CHAPTER 4

Developing a Visual Storytelling Road Map: From Strategy to Implemention

If you’re anything like us, brainstorming, strategy sessions, and content planning make our hearts beat a little faster—in a good way. It’s such an exciting time to incorporate visual storytelling into your social media program and develop a strategic road map that will set you up for success in the long run.

Visual storytelling is more than just producing stunning images, videos, and other visuals. It’s a way of thinking. In order to be successful, your visual storytelling program must have clearly defined goals that are in alignment with key business objectives. To achieve those goals, companies need to take a hard look at how their current efforts compare to where they want to be in the future. Identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities will help to determine what additional resources are needed to achieve these goals.

In addition to setting goals, content planning is key to strategically developing visuals that will bring your company’s story to life. Planning for what you can control and developing a robust visual library will help your company to be more nimble when the unexpected happens. It will also allow you to focus more on content distribution and engagement, both of which are key performance indicators (KPIs) for visual storytelling success. In this chapter we’ll offer tips and resources for measuring program success, and we’ll show you how the right analytics can help you tweak your visual content strategy on the fly.

It’s important to note that the step-by-step process and solutions shared in this chapter can be leveraged regardless of your resources or head count. We often hear, “Oh, but I’m a one-person department,” or, “I’m a small business owner.” Phooey! Passion, enthusiasm, and a can-do attitude are the very first things you need to embrace visual storytelling. Some of the best visual storytellers out there are small businesses because they live and breathe their story each and every day. We’re here to offer thought starters and a defined process that will have you looking at and capturing the visual world around you a little differently.

Are you ready?

Setting Goals

There’s no denying that social media can be a powerful tool, but too often companies get caught up in producing a stream of content, and they don’t think about the big picture. Or worse, they get caught in a cycle of random requests from departments across the company who are all competing for space on the social media content calendar. Instead of perpetuating the cycle, align your visual storytelling strategy with your company’s goals and vision for the future. Whether it’s corporate, marketing, branding, or customer relationship management (CRM) goals, a visual storytelling strategy will resonate more with your target audience if it’s shaped around key business objectives.

It’s easy to think of this as limiting, but the reality is quite opposite. Having a clear understanding of the role visual storytelling can play in achieving your company’s goals on social media is a creative catalyst. It will help you to define your vision and identify the components that will bring your visual story to life. It will help you identify the supporting themes, content buckets, visuals, and social media platforms at the heart of your strategy. And it will help you identify what success metrics to evaluate as you ramp up your visual storytelling program.

The key is to keep your goals reasonable. Select several goals that are the most important to your business and that are feasible to achieve through social media. Here are examples from leading companies regarding their visual storytelling goals:

• Awareness and education

• Branding

• Competitive differentiation

• Consumer engagement

• Corporate social responsibility

• Customer retention

• Fan and community growth

• Lead generation

• Loyalty

• Positive press

• Product launches

• Promotions

• Referral traffic

• Sales

• Thought leadership

A good example of the role goals play in developing a visual storytelling program can be found in Burberry’s Art of the Trench Tumblr and website. Launched in 2009 and still an ongoing campaign, the sites are described as “A living document of the trench coat and the people who wear it.”² Through the sites, Burberry targets current and aspirational trench coat owners, with its goals structured around raising awareness, referral traffic, sales, and branding.

Supporting themes of this story are told visually by the photos of the people featured, which include a range of men, women, and children. Each person has a different look and a unique way of styling his or her trench, allowing contributing themes of personal style, quality, universal appeal, and wearability to shine through.

By curating a visual storytelling experience, Burberry’s customers rewarded the company with more than just awareness and a celebration of the trench lifestyle. Just one year after launching the Art of the Trench website (www.artofthetrench.com), it generated 7.5 million views from 150 countries, plus higher-than-average conversion rates from the click-throughs to the Burberry website.³

Auditing and Analyzing

Once you’ve defined the big-picture goals, it’s important to understand how your current efforts stack up. Start by conducting a content audit of how your efforts are performing across all of your social media channels, and cross-reference it with the overall social media conversation about your company. While the word audit sounds daunting, we’re going to make this process as easy as possible. It’s important that you recognize how you’re currently allocating your content, whether your content themes are in alignment with goals and key business objectives and what your content’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities are.

Evaluating Your Current Efforts

If you already have a system for measuring your social media content efforts, that’s great. If you don’t, we recommend building a good old Excel spreadsheet.

The purpose of this process is to identify the ways in which your current social media content strategy supports your goals and to identify your top-performing content themes and types. The end goal is to evaluate your current program and create a benchmark against which to measure your visual storytelling efforts going forward.

We understand fully that some companies may just be starting out, while others have been incorporating visuals into their social media content calendars for some time. Whichever the case, this exercise will force you to evaluate all of your efforts by platform and dig a little deeper into the rationale behind the messages and content types you’re putting out.

Determine a reasonable timeframe in which to run these metrics, with the schedule depending on your frequency of posting to social media and the tools and resources you have at your disposal. If you can build a larger sample size of three to six months, that’s fantastic, but if two is more scalable, do the best you can.

