Planning Your Marketing Strategy: Where to Start?
So you’re ready to launch a new product. Boost a service. Announce a partnership. Sponsor an event. Sign an Ambassador. Whatever you want to communicate – you need a plan. Basically, you need a kick-ass marketing strategy to efficiently and successfully get your message out there.
But where are you going to start? And how is it going to look like? Whatever you plan to do, visuals will definitely be part of your language.
Using visual content to communicate today is a no-brainer — speaking in visuals is the marketing language du jour. So in order to have a bulletproof marketing strategy, it’s critical to start with powerful visual content to kick off your on-message branding.
Ta-da! Visual content created. Now what?
So now that you’ve invested time and energy in creating this wowser visual content, you can sit back and wait for your next burst of creativity. Actually, no. You’re not finished yet.
So what’s next? Where do you store this visual content? Who can use it and find it in your storage system? Where will it be published? Once its published, how do you measure its impact?
Here we’ll explore the lifecycle of visual content: create, store, publish, measure. Once it’s created, what’s the best way to manage its storage? And once it’s published, what’s the best way to measure its success?
A Kick Ass Marketing Strategy Starts With Efficient Media Management
To keep up with the ever-increasing demand for visual content, there’s a wide range of storage systems that help organize it efficiently. Here we’ll take a closer look at Digital Asset Management (DAM) products, but the case can be applied to a number of digital storage systems.
“If only images were made of text…Searching for them would be so much easier!”
How often do you hear this? Where’s the ‘easy button’ to help with the massive challenge of making visual content as discoverable and as productive as possible? While it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, whoever said that was never responsible for inputting that picture’s metadata.
Assigning textual metadata to images is tedious, thankless, but absolutely necessary work. The metadata helps visual content become discoverable within DAM products, as all use traditional text-based search methods.
Automating Media Management
This is where image recognition technology can form a natural partnership with Digital Asset Management systems. The complimentary capabilities help save an enormous amount of time and energy spent on metadata application and asset retrieval. Let’s look at some below:
- Visual Search identifies the same or similar images, while removing unwanted images and duplications.
Think of a hotel chain that, in anticipation of summer holiday bookings, want to display images of their best properties that feature swimming pools. Using just one hero image, Visual Search will showcase all images that have swimming pools in them, that resemble the similar visual style of the original hero shot.
Suggested auto-tagging labels and classifies visual content automatically, potentially saving days, if not weeks of manually applying metadata to files. What’s more, the quicker the visual content is tagged, the quicker it can be accessed by all users. This is a win-win for all involved.
- Facial search and recognition technology identifies faces within images, searches for similar faces across your collection, obtains demographic data, and can find specific people within large image collections.
Imagine a company that wants to identify and tag its brand ambassador across their large image library. This single facial recognition capability alone is a game-changer for PR and marketing agencies in managing their talent across large image collections.
Don’t Rush Your Marketing Strategy Planning
Many brands today create visual content based on the latest design scheme and push it out to market, while remaining oblivious to how customers and prospects perceive their hard work. If more than 80% of branded content has no direct mention of the brand itself, then how can we measure its success?
In this way, most images are missed by traditional text-based analytics, leaving your company out of your own visual conversation. Image recognition technology applied by PicScout’s Insights for Business monitors your visual content analyzes its impact, engagement and reach. It provides insights that can help develop new growth engines, customize product innovation, build brand loyalty, and evaluate the ROI of brand ambassadors.
The lifecycle of visual content, if managed and measured with PicScout, turns your images from simple communicators into measurable, actionable assets.
