helps with SEO

Link back to your Company

This appears underneath the embed code itself and credits the infographic back to your company

Results to Expect

If you follow the 3 steps listed above, your infographic will drive traffic back to your website, as people see the teaser on a bloggers’ site(s), get interested, and click through to download the full-monty version. Infographics have the potential to generate traffic to your website but do little to generate marketing-qualified leads. There is no name capture and unless you have visitor tracking and analytics software installed on your site, it is unlikely that you will know who is (anonymously) downloading your infographic.

Oh yes, here’s our example properly embedded:
The Noob Guide to Online Marketing - Infographic
Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform

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Where does Pinterest fit in your content marketing strategy?

Posted by on March 29, 2012

Key Stats

It seems just like yesterday the question “Does Twitter matter?” racked the minds of busy marketers. Now along comes Pinterest — in like a lamb and roaring like a lion.

  • AsTechCrunch mused on Feb. 17, “It seems like everyone’s discovered Pinterest this week.”
  • Only a day earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported of Pinterest, “Traffic to the website has grown tenfold over the past six months.
  • In January, the number of visitors on Pinterest.com was almost a third of that on Twitter.com.”
  • At the time of this writing, Pinterest is a top 10 website (Source: C|NET article dated Dec, 2011).

About Pinterest

  • The Palo Alto, CA-based Pinterest says its mission is to let people “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.
  • People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.”
  • Needless to say, there’s gold in them thar pinboards. Marketers have quickly discovered the benefit of enabling these pursuits.

Bye “Like” Button. Hello “Pin It” Button

It seems that every piece of content on the internet these days has a “Pin It” button which must go well nicely with the hardworking people behind ShareThis. I remember when business owners would beg me (well, maybe gently persuade) me to “Like” their Facebook Page. Now it is all about “Pinning” their products onto my Pinterest board to share with friends, colleagues, and potential customers.

Pinterest is … well … surprisingly Addictive

I’m not going to lie … I am a Pinterest user and my activity has steadily increased since setting up my account last week. Despite only being on the site for a short time, I understand why people find it addicting and here are some of the reasons:

  • The user interface is so easy to navigate, especially with topics organized into specific groups (Take notes, Facebook)
  • It’s visual. Need I say more?
  • I’m learning more about my friends and colleagues upcoming plans than I thought. There is something very yoyeuristic about Pinterest. Want to know if someone is going to remodel their bathroom anytime soon. Check out what they are pinning! Couple you know contemplating a trial separation. Check out what she’s pinning.

The data definitely suggests that Pinterest is hitting the dopamine centers of the brain. Pinterest users spend more time on the site than users on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter COMBINED. For a designers’ perspective on why Pinterest is so addictive, check out this blog entry from Neil Spencer on Visual News.

Now that we have your attention, here is a short 1-2-3 of how Pinterest helps you drive clicks:

  1. Copy the URL of a graphic on your website or ecommerce storefront
    Pinterest is not yet a mature product and it shows. It is supposed to figure out what is a “big graphic” on the page automatically, it turns out to be faster and easier simply to find the graphic you want, right click on it in Chrome, and then copy the link to the graphic.
  2. Go to Pinterest and “Pin” the URL
  3. Pinterest then embeds a link back the source page from which a graphic comes.

Is this social media or is this content?

Great question. When you create a pinboard on Pinterest, you are curating content you’ve found elsewhere on the web. The act of curation turns this into content, in my humble opinion. At the same time the people on Pinterest make it a very interesting place to make your content available, as the community is highly engaged. Already I am getting more comments back from my little flurry of Pinterest activity than I get from Twitter and I’ve been on Twitter since 2006.

So while companies don’t have to post their content everywhere, Pinterest is one place we really recommend, especially for brands where a bit part of their appeal is visual. (We have a lot of Architects and Interior Designers as clients here at Open Marketing). You can use Pinterest for thought leadership. Create a Pinterest board to showcase your thought leadership in a specific area (i.e. photos of great solar installations for a solar company).