Tracking Data

If you decide to do the audit yourself in a very basic way, in the Excel spreadsheet you want to look at key factors that play a role in the success of your content. Depending on your social media audience, posts may be more effective at specific times of day, or your fans may prefer photos to videos. To evaluate these factors, create a spreadsheet with a different tab for each social media platform you have a presence on. Keep each of the following as individual columns or rows so you can filter as needed.

• Date

• Time of day

• Day of the week

• Content type: for example, photo, video, text

• Content theme: for example, product, promotion, sale, thought leadership, funny

• Engagement metrics for the platform: each as a separate tab or row (for example, likes, comments, shares, retweets, click-throughs)

• Paid media support for the content: for example, dollar value

• Engagement rate per post

• Post sentiment: positive, negative, neutral

• Qualitative wins

For engagement rates of your posts, tweets, and so on, here are quick and easy ways to calculate them:

• Facebook. Look at the “virality” of your post in Facebook’s page analytics. If you prefer to calculate yourself, this figure takes likes, comments, and shares and divides them by the total impressions generated per post.

• Twitter. Calculate a basic engagement rate with the number of replies and retweets divided by your number of followers that day multiplied by 100.

• And so on.

Qualitative wins could be inclusion in a news article, a response from an influencer, becoming a trending topic, or a surprise number of leads generated. These may be harder to remember the further you go back, but they’re valuable to capture and record when you can because numbers won’t always tell the full story.

Analyzing the Raw Data

Having this data in a spreadsheet will also allow you to filter by each factor and look at the raw data for trends or themes. Evaluating these supporting components, plus your content’s engagement rate across all of your social media channels is one important step in pivoting to where you want to be going forward.

When looking at your social media content metrics, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What does my post frequency look like: for example, number per week and time of day?

• What does my content mix look like across text only, photos, videos, infographics, presentations, and more?

• What percentage of my posts by social media channel are visual?

• What topics do I post most frequently about?

• Am I posting the same content and creative across all of my platforms, or do I personalize content by platform?

• Do these topics align back with the key business objectives I want to support with social media?

• Are there any topics that I’m missing?

• Is my company’s voice, personality, and corporate culture coming through in my posts?

• What social media platforms are currently performing the best and worst for my company?

• What are the characteristics of my top 5 to 10 posts across each social media platform?

• Am I supporting any posts with paid media? If so, what are the spend, frequency, and post types?

• Have there been any qualitative wins as a result of my company’s social media content over the past year?

Listening to Customer Conversations and Sentiments

In addition to analyzing your proactive social media content efforts, you also need to listen to what your customers are saying about your company online. Studying your customer’s frequently asked questions, overall sentiment, favored social media platforms, and their use of visuals is important for several reasons. First, it allows you to determine if your proactive content and what your consumers want to hear from you are in alignment. Second, social media conversation about your company is a powerful focus group. Understanding what your consumers’ frequently asked questions are, plus what they gush or gripe about, will help to drive your visual content strategy. It can also help you prioritize what social media platforms you invest more time in and the types of visuals you use.

Here’s what you should be listening for:

• Frequently asked questions

• Conversation topics

• Conversation sentiment: overall and by popular topics

• Conversation spikes by topic, time of day, and day of the week

• Favored social media platforms

• Frequently used visuals: for example, photos, videos

Arguably the best way to glean this information quickly is to invest in a tool like Radian 6, Sysomos, Social Mention, or others. But if you are on a tight budget, these can be a little spendy. If you don’t have budget and resources for a social listening tool, you can do this the old-fashioned way. Analyze your social media platforms when you’re conducting your content audit to gauge how responsive your fans were to each piece of content. For example, if you’re on Facebook or Instagram, look closely at the comments. See if fans responded in line with the content topic, the sentiment of their comments. If their responses are largely off topic from your content, look closely for key themes.

You can also search for your company across all of the major social media platforms to take the temperature of the general chatter. Facebook may be challenging with privacy settings, but the introduction of hashtags may generate some interesting findings. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vine, Pinterest, Google+, and Tumblr are all very searchable. Learn what and how people are sharing—news articles, photos of their in-store experiences, reviews on a product or service, and more. Social listening tools rely on users with public account settings, which means you won’t be able to get data from all of your customers, but it will serve as a good sample size.

Social media at its finest is a continuous, two-way dialogue between your company and your customers. If you can use social listening to inspire relevant content ideas that prompt conversation and engagement, you’re one step further toward hitting those key objectives.

Summarizing Your Audit

Once you’ve gone through auditing your efforts and consumer conversations online, summarize your top 5 to 10 key takeaways. What really jumped out to you? Was it that posts on Monday morning always perform above average, or that your consumers take a ton of photos of your products? Do customers talk about one thing on Facebook but something completely different on Twitter? You may have even identified FAQs that are asked over and over again, or you discover an unexpected use for one of your products. All of these takeaways can be translated into themes for your content calendar.

Depending on your resources, it’s good to go through this process on an ongoing basis. Even if it’s not as robust, going through a topline process monthly with a deeper dive quarterly will help to keep you on track. It will also ensure that you’re not missing any new themes or trends to craft content around. Just because your customers were saying something one month doesn’t mean that it will carry on forever. The best companies and brands on social media strive to be nimble to change and tweak their content themes as needed.

