Piktochart: Great New Tool for Creating Infographics

I moved to St. Helena a few months ago and I love the serenity of this little village in the heart of the California wine country. Moving to a new town can be lonely, so I joined the Chamber of Commerce. I was motivated by a workshop that was jointly produced with the Calistoga Chamber. I figured this would be a great chance to make new business connections. The format consisted of a series of speakers, divided into four categories, with presentations from local companies.

Their goal was to provide information about what you’d need to know if you were doing business here. I assumed this would be a huge snooze, but boy, was I wrong! Each presenter had a PowerPoint and exactly 5 minutes. The slides were timed, so believe me, it kept the presenters on the move. This was information delivery in a speed-dating format. The team who worked on this event did a superb job—I’d lost faith in Chambers of Commerce, but this program was relevant and expertly produced.

The St. Helena Chamber President, Pam Simpson, used her five minutes to talk about some of the great tools she and her team had been using to streamline their communications and upgrade the quality of their presentations and web postings. She named five applications, and I hadn’t heard of any of them. Let’s face it—we’re all busy, doing more with less. There are approximately a gazillion social media applications that all do the same thing and more standalone apps than we know what to do with. When I hear about fabulous new applications I groan and think about the time it takes to identify and ramp up to using them. I don’t care how easy they are to use—there’s ALWAYS a learning curve!

But Pam assured us that these were both easy to use and had become terrific productivity enhancers for her team. I went home and tried one of these, Piktochart. Happily, Pam was right.

Piktochart: Infographics made ridiculously easy

If you’ve been paying attention, infographics have become an important part of information delivery for social media and other forms of electronic delivery. They’re clever, fun, colorful and provide easy assimilation of key facts. But if you’re not a graphics whiz kid, or if you don’t have a graphics program, creating an infographic can be laborious. I’ve had some good ideas, but I knew I’d be using Apple’s Pages to create my high-res image, and this application is cumbersome, and it would require a significant time investment. The result? My infographic has been on hold for a long, long time.

Piktochart’s self-contained library makes this a breeze

Just as Pam promised, all you do is create a login and this app opens up a world of easy possibilities. There are some very workable free templates, drag-and-drop technology, images and fonts. You can import your own logo and images to customize this, of course—you’re not stuck with what they give you as a default. You can change the color palette, and something I really like—as you work, Piktochart autosaves so you don’t lose track of time and end up losing your work if your browser craps out.

Piktochart: more functionality available

There are also templates for presentations, posters and flyers. Since statistics are the heartbeat of infographics, many of these templates come with readymade stats that I’m going to assume are correct. I googled a few of these to doublecheck, and they were spot on, but would always want to confirm them before using in any product.

• The free version has 13 templates that are fully customizable.
• If you want more options, you can pay $15/month and access more than 400 templates and more features.
• If you want even more functionality, you can opt for the Pro version, at $29/month.
• What may make these advanced options attractive for some users: turnkey infographics. I searched the comprehensive library of 400 templates for content marketing and came up with an infographic that was excellent. If I were a pro user, I might be tempted to use this as-is, or make only minor adjustments.

Infographics have become an important medium for information delivery. I’m delighted to have discovered Piktochart and can’t wait to try out the other applications that Pam recommended at the Chamber of Commerce event.

Are you interested in creating infographics for your content marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and marketing strategists.

Becoming a Better Writer: Ask Yourself “So What?”

These days we’re all marketers. If you’ve got a website, if you’re publishing a newsletter and/or a blog and posting to social media, you’re involved in content marketing. It’s a great way to build an audience and increase visibility. One catch--you have to be able to write. If you’re a crappy writer, content marketing’s not going to work for you, but you can become a better writer.

Give your writing time to percolate

If you’re using Twitter successfully, you’ve already learned a valuable lesson in consolidating your thoughts into simple 140-character bursts, and editing is key to good writing. My methodology is to give myself plenty of time before a deliverable date to draft an article or blogpost. I like to come back to it later, preferably in 24 hours, and edit the hell out of it. You’d be amazed at the perspective and objectivity that time provides. I wonder why I used clumsy sentence structure or took so long to make a point. This method provides so much clarity; it allows me to quickly make edits, tightening up an article to make it more compelling.

Less is always more

When it comes to effective business writing, think fewer words and simple sentence structure. Forget elaborate adjectives and vocabulary. Make it accessible. Make every single word count. I just read an article by a financial expert and his recommendation was to pretend that each word costs you $100. If you have to reach into your pocket and shell out $100 each time you use a word, you’re going to make sure that every single word is critical-mission; you’re going to make your point quickly and as persuasively as possible. (To think about: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was just 272 words, and who doesn’t recall “Fourscore and 40 years ago . . .)

A few other tips to keep you on the straight and narrow

• After each sentence or bullet point ask yourself "So what?" If you can't provide an answer, it’s irrelevant, so lose it.
• For a lengthier email or report, clearly define your primary message, frontloading it so it lives in the first paragraph. Don’t be so arrogant as to assume that anyone’s going to read every word.
• Make sure that the contents of an article or email are clearly defined in the subject line or title.
• If an image will help summarize or illustrate a point, use it.
• People have extraordinarily short attention spans. Share good information that clearly informs and/or entertains.