Here are other ways Pinterest can enhance your marketing strategy

  • Brand Identity
    Place your brand in proximity to another high-status brand. We do this all the time for our clients. This proximity works to pull the “David” brand up in status towards the “Goliath”.
  • E-Commerce Revenue
    If you sell product, pin a hero shot for others to see from Etsy or your eCommerce storefront. Remember to pin up a shot of the product in the ecommerce store where you get the most margin … there’s no way of adjusting the link that goes with something you pinup, as far as we can tell.
  • Drive Website Traffic/Get Link Love
    Pinterest is growing in the Alexa Rankings like a weed … it’s Number 17 in the US at the time of this blog post. Users are pinning everything and anything, so why not try to insert your content into this wave to increase the odds of your site being linked-back?

Getting Started on Pinterest

Pinterest is still in Beta mode, which means you need to go to http://pinterest.com and request an invite. Or have someone on Pinterest invite you to join. The site is very quick in getting back to you with an enrollment, so this may be more about the illusion of exclusivity than anything else.

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Content Marketing: What’s Innovative is Aligning Content Marketing with Business Strategy

Posted by on March 9, 2012

The traditional advertising business has been in free fall for a while now. More and more brands are looking at content marketing as a way to build brand preference and stay top of mind. Case in point: General Mills, the venerable consumer-packaged goods company. General Mills and its agencies recently rolled out a new site that promotes the Nature’s Valley line of granola bars.

Generally, the New York Times does not bother to talk about a new website, but this is an example of a consumer-packaged goods company investing $1M in content marketing. The site consists of trail maps for three of the most-visited national parks in the US: the Grand Canyon, Great Smokies, and Yellowstone. The way the trail maps are presented is not new and not presented in a particularly novel way. Indeed the presentation of the trail maps themselves was borrowed from Google Street View.

What makes this case innovative is the way General Mills is using this type of content to keep their granola bar brand top-of-mind with families and active adults who plan on visiting the national parks this spring and summer.

Relevant Links
Virtual Hikes Promote Nature Valley Granola Bars
Nature Valley Trail View

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The difference between marketing automation and CRM

Posted by on February 15, 2012

A client asked me recently what the difference is between marketing automation and CRM and why they needed both systems as part of their fundamental infrastructure.

CRM solutions like Salesforce target sales and business development folks and the tasks that are important to them, especially how to input, manage, and track their leads. The unit of measurement used is an opportunity.

However, CRM systems don’t do a good job of recording all the marketing activity that happens through multiple channels. For this, we need marketing automation. Most marketing automation applications are designed to do 7 core things:

1. Lead Generation

  • Make sales happy with more qualified leads
  • Convert website traffic into leads, automate lead development, identify when prospects are ‘sales ready’ (or marketingqualified), automate sales tasks and track follow up.

2. Lead Nurturing

  • Drive revenue by nurturing raw inquiries into ‘sales ready’ leads
  • Nurture relationships with qualified prospects, educate leads before passing them to sales, trigger relevant responses to prospect behaviors and automate repetitive marketing tasks.

3. Lead Scoring

  • Improve sales effectiveness by passing only qualified leads to sales.
  • Automate lead qualification processes, measure prospect interest and engagement, score leads using demographic data and behavioral data and focus sales resources on the best opportunities.

4. Website Tracking

  • Know exactly who is visiting your website and where they go
  • Track all prospect interactions online, identify which companies are visiting your website, monitor known and anonymous visitors and automatically alert sales reps of new prospect activity on the website

5. Email Marketing

  • Don’t just email prospects, engage them in a dialogue
  • Deepen relationships with triggered, multi-step campaigns, get to the inbox using the latest deliverability technology, raise and open click rates by targeting segments and track and score who opens and clicks on each email.

6. Landing Page Optimization

  • Create, publish and test targeted landing pages
  • Launch new landing pages in minutes, use your own branding and subdomain, maximise conversion rates through A/B testing and capture leads with smart forms that recognize people who have been to your website before and “know” the difference between a prospect and a customer.

7. Marketing Asset Management

  • Store, distribute and track content and other marketing assets.
  • Upload and manage documents and image files, publish customized URLs for each asset, track which piece gets viewed by prospects and notify sales reps whenever key marketing assets are viewed by a customer or prospect.