It’s not until we look closely at our efforts that we understand our strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Studying your current efforts and how your consumers perceive your company are key to your content planning and measurement efforts. It will also give you that much-needed support to turn down that completely off-topic, off-strategy post request the next time it crosses your desk.

When brands use data and historical analysis to optimize their engagement strategy, they see a significantly higher impact than they would see with just using random visuals.

Both Ekaterina and her strategy and account teams at BRANDERATI are huge believers in the data-optimized approach described above. Granted, they do use a proprietary analytics and engagement tool to answer the questions we raised above in a much faster fashion than any manual analysis could. And by doing so, they help a large list of their clients reach unprecedented levels of engagement on their social properties.

Running the data across a variety of brands and industries over the past two years, the BRANDERATI team found that utilizing a data-optimized content strategy increased their clients’ engagement on their social media properties. Even brands with a significantly sized and established social media presence saw their monthly engagement increase with the use of historically optimized and strategically placed visuals versus the use of posts with randomly selected visuals.

One example of a brand that saw success with this strategy was DIRECTV. The company’s content strategy includes a large variety of elements such as TV and celebrity news, movie, and sports updates, as well as a complete rundown of offers and features DIRECTV provides. It is critical for a brand with such a diverse content strategy to identify the most popular and relevant types of content to help drive the highest level of social engagement possible. Partnering with BRANDERATI, the team identified significant peaks in engagement around the brand’s content over the summer of 2013. One of the things they found was that DIRECTV’s Facebook engagement increased by 148% when they initiated social conversations about the TV series Duck Dynasty! Armed with this information, DIRECTV decided to create a larger three-tiered engagement program related to Duck Dynasty.

The first step was to develop weekly content schedules and increase the number of Duck Dynasty updates and features. The team designed and posted countdown images to the season premiere, which were wildly popular among their fans. The brand also used this information to boost their ongoing Facebook fan acquisition campaigns. The company targeted Duck Dynasty fans in its outreach. This campaign allowed DIRECTV to acquire more fans with an increased propensity to engage with the kinds of content it were already posting, at a lower cost. In addition, DIRECTV partnered with the A&E network to launch a Facebook application game tied to the show. This game, called Duck Dynasty Quack Match, engaged fans and gave them an opportunity to enter a sweepstakes and win daily prizes. This approach, along with using various similar visual tactics, led to an increase in monthly total engagement of 56% for the three months in the summer of 2013 over the previous six months.

Social media analytics helped DIRECTV stimulate and grow its community of adoring fans by providing a clearer view of what their fans were passionate about. Utilizing results from social analytics to drive marketing initiatives outside of a social posting strategy is extremely important, and it can lead to success for a brand outside of its own digital ecosystem.

In developing and executing any social engagement strategy, it is important to know the people in your audience and what they like. It is crucial to study how your fans behave and react to different types of content, and apply those findings to future strategic plans.

Another example of a brand that used this strategy is the National Basketball Association (NBA). Leveraging lessons gleaned from previous engagement analysis, BRANDERATI’s and NBA’s marketing teams developed a creative social content strategy.

One series of posts implemented during the 2013 postseason that worked particularly well for the NBA was the We’re Moving On posting campaign. So at the completion of each best-of-seven series, the team designed a post with an image of the winning team that accompanied by the message: “WE’RE MOVING ON TO THE [SEMIFINALS, FINALS, and so on]”. Other strong performers for the brand were Facebook albums. So the team designed a series of albums filled with predictions for the results of each game series. For example, at the start of the Heat versus Spurs best-of-seven finals, the album posted included eight images, one for each potential result (Heat win in seven games, Spurs win in seven games, Heat win in six games, Spurs win in six games, and so on). Fans were encouraged to share the image that included their prediction for which team would win, and in how many games. Both of these campaigns created a consistent feel to the page and a repeatable success for the NBA.

In addition to these campaigns, the team wanted to create a few posts that would really stand out and create buzz. One idea was to design and post championship rings and banners for the Heat and the Spurs, countdown posts leading up to the crucial finals game 7, and even posts celebrating Father’s Day and the NBA’s Social Media Awards. And fans loved it! These posts even got picked up by Bleacher Report, Fox Sports, and the NESN channel. This visual strategy and creative thinking led to an increase of nearly six times more shares than the previous year’s posts.

Shaping Your Visual Story

Now starts the really exciting stage of taking your goals and current social media content efforts, plus any new learnings, and translating them into your visual storytelling program. A little planning goes a long way in terms of keeping your efforts strategic and on track.

Goals may be the backbone of your visual storytelling program, but translating them into a powerful story requires meaningful supporting content. Think of each piece of content you share as a visual vignette contributing to the larger story your company wants to communicate. Each piece of content needs to have a clear theme and point of view, much like a chapter or scene, plus a takeaway message for the reader. The content also needs to be aligned with who you are as a company in terms of voice, personality, and values. Once woven together, these themes will shape your visual story.

Themes can come from many places, so we recommend a little exercise that involves looking at how your goals, company voice, and customer feedback can be supported with visual content.