Are you struggling with your content marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.

Forget the Boomers--Time to Reach Millennials

Anyone who thinks that everyone is his/her audience is facing a big learning curve. Smart business owners know that the more they can target their audience the more successful their marketing will be. It used to be that we were all targeting the vast baby boomer market, but that’s rapidly being replaced by the need to reach millennials—those 18-34 in 2015.

Millennials: a huge demographic with money to spend 

Millennials are now the nation’s largest living generation. Research suggests that millennials have an estimated $200B spending power, but reaching this audience requires a different approach than what we used for the baby boomer market. Millennials are far more digitally connected than any other group, and they expect a more personal relationship with businesses they support.

• 91% of millennials are regular Internet users; they’re connected 24/7.
• Because millennials are so tied to their connected devices, some have begun to refer to the demographic as Generation FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
• They use a combination of smartphones, tablets and laptops to access the web for everything—information, shopping, entertainment, news and social media.
• Millennials don’t want to be told, they want to be spoken with, making a personal connection. They want to know about the people with whom they’re going to be working.
• Think immediate information delivery. Millennials were raised on social media, so they’ve been trained and have come to expect short answers with even shorter waiting times.
• They’re skeptical. Millennials google everything to check for accuracy.
• They don’t do anything without validation, asking their friends, relying on market research and testimonials before purchasing

A big misconception about millennials is that they are young and immature

While the demographic still skews young, they are growing up and many now have children. Another misconception is that millennials disregard traditional media formats like TV and magazines.

• Magazines are reemerging among millennials as the preferred “screen” for beauty categories; the group views magazine reading as a luxury or reward.
• It’s an oversimplification to suggest that millennials don’t watch TV. They are powerfully drawn to the TV for big events, sports, premieres and finales.
• Millennials are motivated by a desire to participate in social conversation (FOMO).

Reaching the millennials market: cause marketing

Tie your brand to a cause. Millennials love social issues and are likely to select brands and products that support them. Think TOMS Shoes, for instance, which millennials love—buy a pair of the fun, comfy TOMS and they give a free pair of shoes to a needy child.

If you want to get the attention of millennials, you need to have a good online presence that interacts with the public. Most important? Creating a voice that millennials can trust.

Is your online presence compatible with millennials? 

Maybe it’s time to update your website and integrate your messaging across your online channels. Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.

An Easy SEO Checklist for Better Search Results

Without a thoughtful SEO strategy, the chances of your website’s showing up in search engine results pages (SERPS) are next to nil. SEO is what helps improve your brand’s visibility and drives traffic to your site. Here is an easy checklist to help increase the SEO value of your website.

1. Make sure your website is responsive—that it translates to mobile devices. This is by far the most critical-mission issue right now. Take a look at your website on your phone. If you have to do a lot of manipulation, if the text is tiny and inaccessible, it’s time to think about a new website. Google is punishing the desktop sites that have not created mobile versions. Google has created this site that will quickly tell you if your site is mobile friendly or not.
2. Create a unique, branded domain name.
3. Create an HTML site map for easier indexing by search engines.
4. Also submit an XML sitemap that will speed up indexing.
5. Use Heading Tags (H Tags) for headings and subheadings throughout your site.
6. Use images. Audiences these days are sophisticated, the expectations high. Quality, high-resolution images are affordable on stock photo sites, generally as packages.
7. Label your images with the name of your company, image_name of image. If the image doesn’t show up—and it may not on mobile devices—users will have an idea of what they’re missing.
8. Optimize keywords, using them in title, H tags and description. Forget keyword stuffing; focus on keyword placement.
9. Develop internal contextual linking strategy.
10. Create more SEO value by using alt tags on your images—additional fields that you can fill in with the name of your business.
11. Do write your own metadescriptions; otherwise, you’ll be stuck with the default, which won’t do you any favors. If you’re using WordPress, install Yoast and fill in these fields for each page. Metadescriptions provide a 160-character overview of each page on SERPs.
12. Reduce popups and distracting ads to avoid losing traffic. Let’s face it—these are just too annoying.
13. Optimize load time: make sure images are complete hogs that prevents your site from loading.
14. Check for broken links, which can hurt your ranking. This is part of periodic site maintenance. If you’re linking to external sites, these often disappear after a while, so your pages need to be updated accordingly.
15. Quality content that isn’t duplicated. There are different opinions about landing page length, but many experts recommend 300+ words to rank well. Frontload this, with the most important information in the first paragraph, above the fold, including your keywords. One thing that’s nonnegotiable: well-written, quality content. If you’re a crappy writer, find someone else to write this for you--talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing--this is what we do!

Keep it simple

Never—ever—forget that people will be pulling this up on their phones. Something else to be thinking about. SEO doesn’t stop with your website. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. You need to be continually adding fresh new content—add case studies and a blog. Make sure that you’re keeping your site updated with your products and services. You need to be looking at your presence across all of your online marketing channels—your social media sites, Yelp, etc. Owning a website is a responsibility. If you want it to work for you, you need to work it.

Is your website delivering ROI? If not, talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and digital media experts.