Content Marketing

A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words: In Content Marketing Too

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1000 words.This morning I came across a presentation by Wakster’s Philippe Ingels. Wakster is a British agency dedicated to the use of illustrations for Marketing. I though the topic was particularly relevant to our readers and so I am sharing his presentation with you. Rather than try to bore your readers to death, why don’t you try something different? That’s the meaning of Philippe Ingels’s presentation and also the gist of our work at Visionary Marketing.
I used Philippe Ingels’s picture above. You will find others in this piece. His presentation is available hereafter
On the web and elsewhere, advertisers tend to believe their own dreams and their motto is “if customers cannot hear our message, let’s shout it out a wee bit louder!

A picture can make you stand out from the crowd

However, the results are poor. Users hate advertisers for being insistent. The more they are the more they hate them. So both advertisers and publishers are trying to lure readers into reading their uninteresting messages by throwing more and more banners at them. I even counted up to 4 layers of banner advertising on one particular website. These publishers’ web analytics platforms will add up all these “readers” into their stables. But it is an illusion. For readers have averted their eyes from that content for a long time. Big data and a big illusion too.

Readers know how to get rid of boring content providers. Ad blockers are ubiquitous to a point that vendors like Apple are including them in native mode in their operating systems. One way of avoiding this issue is to create outstanding content, content which will stand out from the crowd and make readers WANT to stay without forcing them to. Pictures and namely cartoons are a way of avoiding this issue. We often demonstrate this on our Visionary Marketing blogs as in this instance of a blog piece about ghosting by Mia Tawile.
A picture is worth a 1000 words

Our method: a picture is worth…

The method is simple: illustrations can be funny, humour can inspire. This doesn’t mean that you mustn’t write anything, on the contrary. But it can be summarised in a little illustration that goes with your text. As simple as that. Another hint is that you should add your Twitter handle on your pictures. In that way, when people share your content on Twitter, your mention will be added automatically without forcing Twitteres to try and find your Twitter handle for ages. Illustrations are a good idea because they are personable and they show the definite characteristics of the person who created them. With photography is a bit more difficult and too much photography on the Web is standardised. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Photography also enables you to show your personality. We, at Visionary Marketing, often resort to photography since we have built our own photo archive.
Its artistic principles are literally different from those which rule standardised image banks which are overly marketed and deja vu. And therefore should be avoided at all cost. As a conclusion, for you stand out of the crowd, visuals are a good idea. They can help you support your text and draw attention to it.
A picture is worth a 1000 words
With photography too, it is possible for you to have a style, to convey a message, to underline the text with your own signature. What matters is the society, start its difference. As a conclusion, my motto is “marketing is less a matter of doing things than a matter of doing things differently”. Thinking about illustrations isn’t a bad idea, and many of our articles have them on a regular basis in order to convey personality and improve attribution of its content to the author (or the brand in charge of promoting the content for that matter). We advise you to read this presentations by Wakster and urge you to change your way of thinking about content marketing.

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »
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