Start by listing out your goals and jot down very topline responses as to how visual content can help achieve them. Aim to have about three supporting points for each goal, but you can always grow the list as needed. If your goals differ by social media platform, then go through this process for each of them. Here’s our sample:

Look closely at these goals and supporting themes, and they will likely be in line with key brand differentiators. Chances are, these themes are closely tied to message points in a company tagline, advertisements, mission statement, and more. If there’s anything major missing that’s a key company goal or brand differentiator, now is the time to add it.

Although a good start, this alone will not communicate a cohesive visual story. Next, look closely at your company’s voice and personality. Social media platforms all require a more human touch than other online communications. This offers a good opportunity for your company’s voice to shine in a relatable, personable way, allowing your customers to build a different type of relationship with you.

This may sound strange, but to bring out your company’s voice, it helps to play a little what-if game. If your company were a person, what would it be like in real life? If you need help deciphering this, look at how you communicate to your customers on your website, in advertisements, e-mail communications, and your social media channels, and pull out the more human qualities. Remember, you want to embrace social media’s more personable, human side. Breaking this out will identify other important visual content themes that bring your company’s story to life.

Last, but certainly not least, it’s also important to go back to those consumer insights you pulled from your customers online. Sometimes the person we want to be versus how others see us are two very different things. Visual storytelling can help your company to bridge those gaps and personify those key values to enhance your reputation. Make sure to call out personality traits that are strong versus weak so you can develop a plan on how to organically strengthen those values through visual content.

In addition to personality strengths and weaknesses, you also want to look for the most commonly discussed conversation themes from your consumers online. Make sure to call out if these conversational themes differ by platform because doing so will allow you to further personalize content themes to their most relevant audiences. Compile these themes and feedback with any supplemental information you can get from your marketing, market research, and/or your customer service teams and build those into common theme or topical buckets:

Are you starting to see themes and topics that you can craft visual content around? You should be. Based on XYZ Company’s goals, personality, and customer feedback, it appears that its visual story should be shaped around its being a hardworking, down-to-earth, customer-centric company. Content themes should be crafted around how the company puts customers first and its key brand differentiation points and promotions. To play up the fun and down-to-earth elements, the company can develop lifestyle content showing how its products play a role in consumers’ lives, and it can talk about the fun in-store elements like freebies and music playlists. To aid customers in reviewing product and service offerings, blog and video demos can be drafted. And to align with customers’ shopping habits, most digital offers should be posted in the evenings.

By going through this process with XYZ Company, we’ve shown how you can shape your story and identify major themes to craft your visual content mix by looking at your goals, company voice, and customer feedback by social media platform. In the next section, we’ll explain how to determine your visual content mix from topic, medium, and platform perspectives.

Determining Your Visual Content Mix

Successful visual storytellers understand that the magic is in the mix. Mixing up types of content and different media—from photos to videos, infographics, and more—keeps your visual storytelling fresh. It also allows you to deliver more personalized content to target audiences across different platforms with the ultimate goal of keeping your customers engaged and coming back for more.

For visual storytelling, it’s important to personalize your strategy and content mix by platform. There will be opportunities for content to overlap and be used across multiple platforms, but this will be dictated largely by the platform best practices plus the customer insights and preferences that you uncovered through social listening.

The first step in determining your visual content mix is to evaluate your desired frequency per platform for posts, tweets, pins, and so on. For example, if you post 30 times per month on Facebook, you want to define how many of those posts will relate back to your most important and relevant visual storytelling themes. While the concept is simple enough, the challenge is that social media managers are faced with a never-ending stream of requests for space on the content calendar. Having a formula and clear plan will not only keep you organized but will also help you to educate colleagues the next time they want to “get something on Facebook.”

In this section, we will share tips for determining your content frequency and for allocating content themes and visual media across a multitude of platforms in your monthly content calendar.

Frequency

Frequency is one of the top question topics we get from the audience when we speak at events—and for good reason. How often companies should post is not easy to generalize because it’s going to be different for every company. Frequency will also be different for every channel your company has a presence on.

We’re operating under the assumption that readers of this book already have a presence across multiple platforms and have done some work to determine their desired social media content frequency for each of them. You’ve made that determination probably based on things like how much relevant information you have to share and your resources, staffing, and ability to source visuals. Unless you’re hardly posting at all, it makes sense to stick with that frequency as you ramp up your visual storytelling efforts. You’ve already built a benchmark based on how your content is currently performing, and consistency makes sense, especially in the beginning. Tinkering with your frequency is a good trial-and-error solution when you’re looking to enhance engagement further into your program.

There have been a lot of different studies published over the past several years that show the best times to post on various networks. Just Google “best time to post,” and you will see numerous different pieces of advice. Some say weekdays are the best days for engagement; others say weekends are. The data is controversial.

And while it’s helpful to look at averages, frequency is unique for every company because of different fan counts, demographics, preferences, and levels of engagement. It’s also a good idea to gauge the frequency of your competitors’ posts as a way to understand if it’s drastically different from your own—and if so, why? Also, your executives will inevitably ask, and you need to speak to how your approach differs and why. It’s critical that you don’t feel like you need to replicate the efforts of your competitors and that you instead remain focused on the best approach for your company.

