Last week, we published Marketer’s toolbox for creating amazing visual content, featuring 33  apps to easily create visual content like a graphic for a  blog post, infographics, memes, gifs and videos. The post has been a massive hit with more than 8k reads in the last 7 seven days.

You might ask: has such visual content been effective for businesses? and to what extent?

So, we decided to search for some proven examples of how businesses really used visual content. In this post, we have tried to feature some businesses who have used different forms of visual content effectively. Hope these examples will inspire you to explore different channels of content marketing.

Videos

Making videos is hard. But they are incredibly easy to promote, acquire traffic and build inbound links. We all love videos as they have ability to convey a message in short amount of time in a relatively small real estate on web.

Gregory Ciotti, who heads the marketing at HelpScout, routinely writes some awesome stuff on behavioural psychology on his personal blog : Sparring Mind.

When he was doing a post on Productivity Science, he partnered with ASAPScience to make a video on productivity.

 

The video went absolutely viral. It has amassed over 2 millions views till now. Gregory even got featured in popular media outlets like Discovery channel and Brain pickings.

If you google for productivity science or science behind productivity, Sparring Mind comes on top of the results followed by the Youtube video.

You might be thinking that Gregory must have paid thousands of dollars to make that video. In reality, he didn’t. In fact, he set up a win-win partnership with ASAPScience. He offered them all the revenue from Youtube ads. He also helped the team as much as possible in writing the whole script and in promoting the video.

Infographics:

Kissmetrics is well known for its content marketing efforts. It realized the potential of infographics much before everyone else and created a total of 47 infographics.

Here is one of the extremely popular on ‘ How Colors Affect Conversions’
++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Source: How Colors Affect Conversions – Infographic

Within the two-year period, infographics generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains.

Such infographics have driven 41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes on social media for Kissmetrics.

Each infographic on average cost Kissmetrics $600, which means it spent $28,200 on infographics.

If it wanted to acquire same amount of traffic via ads, Kissmetrics would have spent hundreds and thousands of dollars. Now, that’s a lot of money, especially if you compare that number to the $28,200 it spent on creating the infographics.

Social media graphic:

Grammarly is an automated proof reader that helps you correct your grammar mistakes. Grammarly has adopted a smart strategy to create a content around grammar mistakes and how it changes the context of the content.

Here is one example:

Such graphical cards garner lot of social love on Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Grammarly’s  twitter is filled with such visual content which is loved by its audience. And such content helps a lot to grab the attention of potential customers.

GIFs:

Salesforce is one of the big guerillas in SAAS space. They have been pretty good at exploring various content marketing channels such as GIFs. Throughout its blog, it has used to GIFs prominently to get it message across. Here is one on ‘How sales help create Content’

You will find numerous such gifs created by Salesforce here.

Quotes:

When Josh Pingfond of Baremetrics, a Stripe analytics startup, wanted to share some of the lessons from running his own startup, Baremetrics, he didn’t just tweet in plain text. Instead, he created visual quotes like this one:

Though such content won’t bring you lot of traffic, it is definitely a content worth sharing. It grabs your attention instantly. Not just that, but it also helps to garner a significant mind share.

Free Photos:

One and half year ago, founders of Crew changed their business model to an invite only marketplace for web & app development services. They had just 3 months of cash left to turn things around.  With no marketing budget, the team was in desperate need of a way to accelerate growth.

Around the same time, they were creating a homepage for the website and needed good photos. After struggling to find to find a good photos online, they hired a photographer to shoot some photos. They used few and had extra photos. They decided to share those photos for free on a website: Unsplash and started sharing 10 free photos every 10 days.

It was a massive hit and importantly brought large number of customers for Crew. So far, 5 million unique visitor have visited Unsplash. It has been #1 referral source to Crew to get customers and designers.

You must have noticed a rise of sites similar to Unsplash (some of which we covered in our post) who are using free photos as a form of content marketing to promote their primary business.

Memes:

Memes are funny. We all love sharing it. Memes are basically an idea or opinion a lot of people can co-relate to in a funny way. This compels people to share it on social media or popular sites like Reddit where memes regularly make it to the top of front page.

Good memes can go viral very quickly. If you jumped in at a right time by creating a meme that can relate with your audience, you can surely reap rewards from it.

For example, when memes on  ‘What People Think I Do/What I Really Do’ were going viral, Hubspot came up with one of its on own on sales, and posted it on their Facebook page.

This particular meme generated an impressive 453 likes, 57 comments and 256 shares.

HubSpot jumped on something which was already going viral and came up with similar content of its own to leverage the buzz. You can do that too. It is good idea to keep an eye sites like Reddit and Imgur to see what is going viral. With a bit of creativity, you can use such memes to your advantage.

Interactive content:

If you are solving a problem, most likely you can create an interactive content that is intriguing or amazingly helpful for your audience.

A forex company, MahiFx, wanted to encourage more and more people to trading. It came up with an ingenious yet simple idea which brought them thousands and thousands of inbound links.

They launched this: You vs. John Paulson

It allowed anyone to enter their salary and compare their earnings to billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson.

Let’s say, you earn $70k annually. It compares your earnings against John Paulson, and shows you how much time it takes John to earn what you make in a year.

In this case, just 7.5 minutes.

The examples mentioned above goes on to show that creative visual content can be very effective in your content marketing efforts. Create something that can be very useful or entertaining to your audience, no matter how simple or small it is. Who knows you might find a big winner in that. 2014 has seen visual content becoming an important part of content marketing. I am absolutely sure that it will take a big share of content marketing in 2015. So, brace yourself and make your presence felt.

Also, we will be curating highly effective and successful visual content weekly for you take inspiration and create even better content. Do subscribe to our blog to get notified.

Do try out our app, Viraltag,which lets you easily share visual content across multiple social networks. You can spice up your visuals with our built-in editing tool. And yes, we even help you discover engaging visual content. Sign up for a free account now.

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