Visual Content and The End of SummerBy Lindsay Bell

For many of you in the good ol’ US of A, summer has probably felt over for a few weeks now.

Many of you have sent your children packing—literally —back to school already.

And yes, I’ve seen a few “joy to the world” posts fly by my Facebook!

But here, in Ontario, and most of the rest of Canada, today marks the first day back to school for my son, and most of his peers.

Mind you, don’t weep for him.

He’s in grade 10 and will be “at school” for a grand total of about an hour and a half today.

The last official long weekend of the summer is behind us.

And all you astute business people are already at your desks, excited for what this last quarter of 2014 will bring, right?

Right….??

Visual Content

Well, you’re in the right place, because we’re set to launch another month stuffed with greatness.

Our theme this month is visual content…visual marketing…whatever you want to call it suits me just fine.

We’re going to explore the many facets of visual marketing—the science behind why consumers are such visual creatures, and the good, the bad, and the ugly of using graphics and/or infographics in your strategies.

We’ll look at why video is so hot and getting hotter, and what to consider when crafting visual content of any form.

Need tools?

There will be case studies and articles on which tools you can use to create compelling content, which ones you probably shouldn’t, as well as pretty much anything else you can think of—from A to Z (or “zed,” as we say in Canada).

As usual, we start the month with another of our Spin Sucks Pro webinars—though we’ve delayed it by one week to allow you all to recover from the long weekend, and shake off summer.

Visuals that Stick

On Thursday, September 11th, Joe Cardillo will bring you Visuals that Stick.

He’ll walk you through the specific kinds of imagery audiences respond to and remember most, including the psychology of color, illustrations, human recognizable objects, and embedded stories.

You’ll come away with relevant examples, and a handy-dandy checklist you can use to see if the visual content you are feeding into your marketing/branding efforts will truly stick with your audiences.

Throughout the rest of the month, we’ll explore even more.

Following are just a few posts that are coming up in the next few weeks:

  • Visual Content Design Trends: Full Width Video
  • How to Avoid a Canva Fail
  • How to Be a Digital Movie Star
  • How to Use Visual Social Media for Your Brand
  • Boost Your Image with Visual Storytelling

Author Q&A

Wednesday, September 17th at noon EST brings yet another author Q&A, with marketer and beer lover (sold!) Tim Frick here to answer all of your questions, live, on the blog.

He’ll be discussing his latest book, Return on Engagement: Content Strategy and Web Design Techniques for Digital Marketing, and if you want to know anything about implementing an effective content strategy and how to stay ahead in the rapidly changing industry of web design, this is one Q&A you don’t want to miss!

The bottom line is this: While we’re all really, really sad to see summer has flown by so quickly, it’s kind of hard not to be excited by all the goodness yet to come, both in September as well as the coming months.

And also…there are only 16 Fridays left until Christmas!!

Lindsay Bell

Lindsay Bell is the content director at V3 Marketing, and works in Toronto. A former TV producer, she’s a strong advocate of three minutes or less of video content. She has a cool kid, a patient husband, two annoying cats, and Hank Dawge, a Vizsla/Foxhound/moose hybrid. Ok, maybe not moose.

View all posts by Lindsay Bell