If you are marketing in the United States, it’s helpful to know that the Eastern and Central Time zones represent close to 80% of the U.S. population. If you have to make a choice which time zone to target, time things for your U.S. audiences in EST.

If you target international audiences, pay attention to which countries and time zones are most represented. When Ekaterina managed the Facebook strategy and global presence for Intel, she knew that her international audience was so diverse that no matter when she posted something, it would always get immediate likes and comments. But even then, she made sure she was using analytics to help her reach the highest peaks of engagement. First tracking it manually (in the early days), then engaging tools such as PageLever, she looked at the days and times when the most engagement happened.

It is also important to play with different times and to test what works best around various types of posts.

At the end of the day, quality content is always going to trump quantity and volume, especially with the ability across most social media platforms to use paid media to enhance the reach of a post or tweet. You never want to get caught in the cycle of producing content for content’s sake, so frequency first and foremost needs to be in line with what’s interesting, important, and relevant to your audience.

When evaluating frequency, a helpful metric to have is the shelf life, or life cycle, of your content by platform. Because each social media platform performs differently, measure your next 10 or so posts, tweets, Instagram photos, pins, and so on, on an hourly basis. Each hour, calculate how many engagements there are on the piece of content you posted—for example, likes, comments, shares, @replies, retweets, or repins. You may even need to go into shorter time increments for platforms like Twitter. Find out when that engagement starts to taper off and ultimately ends. Through this simple exercise, you’ll better understand the shelf life of your content, which can help in determining the frequency per day and the time of day your content should be posted. You will also learn how to not step on your own toes by overposting so that you can give your content the optimal amount of time it needs to shine.

Usually the shelf life of a tweet is considered to be an hour at most, and shelf life of a Facebook post is about 24 hours.

Allocating Content Themes and Media

Once you have the frequency set, it’s time to determine your monthly content mix. This is where you prioritize by social media platform the most important content themes that go into crafting your visual story. The mix needs to balance what’s important from an ongoing visual storytelling perspective with goals, current events, questions, and general conversation from your customers. Rank these themes, and assign a frequency qualifier to each bucket, whether it’s in terms of the number of posts or percentage of the month’s content. This mix will likely be different by social media platform. It will also likely change each month depending on how much news your company has or the tweaks you’re making in response to fan engagement.

When ranking these items, ensure that the mix has a balance to what you want your customers to know about you, versus what they’re looking for. The content should also aim to be mostly upbeat, fun, motivating, and engaging. Remember that people don’t always come online to read the newspaper. Sometimes they want to pet the cute dog too.

Once you have your monthly content themes outlined and prioritized, you can use this information as your baseline when you’re crafting the actual visual content. Outlining content themes makes it easy to identify what messages will best be conveyed as photos, videos, infographics, presentations, and/or some other medium. Planning will also make your life overseeing social media easier: you won’t be scrambling to get post content set or have to articulate your vision for content on the fly.

Planning for the Unexpected

We all understand how important yet challenging planning is given the realities of social media. Anything can happen at a moment’s notice, like a crisis situation or a new meme taking the world by storm. Planning will help your company be more nimble to change as it hits. While this all sounds amazing, how do you actually plan for the unexpected?

The honest answer is that you’re never going to predict everything that is going to happen. However, you can work with people in your company to identify common occurrences—both positive and negative—and look for opportunities to create visual content solutions around them. The proactive end of responding in real time to the latest viral sensation will be discussed in depth in Chapter 5. For the purposes of this chapter, we want to help you to identify how to anticipate key visual content opportunities in advance based on past history as you build up your content library.

In order to do this, you need to form a cross-department team of people who can help you to understand key themes or issues that have required a rapid response in the past. Typically this team will include people from brand and product marketing, public relations, and customer service.

Brand and Product Marketing

For brand and product marketing, you want to understand the most important factors that can influence sales and customer leads. For example, if you’re a hardware shop, a heat wave may result in a sudden surge of sales for air-conditioning units and fans. Or a snowstorm will generate a rush to the store for shovels. When you’re planning your content calendar ahead of time, this isn’t necessarily stuff that you can write in, but it’s important to your company. Identifying weather as an important theme around which to craft content to support key business goals allows you to get ahead of the game by crafting generic visual content around heat waves, snowstorms, dry spells, and other weather events. Save this content in your library for a rainy day—literally!

You should also ask the brand and product team about product perception, competitive positioning, and important trends or shifts in the industry coming up over the next year. All of these can result in a shift in strategy and present an opportunity to plan ahead with visual content.

Public Relations

For your public relations team, you want to have a strong sense of their annual plan and monthly focal points for pitching stories to the news media. These themes and points can not only generate additional ideas for your visual storytelling program but they can also help in maintaining a consistency of voice. The public relations team can also tip you off to the times of year for such events as key awards, rankings, events, executive speeches, exciting partnerships, and major announcements.

You should also ask your public relations team to think back over the past few years to the most common reactive issues facing your company. Everyone prefers to think about the fun and proactive side of social media, but the reality is that your business practices, values, employment policies, customer service issues, how and where you source your products, and other issues can all generate a negative wave of inquiries online from your customers. The purpose of this process is to better plan how you manage these sensitive situations online and if there is an opportunity to use visual content to help resolve them. Examples could include sourcing a how-to video in response to customer concerns about how a product or service works or to give customers a look inside the facility where your products are made. This practice will also help further strengthen your relationship with your PR team because all responses in relation to sensitive situations need to be consistent across traditional and online media.