Of course, your marketing automation application will work best if it is integrated with your CRM system. Here’s why:

  1. Manual exporting sales-ready leads gets old fast
    Sure you could manually export ‘sales ready’ (we like to call these marketing-qualified leads) leads from your marketing automation product into Excel and then have someone manually upload the list into your CRM product. But why? Any manual process is bound to fall down, especially today, when the focus is on real-time marketing (and by implication, sales.) Integration makes short work of this process.
  2. Sales needs, wants, and deserves to know the full marketing history
    Don’t silo off the information. Instead, marketing automation applications should integrate in with CRM so that your sales people can get the entire marketing history at their finger tips. This should include: how a prospect or customer has been communicated to by marketing, the pages they’ve viewed on your website, how much time they spent on various pages, and how they responded to various marketing campaign. This is actionable insight about what the prospect or customer is interested in that your sales people can leverage when calling on the prospect or customer.
  3. Closed Loop Return on Investment (ROI) reporting
    The only way to tell what marketing campaigns are working to drive sales is through integration of your marketing automation and CRM systems. Otherwise, you risk focusing your marketing team on driving traffic or leads … without understanding what kind of traffic or lead is converting into initial sales and ultimately repeat purchases. Lifetime value matters.

Relevant Links

How are CRM and Marketing Automation Different

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Samsung Galaxy Note & maybe the beginning of phablet category

Posted by on December 29, 2011

The Return of the Stylus

motorola envoyThe Samsung Galaxy Note is 5.3 inch phablet with a resolution of 800 x 1280 pixels – which is what people are calling oversized phones that can function as smallish tablets. This is much the same size screen I had when I used a Motorola Envoy but at 2x+ the resolution (480 x 320 pixels). The Motorola Envoy ran the MagicCap operating system and was quite frankly was my all time favorite mobile device. I know, I know this dates me but it irks me that I still don’t have a device as good as the device I used back in the early 90s. The Galaxy Tab is the closest thing I’ve seen to device nirvana.

Samsung-GALAXY-NoteRight now I am experimenting with using the Galaxy Note as a replacement for a notepad in meetings and for business-type tablet activities, especially accessing sites and applications I rely upon on a day-to-day basis to run Open Marketing and to handle my client’s business. For my phone, I currently use an iPhone and am having some trouble getting accustomed to Android.

Here’s what I like about the Samsung Galaxy Note

  • Beautiful large, crisp display
  • Incredible battery life
  • Stylus bay – meaning you can tuck the stylus away into the device neatly
  • Ability to write notes in “ink” – as back in my MagicCap days … I don’t particularly need handwriting recognition
  • Addressable file system – meaning I can send documents back and forth to the file system and figure out where stuff goes
  • Wicked fast
  • Great integration with Google
  • Tethering

What I don’t like

Or at least am having trouble getting used to

  • Android. I know, I know. That’s supposed to be the point. Normally, I move from one operating system to another quite fluidly but Android and iOS are similar enough yet different that I am having problems. The biggest issue is that Android applications all work differently. Plus the myriad of home screen options / launchers is very confusing … at least to me.
  • Integration with Microsoft Active Exchange is awkward

Samsung has sold 1M of these puppies since the product launched in September 2011 which is a large number in a relatively short time. I purchased mine through Amazon as an unlocked phone and then went down to my local smoke shop (really) and bought a SIM card from Simple Wireless ($40/month no contract). My experiments with the phone suggest that without a SIM card, you cannot change the language from the default German to English and get the language changes to stick … but on this I may be wrong.

Will I move off my iPhone and onto the Galaxy Note as my main phone. I don’t know yet. Right now I’m going to use both phones, one as a phone (my iPhone) and one as a tablet (the Galaxy Note) and see how I feel. I’m traveling to Europe shortly and will pick up a screen charger at that point. For those of you on AT&T, the Galaxy Note is expected to come to AT&T sometime in the first half of 2012. I moved off of AT&T to Verizon in April 2011 so there’s more involved here than a simple switch of one phone to another. I’d also have to change carriers yet again.

Relevant Links

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Nice to get recognized for our work

Posted by on November 29, 2011

Generally, we like to think the work we do for clients performs well and looks great. But great looks are – for us – always secondary to making sure the site performs well in terms of getting found, its conversion value, and optimization, the three things of importance to anyone who cares about generating leads, demand, and knows about inbound marketing.

But yes… recognition is always nice. So it was very(!) nice to learn that the website and branding we did for our client Content Rules, the global content experts, was featured as one of the top 50 “jaw dropping” WordPress blogs by Kevin Leary. This was a collaborative effort between ourselves and Paul Jarvis at TwoThirty Design and Adam Bogner who did the branding and identity system as the principal of Still Brand Works.

Source
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Don't forget the marketing funnel when creating infographics

Posted by on November 15, 2011

Today, content marketing is the strategy everyone seems to be talking about, as a low-cost way to re-invigorate business-to-business marketing, drive more leads, and create more engagement. And the poster child for content marketing is – of course – the infographic.

For those not in the know, Content Marketing is defined as a strategy where you create and distribute  

relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.  (Source:  Junta42.)

Notice that last bit – driving profitable customer action.  What a lot of people don’t seem to understand or appreciate is that content marketing takes the development of compelling content plus an indepth understanding of the marketing funnel at your company.  Development of great content is not enough … you must link the content you develop directly to the marketing funnel in order to succeed.

Here’s a  hypothetical marketing funnel – just in case you’ve never seen one in the wild:

marketing funnel

Let me explain.  We recently worked with a client who was obsessed with creating an infographic and seeing it “go viral.”  

We love infographics.  While not the easiest form of content to develop as part of your content marketing strategy, they have a number of advantages, including the fact that they particularly appeal to the media, to the Millenial Generation which is unlikely to read anything like a white paper, and they are one of the types of content most likely to be shared.  The flip side of this is that infographics are not the easiest form of content to develop … unless you have professional resources like ourselves on your side.  (It takes chops in graphics, copywriting, information architecture, and the like to do content development right.)  What makes an infographic go viral?  Well – that’s the topic of a different blog posting – but if your are interested check out this post here as well as this awesome guide to what it really takes to create compelling content which is the minimum bar for entry for something that will go viral according to the nice folks at distilled.net

Now here’s where it gets interesting.  The client with the obsession worked with us to create a great infographic.  (Most great content strategies – like the best and shiniest content we develop – happens when the agency and the client go heads down and collaborate together for content development.) The infographic we did got picked up by the media and got downloaded a lot. In other words, this was – yes! – compelling content. Or in layman’s terms … it rocked.

For content development purposes, the content we developed failed at its main mission. There is not one sale we can attribute to downloads of the infographic. Why? The content contained in the infographic did not help move the prospect from persuasion to conversion to sale, or through the marketing funnel. &What could have worked better?

For content strategy purposes we tested two offers with this client – the infographic versus a testimonial video designed to match the exact demographics of the potential customer.  The testimonial approach proved far more effective at moving the customer towards the sale.  Here’s the relevent data so you can see the impact developing the right content can have on revenue:

infographics versus video

 

Now, there’s nothing revolutionary, new, or even different about a testimonial video.  Here we did 6 videos – 1 to match each of 6 customer personas or types.  What worked here for content development purposes is that each video was crafted to persuade a particular type of customer, to move them towards conversion and the sale.  This turns out to be a best practice – matching the content you develop to the specific persuasion needs and wants and hot buttons of  your prospect.  

The bottom line:  content development and content marketing can’t happen in a vacuum.  The best content strategies start by looking at your marketing funnel and working backwards to determine the types of content most likely to move your prospect from persuasion to conversion.

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Quick and Dirty Guide to Evaluating Web Creative

Posted by on July 15, 2011

A lot of people don’t know how to evaluate web creative, so here’s a quick and dirty guide.

Before You Begin
First of all, go back and read the creative brief with a highlighter. Highlight the communication objectives and what the brand is all about. Put the highlighted portion of the brief to the right of your computer (assuming you are right handed).

Now look at the comp. Comp stands for “comprehensive” – meaning all the copy and artwork is supposed to be in the right place in the layout … but not necessarily all the copy and artwork will be final. In fact, with a web design at the comp stage the majority of artwork is close to final … except for “spot visuals” such as screen shots and masthead visuals. Copy may or may not be final – as copy is easy enough to change on the web.