Customer Service

Your customer service team is also an incredibly valuable resource when it comes to planning for the unexpected. Depending on how long your company has been around, they probably have on file years and years of customer inquiries and the company’s responses to them. Understanding the most frequently asked customer service inquiries and comments—both positive and negative—can offer ideas for sourcing visual content. Based on past behavioral trends, it can also help your team to anticipate how visual content can better support frequently asked questions, a new product launch, store opening, and other similar events.

Ensuring that your content and daily social media community engagement is in line with customer service responses is also important for consistency as well. This team will be an important stakeholder should you ever need to manage through a social media crisis.

Ultimately, planning for the unexpected translates into planning for what you can anticipate. However, doing so will result in greater flexibility to jump on important trends that fall outside of your realm of predictability. Developing a robust content library and content buckets will free up the valuable time you need to allocate your creative resources around real-time opportunities when they arise.

Distribution and Engagement Strategy

Once you have your content calendar set and posts created, now comes the fun part: sharing it with your fans. When preparing to distribute your content, make sure someone from your company is there to listen and engage with feedback and responses. If you think of social media as an ongoing conversation, posting content without engagement can be likened to talking at versus with someone.

While the purpose of this book is to teach you the best practices of visual storytelling, half the fun of telling a story is watching the response from your audience in real time. From the cringes, to the laugh-out-loud moments or gasps of surprise, the best storytellers play off of their audience to really hit the message home and create a lasting experience.

You can and should be doing this as well on your social media channels. Use your visual storytelling program to spark one-to-one human conversations based on the content you’re putting out. You’ve put a great deal of work into aligning your content with business goals and objectives, so your goal as a visual storyteller then becomes that of extending the life of the conversation and engagement for as long as it is relevant.

During these conversations, continue to wear your visual storytelling hat, and look for additional themes, ideas, or questions that will trigger more content ideas. It’s also a good idea to actively look at the content your fans are sharing each day. Liking and commenting on visual content created by your fans—both positive and negative—can help to deepen your relationship with your consumers. It shows them that you’re present and engaged yourself and that you care about the role your company, product, or service plays in their lives.

Crafting and Sourcing Stunning Visuals

In order to develop a cohesive visual marketing strategy, companies should be thinking like digital curators. When crafting visuals, the key is to personalize content across platforms, while keeping the tone and branding consistent. Regardless of budget or headcount, there are countless opportunities with visuals for driving creativity. In this section, we will share our top tips for developing different types of visuals, plus we’ll give you some tools, apps, and other resources to help you along the way.

Traditional Images

In many ways, photography is like a blank canvas. Any moment can turn into a photo opportunity, with the beauty in the eye of the photographer. The concept of a well-composed photo is nothing new to companies—it’s something they’ve been sourcing for their websites, advertisements, retail locations, and the news media for a long time. What’s new, though, is the concept of social media-friendly images that drive an immediate response. For those looking to truly push the limits and take their imagery to the next level, check out our tips for taking stunning photos.

Photo Collages

Looking for inspiration on how to craft a collage? Look no further than the visual experience of your Instagram page. Ever since Instagram started offering a desktop viewing experience, it has showcased the value of the collage. Though arranged at random, you’ll get a sense for just how engaging the right assortment of images can be when artfully placed together.

Collages have always been a natural fit for the fashion industry, inspired by the highly editorial nature of aligning images together to look like a magazine spread. Style inspiration community Polyvore practically runs on collages, both on its site and across its social media channels. Polyvore’s collages offer a compelling example of how to artfully arrange your images and pops of colors to create a visual fashion story.

When making a collage, look closely at the balance of images, including their composition and colors. The idea is to pull the viewers in with a focal point but keep their interest with a range of colors, unique imagery, or visual focal points. It’s also important that the imagery come together to craft a story, as several Great Gatsby-inspired collages from Polyvore show. One of the collages, for example, features a comfortable yet chic outfit for a lazy day that’s a nod to 1920s fashion with the color themes of white, black, and yellow consistent throughout.

Many companies also leverage the creative power of collages to populate their Facebook or Google+ cover photos. With so much space to add images, a collage offers a nice way to maximize this real estate. It also doesn’t have to be a full-on collage. It can be a series of images over a larger image.

Images with Text, Quotes, and Stats

When a photo alone won’t do, text, quotes, and stats can help to clearly communicate a point, inspire your community, promote competitive differentiation, generate a laugh, and more.

Clearly communicate a point. Think about it. To its fans, a photo featuring a crushed can of Red Bull without text could mean a multitude of different things, from brute strength to anger, an unfortunate accident, and more. Layer in the text “We find your lack of energy disturbing,” and the Instagram image takes on a new meaning in line with Red Bull’s fun and extreme lifestyle.

Inspire your community. Whether it’s a quote, stat, or phrase, the use of powerful words will deliver an inspiring message. Inspiring visual content can take many forms. Most often it’s found in the form of a quote from a well-known thought leader, company executive, or customer. However, a powerful stat can bring a message or point of view to life. Depending on the intention of the post, a snappy one-liner like “Wish you were here” or “Love what you do” can also motivate your audience.

Another idea is to produce a word cloud describing a value, product, or service. Want to go the extra mile? Consider crowdsourcing these words from your community.

Promote competitive differentiation. GE does a good job using visuals with quotes and statements to reinforce a key competitive differentiation—its people. Customer testimonials, positive press, research studies, awards, and third-party endorsements could also help to promote competitive differentiation.

Generate a laugh. While quotes inspire, stats reinforce key points and facts. Stats have the ability to add credibility, spark a conversation, or call attention to an important topic or issue. As seen with one of Coca-Cola’s posts, stats can also be downright silly. Citing “An ice cube’s confidence increases up to 500% when it’s served in a Coke,” this lighthearted stat shared on the company’s Instagram account and complementary image prove that it’s okay to have a little fun with your social media community.

Postcards and E-cards

With people increasingly reliant on electronic devices, the traditional postcard has had to transform for the digital age. While the medium may have changed, postcards and e-cards still offer a strong opportunity to craft a visual story built around an occasion or experience.

Hyatt House, part of the Hyatt Hotel chain, treated guests during their stay with two complimentary postcards from Postagram. Housed on an app on both Postagram’s and Hyatt House’s Facebook pages, guests could add a personalized photo, a 180-character message, a name, and an address. The postcard was then printed and mailed to the recipient. The campaign was created as a way to help Hyatt House build deeper relationships with its guests by showcasing that it understood the importance of keeping friends and family top of mind while on the road.

It’s hard not to align a postcard or e-card with a holiday occasion. Holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day all have us feeling more sentimental and thus more interested in reaching out to the people we care about the most. But what if you accidently, or not so accidently, offended someone over the course of the year and want to make amends?

Simply make a Peeps Offering.

Created by the iconic Peeps candy, the company wanted to remind fans that it was also around during the December holiday season. In order to break through the holiday clutter, Peeps offered its fans on Facebook a chance to send tongue-in-cheek e-cards with one-liners like these: “I’m sorry I defriended you. Again.” Or “I’m sorry for using mistletoe as an excuse to kiss your Mom.” Laugh-out-loud funny, the Peeps Offering campaign showcases how e-cards can help to show the lighter side of your company.

Memes

Although memes are definitely one of the easiest forms of content marketing, memenic marketing isn’t as simple as it first appears. As with any other campaign, it helps to be strategic when choosing and putting out a message about your brand. It’s also important that the end result be fun and irreverent.

Most memes make light of situations and human behavior. When brainstorming meme ideas, it’s ok to “memejack” and create your own play on the popular themes of the moment. The key is to do it in a clever and original way. People love seeing how others take wacky meme ideas to the next level, so this may seem obvious, but use your own photo, and don’t copy existing memes word for word. Try to bring your own voice and brand personality through both the copy and the visual.

Commonly Used Memes

• Cats or dogs. Make a cat or dog versus a person the hero—anything goes! Grumpy Cat and Lolcats are especially popular memes.

• Challenge accepted. For example, “You can’t stay in bed all day. / Challenge accepted.”

• Common situations. For example, funny responses to asking someone out, waking up, office humor, things kids do, celebrating holiday occasions, and more.

• Confessions. For example, “I do / Use your toothbrush.”

• First-world problems. For example, “I lost my phone. / Now I have to use my BlackBerry.”

• Flashbacks. For example, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s moments.

• Good or bad luck. For example, “Put on old jeans. / Found $$$ in the pocket.”

• Like a boss. Can be used when conquering an everyday situation in a big way.

• Personalities. For example, the jerk, the crazy girlfriend, the terrible boss, and the hysterical statements they make.

• Song one-liners. For example, Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” or Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know.”

• TV shows and movies. For example, funny one-liners from popular TV shows and movies. Reality TV is a well-known source for amazing meme one-liners.

• What if I told you. Funny, sarcastic, and very frank statements on common occurrences.

• What people think I do/What I really do. Funny way to mock a difference in perception between what people think you do versus what you actually do.

One idea is to embrace a fun personality related to your company or brand. It could be a spokesperson, mascot, even a personable office pet. For example, Dos Equis’s famous “Most Interesting Man in the World” ads have his own hysterical and sometimes racy series of memes. Remarkably, these memes are not generated by Dos Equis. Its community of enthusiastic fans generates the memes. Though amazing, wouldn’t it be nice to start or add to the trend? Create your own by introducing the cute office puppy who chews shoes and won’t let anyone near his favorite stuffed animal as the newest shareable meme sensation.

“What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” is another great example of a meme that can be used effectively by brands to address misconceptions about a product or service. HubSpot used this meme to great success on its Facebook page, generating hundreds of likes and shares.

GIFs

GIFs can help bring a static image to life by fusing images together to create animation-like motion. Companies can use GIFs to create bite-sized stories around products, events, and funny one-liners and actions, whether it’s a model strutting down a runway, a cake being decorated, or a motivational quote. Common themes like having a “case of the Mondays,” “TGIF,” or seasonal holidays can spark creative GIFs. Companies can also embrace the animation quality of GIFs by parsing together historical content to show then versus now or to give a quick example of how a product or service works.