Evaluation Proper
The 10 Questions You Must Ask When Evaluating the Home Page

  1. Can I immediately tell what this company does?
    The number one complaint end users have about a home page is that they get there and can’t tell what the heck a company is all about. Google also optimizes its search around finding copy that describes the company.
  2. Is there a strong brand impression?
    If I took the logo off and put my competition’s logo in its place would it look “right” or “wrong”. (Hopefully wrong – a strong brand impression would make anyone else’s logo look dead wrong.)
  3. Does the page have stopping power – in 3 seconds or less?
    The average visitor to your website makes a decision to stay on your page or go elsewhere in 3 seconds or less. So your home page has to stop visitor in their tracks and convince them – in 3 seconds – not to click elsewhere.
  4. Is there a well-thought out information architecture?
    The information architecture should be apparent from the home page. The best way to do this is with simple, straightforward navigation. I can’t emphasis this enough. Put the pages that you want most people at the first level of navigation and pages of somewhat less importance at the second level.
  5. Is the page set up with SEO in mind from the get go?
    There should be news and other text-based content that changes frequently on your home page; Google and other search engines put a premium on timely content.
  6. Attention to the basics
    Navigation needs to be simple and straightforward and remain consistent through out the site. There needs to be navigation on the top and bottom of the page. Your logo needs to appear in the upper left-hand corner. Ideally, you should have some branding on the bottom of the page. In most states, California included, you need a Privacy Policy. An “About” page is expected and should appear on your bottom navigation bar. Likewise, a Sitemap is expected and should appear there. Trust me … these are standards. Violate them at your own risk.
  7. Does the copy pull the visitor through the page?
    Are there headlines and subheads to break up the copy into chunks? Are the sentences short? Are there visuals with captions? Is there enough copy … you want to make sure there is enough copy on the page that the page gets indexed by Google? Are you using h1 – h6 tags appropriately for the different types of headlines (again, Google likes these)? Improve readability by using dark text against a light background whenever possible.
  8. What are the main messages being communicated?
    Do they align with the brief? Are they simple and clear? Are you being redundant on purpose? In today’s cluttered environment, it really helps to say the same thing the same way multiple times. Are you using images with words to make your message faster to process? The brain processes pictures faster than it does words – so for a quick read, use visuals with captions.
  9. Are there strong, benefit-oriented calls to action (CTA)?
    These are things that you want visitors to do when they come to your website – beyond clicking to go deeper into the site. For example, contact us to get a demo. Are the CTA simple and clear? Do they align with your business / marketing objectives?
  10. Have you avoided the kitchen sink?
    Don’t try to cram everything you want to say into your home page. It rarely works. Instead, work backwards from the analytics you will use to measure success.

    Most professionals measure success on the web with detailed analytics that tell them – among other things – the abandon rate (how many people jumped off their home page immediately) as well as the average number of pages viewed and time spent on the site. The quickest way to get your abandon rate up is to make your home page a jumbled mess, packing it with every single message you can think of. (“Everything including the kitchen sink.”)

    Likewise, if you are going to measure success by time spent on the website (the more time the better) and number of pages viewed (the more pages, the better as this gets to depth of engagement), you don’t want a “kitchen-sink” home page.

Final Words
Don’t reject creative out-of-hand just because its look and feel is radically different than what you were expecting to see. The difference between good creative and great creative is that great creative challenges our expectations. That said, navigation is not an area where you want to spend a lot of time pioneering new ground. The rule with navigation – as it is with other UI elements on the web – “don’t make me think!”.

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Brand spanking new site

Posted by on June 17, 2011

Courtesy of Paul Jarvis at Two Thirty Design this is running on Jarvis WP … a product I’ve been meaning to try for ages on behalf of my clients. This is a semi-custom offering unlike the custom website builds Paul is (perhaps) best known for. Unfortunately, like most of us Paul is jammed right now and so he is not taking an new Jarvis WP work October. Very cost effective option.

Oh, yes. I’m traveling right now. So please excuse the dust.

Links

http://www.jarviswp.com
http://www.twothirty.com

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Design obsession

Posted by on October 28, 2010

www.betterlivingthroughdesign.com

Just slightly obsessed with this site of late … Not sure why.

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