Common Themes for GIFs

• Celebrity moments. From Beyoncé to the Kardashians, President Obama, and more, a quick movement, pose, or dance move from a celebrity can instantly spread like wildfire in a GIF.

• Cute animals. Whether cuddling, chasing their tails, or bouncing off the walls, cute animals are GIF gold.

• Food. Who doesn’t love bringing their foodie cravings to life? Think of a slow-motion GIF featuring an ooey gooey slice of cheese pizza being pulled away from the pie, or chocolate sauce being drizzled over an ice cream sundae.

• Nostalgia. Remember the TV shows, toys, and pop stars that you grew up with? People love traveling back in a virtual time machine through GIFs to tap into nostalgia from way back when.

• My reaction to. Similar to a meme, users take popular and wacky pop culture reactions GIFs and use them to communicate how they feel about events in their lives. If they’re upset, they may show a celebrity throwing a hissy fit, or if they’re happy, they might show a GIF of an athlete doing a victory dance.

• Pop culture phenomena. From McKayla Maroney’s “not impressed” to President Obama’s fist bump, GIFs bring to life action-oriented pop culture phenomena.

• Statements. Similar to memes, people use GIFs to highlight something visually about their personality, usually taken from pop culture such as, “My mom thinks I’m awesome,” “I’m kind of a big deal,” or “Haters gonna hate.”

• Stunts and sports. The action capabilities of a GIF make it easy to share the game-winning shot or an unbelievable stunt in a short-form animation.

• TV shows, movies, and music videos. GIF enthusiasts often parse pivotal scenes in TV shows, movies, and music videos. Add in text, and you can relive a favorite moment over and over.

Infographics

While the case for using infographics as part of a visual storytelling program is strong, it’s a medium that cannot be forced. All of the factors—data, design, visuals, layout, and color—must come together harmoniously.

Though they are free and rather easy to use, we recommend working with a designer to build your own, custom-branded infographic. Since this is a popular medium, it is critical to ensure the visual represents your brand well.

User-Generated Content

With the rise in visual social media platforms, many companies are now turning to their consumers to source user-generated images and videos. As previously seen in this book, companies like Lululemon, Coach, Coca-Cola, Burberry, Nike, and more are all successfully using user-generated content (UGC) to participate in collaborative visual storytelling with their customers. Look closely at the examples shared, and you’ll see that the key to encouraging user-generated content is knowing your customer base. You need to understand what imagery or videos you can encourage, plus the level of depth or creativity. In order to achieve your desired results, it’s also vital to create a forum with a clear call to action and to communicate how fans can participate and submit images.

Videos: YouTube, Instagram, and Vine

From YouTube to Instagram, Vine, and others, companies have choices as never before for capturing and sharing videos. Furthermore, all of the major social media platforms from Facebook to Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, and even SlideShare also make it easy to stream video—with the engagement rates to match. This offers a unique value proposition and business case for companies to use video to tell their stories. The challenge and opportunity for companies is to define the role video will play as part of their visual storytelling program.

Our recommendation is that you revert back to your content calendar planning and look at the top opportunities for which video is going to help tell your visual story in a way that other media cannot. You don’t want to get caught up in all the things you could be doing. Instead, focus on what is the most strategic. Think about your target audience, desired end goals, and resources available. How can video bring to life important supporting themes in your visual storytelling program and make the greatest impact?

Look closely at the common types of video and see what your company would prioritize as part of your visual storytelling program.

Common Types of Videos

• Announcements

• Behind-the-scenes scoops

• Case studies

• Celebrity partnerships

• Community involvement

• Company overview

• Demos

• Event highlights

• FAQs

• Goals

• How-tos

• Live streams

• Office tours

• Parodies

• Testimonials

• Video blogs

• Visual portfolios

Measurement

As discussed throughout this chapter, measurement will play an ongoing role in the life cycle of your visual storytelling program. Any time you embark on a new initiative with visual content, trial and error and testing are going to play a starring role. This is not a bad thing! In fact, the ability to take calculated risks and embrace creative new ways to structure your visual storytelling efforts is going to be key to long-term success.

Truth be told, we could fill another book with tips and techniques on how to measure your visual storytelling efforts. In the interest of brevity, if you continue to track, measure, analyze, and tweak your visual content on the fly based your community’s responses, you will be able to paint a picture internally of how this initiative is improving your social media efforts.

Take every win and setback as a learning opportunity, and showcase how those learnings have resulted in the continued evolution of your visual storytelling strategy. Even for the most celebrated companies, success and staying relevant are ongoing processes. It’s easy to get comfortable and stuck in a specific approach, so think of measurement as a check and balance for keeping yourself honest.

Use the tools and recommendations provided earlier in this chapter as a start, but consider personalizing them to what your senior leadership is asking about. To dig deeper on social media measurement, we recommend the following books written by experts in the field of social media analytics:

• Leslie Poston, Social Media Metrics for Dummies

• Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary, Digital Marketing Analytics: Making Sense of Consumer Data in a Digital World

• Olivier Blanchard, Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization