 Great photo by Juliano Couto. We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress.
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. Grab the lowest-hanging fruit Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. But what if that were already done for you? Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. Update what you bring Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? Don’t reinvent the wheel Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?” It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. For the love of QR codes How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in.
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 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.”
Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email. Ah, progress! Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. Dialing up the numbers game First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. A matter of cost Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. Where have all the emails gone? One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter. Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Awesome photo by admiral-general-m-âââââ-godshepherdly. It happens every summer. Work slows down. People take vacations. If you’re still in a business-building mindset, it can be, well, a little maddening.
In this article, we’ll review some things you can do to be productive when others aren’t. To prep your business for the upcoming season of busy-ness. This article might not be for you. In that regard, it’s probably self-selecting: If you’re reading this, you’re still plugging at it. If you’re on vacation right now, this one will sail right past you. Mind you, we’re not judging here. You can fall into either camp; we don’t care. But between the summer preppers and the summer tanners, this article is aimed at the former. Down-time is your time Think back to the busiest part of this year so far. When you had so much work you’d wake up wondering how you’d get through that day. Now, on that day, think of all the things that you didn’t do. That you couldn’t do. Why not? You were too busy. Pretty simple. So now is the time to tackle all of those things you’d put off amid the rush of peak season. This is the time for all you cobblers out there to make your kids’ shoes. This is also a very good time to be selfish, in a biz-dev sort of way. Review what you’ve got, what you’re presenting to the world. Go through your website. Page by page. Remember all those little niggling details you’d intended to fix and/or update? Now’s the time. Ditto for your firm’s presentation deck(s). Weed out the outdated stuff. Make mentions of new, recent wins. For that matter, this is the best possible time to write new client success stories, a.k.a. case studies. (Need help with those? Contact us. We do tons of ‘em.) Pull together all the client-facing materials from those engagements. Use them to jog your memory. Steal from them, liberally, anonymizing as you go, to create all-new world-facing evergreen material. And what about your blogs? Are they looking sorely out of date on your site? Now’s the time to curl up with a nice cup of coffee or tea, and knock out a bunch of them so that you have a good backlog of evergreen material to push out on schedule. (Honestly: Do you think we wrote this July blog in July? Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach!) Speaking of blogs, you have a fully-populated editorial calendar for them, right? Well, if not, now’s the time to brainstorm your quarterly/monthly/weekly/whatever topics. (We have a good article to help you with that.) Get into production Blogs—which force people to (ugh) read—are just one way to push out your business. Some of the other ways are surprisingly interlinked:
And you can push them out just as diligently, using the exact same editorial calendar you’d created for the blogs. Of course, you can delegate as much of this responsibility and production as your comfort-zone dictates: The writing. The voiceover. The video production. The on-camera talent. And so on. There are other relatively self-indulgent things you can do during summer down-time, too. Take a good look at your office and your stuff. Is that desk chair begging for replacement? Could the walls use a new coat of paint? Good luck attempting any of those tasks during the busy season. If you can’t beat ‘em... And of course, there’s one other thing you can do during down-time: Relax. If you’ve accomplished even half of the things we’d listed above, you deserve a well-earned pat on the back and a nap. Heck, everyone else is taking time off. Things will get busy enough, soon enough. So enjoy the down-time. If you combine that with the productivity tips above, you’ll have the best of both worlds. And need help with any of those things? Contact us. We’d be happy to pitch in.  Great photo by Polina Tankilevitch Let’s dive right into this. It’s based on a disheartening episode we recently experienced with a client.
Here’s the story: We’d been working, for months, with this client, to develop their new brand persona, by taking a meticulous customer-back approach to their business. And by “customer-back,” we mean, “starting with the customer—who they are, what they need—and then working back into all of the messaging and, indeed, offerings.” Done right, this is a powerful process. With this client, we did it right. We were developing some killer insights that would position our client head-and-shoulders above all their competitors. This positioning, then, informed the structure and content of the new website we were creating for them. (“Disheartening”? Stay with us.) So. We did the deep-dive customer-discovery work with them. We developed the new brand persona. We developed the strategy, and then the wireframe (“outline”) for the website. All of these were approved by the client. Then, using the approved wireframe, we wrote all the pages of the website for them. These, too, were heartily approved by the client. Everything was going swimmingly. Cart? Horse? Huh? Then, one day, the client surprised us by sending us a brochure to review. This was certainly a surprise: “brochure” hadn’t been discussed before. But that’s fine. We’re not parochial. We can go with the flow. If clients want to take the initiative and bolster their marketing, we’re all for it. Until we saw this brochure. Mind you, it was finished. Outlined, written, and laid out. The client told us they wanted to send it out, en masse, and wanted our quick review/sign-off before it went. Holy @#$#@$. Our first reaction was Who is this brochure for?? Yep, it was that far off of everything that had been previously, and laboriously, developed... and then approved. Yikes. There was not a sentence, not an image, not a pixel in this thing that was on-brand or on-message. It told a different, and confusing story. The imagery would have been off-putting to the specific target audiences we had worked so hard to define. The structure was confusing. The layout was amateurish: like a mediocre student project. There was no call-to-action. It was, in short, a train wreck. Tough love Now, we’ve seen lots of mediocre, and downright bad, marketing materials in our time. So along that continuum, this one was hardly a shocker or a standout. But what did make it so extraordinary was the way in which it simply disregarded all of the painstaking, groundbreaking work that had preceded it. Not only would it turn off the very people it was supposed to turn on, it—most importantly—squandered all of the effort that went into the main branding and site-building. We don’t enjoy giving tough love here at Copel Communications, but we also don’t shy away from it when it’s required. Here, it was required. It was not fun to tell this client that, while we appreciated all of the effort that clearly went into this thing, it would do more harm than good, and should simply be shelved. Ouch. So now you know the “disheartening” part of this article. But what about the “Steal from yourself” headline? Play it on the cheap You probably figured it out for yourself already. Between the prior branding, and especially the website and its already-written pages, this client already had everything they needed to quickly create a killer brochure, practically for free. It was the same messaging. In just a slightly different format. Indeed, it’s even easier: You don’t know how a visitor is going to poke around the different pages of your website. But they’ll start reading that brochure from the front cover, and turn through it, page-by-page, in order, until they reach the end. So it’s very straightforward to populate the thing, especially when you have all of the content and images already on hand. They’re not only polished and powerful. They’re paid for. And thus the “steal, steal, steal” advice we have to offer here: Steal from every great marketing piece you have, to create other great marketing pieces. Fine. We’ll be polite. We can say “leverage,” if you like. Fact is, too many clients get so caught up in their own marketing materials that they feel compelled to create something new every single time, when reality dictates the exact opposite: Never flatter yourself into thinking that some prospect has not only read, but memorized your entire website, and then will be put off, or offended, when they review your brochure which includes, effectively, the exact same content. So our client’s mistake here wasn’t uncommon. This was the trap they fell into. They just fell a lot harder than most. Their biggest mistake: Opting to “surprise us” while they worked on this thing—from ideation through completion—in the background. Boy, could we ever have nipped this in the bud—and saved them a ton of headaches, aggravation, time, and most especially money—in the process. Use web content for brochures. Leverage brochures for social ads. Use print copy for radio. Sales-sheet images for case studies. Video-script voiceover text for emails. It just goes on and on. Steal, steal, steal. One other way to look at this: If you do the opposite, you diminish your brand. You’ve got all these disparate looks and messages, and no target will ever connect those dots. But when it’s all unified and coordinated—which is actually easier, and less effort—your brand appears huge, unavoidable, and inevitable. Need help with branding challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  You’ve been handed a creative assignment to execute. Quick: How much input do you need?
Question: Is that even a valid question? You bet it is. If you think this is simply a matter of “Well, it depends on what I receive,” then think again. Creative assignments vary in scope and medium, but they all have one thing in common: Interpretation. Your job, as a creative pro, is to take what is basically un-creative yet factual input, and come up with an enticing, all-new creative spin for it. “Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle.” That kind of assignment. Still, you need to know enough about the product or solution you’re selling—and, even more importantly, the target audience you’re selling it to—before you can begin ideating. Which begs a very important question that you may not have thought about before, because these things get tossed your way all the time, and they’re on deadline, and you just do them, so why would you think about it? But the question is the topic of this article: How much input do you need? Put another way: How much is too much? How much is too little? What, in other words, is the Goldilocks-just-right optimal amount of input for you to nail that creative assignment? Think big (or small) Not-so-irrelevant digression: We’ve noticed that old people invariably pine to be younger. And kids invariably can’t wait to grow up. Which suggests that there must be one magical age that all people yearn to be. We asked a Generation Z’er. She said, without a moment’s hesitation: “Twenty-three.” As we said, a digression. But not wholly off the mark. Your optimum-input dilemma follows a similar logic. An easy way to arrive at the answer is to think in terms of wildly exaggerated extremes, and then carve your way back to the sweet-spot middle. For example: You need to create a two-sided sell sheet. The client input consists of an email that says “Make something exciting about our ABC offering! It’s better than what others offer!" Clearly, way too little. You can see where this is going. But you might not see the profitable takeaway quite so easily. True story: Not long ago, we were assigned a two-sided sell-sheet by a client. The input? They emailed us 100 pages of material. Obviously, this was way too much. Not quite so obviously, it was also an opportunity. A time for leverage When we received this 100 pages of input, we immediately told the client, “That’s too much.” They said, “No, we think it’s fine. Send us a bid for the project.” And so we bid on it, all right. Our bid included the massive amount of time it would take us to pore through all 100 pages of stuff, to cull out what we needed to create two pages. We’re not the greatest mathematicians here at Copel Communications, but even we can tell you that that’s a 50x ratio. This bid was expensive. It had to be. We can’t simply carve out that much time and effort to create what would otherwise be a small, basic assignment, without charging to cover all that extra time. When they saw the bid, the client was taken aback. “Wow,” they said, “that’s more than what we expected.” Now comes the fun part. We were able, at this point, to be generous. “How about we make you a deal?” we offered. “If you can carve the input down to an essential five pages, we’ll knock the price in half.” Get this: They thanked us for that offer. The next day, five pages arrived. And everyone was happy. The golden ratio The lesson here is that you need to speak up, and do so immediately. Don’t be shy. And certainly don’t wait until you’re on Page 32 of the input to go griping to the client that you need more time, more money, or both. But do couch it positively: “I’d like to do this for a lower price!” That will get their attention, every time. It will also condition them, going forward. Here’s another trick: (virtual) Post-It’s. That client probably doesn’t have the time to cull the individual slides from that massive PowerPoint deck, or diagrams from that report, but they can add little “stickies” to point out just the things you need to know... if you ask them to. And we ask. All the time. It’s not impolite. It’s professional. Finally, to address the ingoing question of this article: Just how much input do you need? Well, the answer will depend on the type of assignment and the type of input, but we find that about a three-to-one ratio is nice. That’s for written input. If it’s visual input, the ratio can go much higher—as high as ten-to-one—because it’s easy to look through images quickly and make snap judgments thereon. Need help with that next creative assignment? Contact us. We’d love to help. And we won’t be shy when it comes to helping you cull the input.  Get set to be liberated, creatively
If you’re a creative pro, then our mention, in the headline, of a “seven-page PDF,” must make you cringe at some deep, subliminal level. A seven-page PDF? What? Are you crazy? Allow us to tell you a little story. You’ll like this one. Is it Escher, or is it advertising? We recently wrote a big case study for a client, and their gifted internal graphics team was laying it out. But there was a problem: There wasn’t enough copy for an eight-page piece. And so the designer left a big hole in it: “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE.” Before we turn to how we went about filling it, let’s back up here a tad. We’ve been tossing a lot of assumptions your way so far, and now we’d like to expose them:
(Following this so far? It’s not hard.)
You know this. You toil in it daily. A printed piece is four pages. Or eight pages. Or 12 pages. Or maybe 16, 24, or 32 pages. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. And it’s a rule that's inviolable. We’re not living in some Escher distorted-reality world. You can’t remove, or add, a side to a piece of paper. Crisis equals massive opportunity We confess that, when that designer tossed us the “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE” page, we knee-jerk reacted to fill it. A piece has to be eight pages, right? So we, and the client, worked hard to come up with new material to put there. But there was a problem. Try as we may, nothing worked. It all felt forced. It broke up the flow. It diluted the call-to-action or CTA. It took us a while to realize that we were victims of our own orthodoxy. And more importantly, a seismic global event had handed us the opportunity of a lifetime. We’re talking Covid-19, people. Everyone—especially the intended target audience of this piece—was working remotely from home. So why mail it? We didn’t have all those addresses. And so it logically follows...
And then, it’s not a big leap to:
Voilà. A seven-page PDF. It tells the story. It wastes no space. It got killer results. More boxes to think outside of You don’t need a pandemic to be creative. (Boy, is that a bizarre sentence!) But you get our point. We had a client that wanted to make a costly printed piece with easel-back wings, die-cut, on it. But we realized that most of the recipients... have kids. So why not make it into a “free” PDF, with cut-and-fold lines that would be fun to assemble, while building a bond between parent and child—and reinforcing our client’s branding the whole time? It’s that kind of thinking you need to embrace. By the way, our other client now does seven-page PDFs all the time. Along with five-pagers, three-pagers, you name it. Boy is it liberating! Everyone benefits except the printer and the post office. Have a creative challenge that requires outside-the-box thinking? Contact us today. We’d love to help.  Hard to believe that 2020 is almost over. (Good riddance, right?)
What we mean is, it’s time for our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, 1) thanks! and 2) here’s an opportunity to revisit and refresh.
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.  Don’t act surprised. Here at Copel Communications, we can’t even touch on a nice artsy topic like “color” without tying it directly to the bottom line. We’ve already discussed the art/business dichotomy in deeper detail in a previous post; be sure to read “What’s the difference between ‘creative services’ and ‘art’?”
Back to color. It’s one of those fundamental elements that’s so important, so ubiquitous, and so easy to employ that it gets taken for granted, if not overlooked altogether. Not long ago, there was a renewed love affair with color—when its use was democratized and mere mortals were freed from the shackles of black-and-white—similar to what happened with fonts, with the advent of desktop publishing. (We pay homage, and respect, to fonts in this other article which we’re happy to recommend: “How to make fonts work—harder—for you.”) In fact, a good way to appreciate color—a prerequisite to bending it to your business will, nyah-ha-ha—is to go back to the days, not long ago, when it was a luxury. And we can conjure up that world to you with just one word: Newsprint. For the longest time, “news” meant “newspapers.” And newspapers (before USA Today came along) were primarily black-and-white. Sure, there would be what was called “spot color” that would be added, usually red or yellow. And it would invariably be horribly out of register; picture an “On Sale Now!” starburst with the yellow color a third of the way out of the burst itself. So that’s not even “color.” That’s “colorized.” Of course, a world without color is not a world without creativity. We firmly believe that restrictions—guide rails—actually encourage creativity, not limit it. Think of film-noir movies. In color, they would, pardon our French, suck. So there’s gorgeous artistry to be found, and exploited, in the world of monochrome. But then comes the time to go beyond it. A chromatic leap By the way, the term “black and white” isn’t exactly, well, black and white. Early black-and-white film was what was called orthochromatic. Sure, it rendered a black-and-white image, but it looked wrong. That’s because that film, that chemistry, didn’t treat all colors that it was photographing, equally. Reds, for example, would turn almost black. It was stilted. Think of old silent movies, and how it looks like the actors, especially the men, are wearing strange makeup. That’s not strange makeup. That’s orthochromatic film. So it was a big technological leap to get us to panchromatic film. That’s the black-and-white film that you take for granted today. It looks like the real world, only with the saturation dialed down to zero. Now move that “Saturation” slider to the right. And you’re like Dorothy when she lands in Oz. There’s so much there that it’s overwhelming. And now, finally, we get to design. To things you need to create on a daily basis. Like logos. Websites. Flyers. Social ads. Videos. The “color saturation slider” analogy is useful here. Because it helps us find the truth between the unwanted extremes. At one end, you have black-and-white. But we’ve graduated beyond that. More importantly, at the other end, you have full-blown, retina-melting color. That’s why The Wizard of Oz looks like The Wizard of Oz. They were purposely going for color overload, 1) because they wanted to convey the surrealistic quality of this fantasy land, and 2) Technicolor was still relatively new, and they couldn’t resist playing. (Indeed, Dorothy's slippers, in the book, are silver; they were changed to "ruby" for the movie, simply because that's more colorful.) Watch any color movie from that era, and you’ll see the same thing. The film wasn’t more vibrant back then. They simply put more vibrant things in front of the camera. Brightly-colored sets, props, and costumes. From Gone With the Wind to The Adventures of Robin Hood, it’s practically a trope. Dialing it down Here’s the point: There is virtually zero application for Wizard of Oz-style color in any assignment that’s going to cross your desk anytime soon. Could you imagine the reactions you’d get if you handed in something that, um, garish? People got over the novelty of color back in 1939; now it’s time to put it to good use. With that said, here are some guidelines and thought-starters to help you with that next assignment:
Get help Here at Copel Communications, we’re lucky to work with some really skilled graphic and video talent, who often toil within the walls of our clients’ own offices. They take direction brilliantly (see our post on “How to direct (other) creative people”), including when it comes to color. Sometimes you won’t want, or be able, to do this yourself. You’ll need help with that creative assignment, color and all. If that’s the case, contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  We didn't create this infographic. But it's a nice one to illustrate this article. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then an infographic, done right, is worth 2,000.
It’s often convenient, if not downright imperative, to convey your company’s offerings via a succinctly annotated image. Done right, it packs the punch of a headline. It quickly conveys the big picture. It even gets across a few crucial details—in the proper sequence, that is, after the main message has made its point. Note that we said “done right,” twice, above. It’s really key. Look at the flip-side: An infographic, done wrong, will have the opposite of its intended effect. It will confuse. It will disorient. It will convey the wrong message. It will show the whole world that you can’t even describe your own offering. With that caveat as a motivator, let’s dive in. How to create an infographic Step 1: Step back You thought we’d be talking about color palettes and fonts, right? Wrong. That’s part of the execution, the tactics, of the infographic. You need to start with the strategy. And you can easily devise this by considering two basic things:
Basic, yes. Simple, no. For the intended audience, let’s say it’s prospective customers—a fair assumption. But are they qualified or un-qualified? What you tell them would vary accordingly. If you want to move them along the sales funnel, you need to know about their needs and behaviors. Put it this way: You don’t want to get deep into the weeds with them if they’re truly viable, and yet such deep detail would only confuse them or turn them away too early in the game. (If that’s the case, you may well need to create Infographic 1 and Infographic 2, for the un-qualified, and qualified, leads respectively.) Also, from the “audience” standpoint, what’s their situation and sense of urgency? How much, how desperately, do they need to learn what you want to present to them? This will really help your efforts downstream, as it will translate to the types of colors, fonts, verbiage, and imagery you employ. You want to do the best job of pushing their buttons. After all, the tacit job of that infographic is to sell. Another consideration: The form factor. Where will your audience be seeing this infographic? In a huge, printed brochure? Or minutely displayed on their iPhone screen? The answer to that question will dictate just how much, or little, info you can clearly convey. Once you’ve answered the “target audience” question, the “What do we want to show them?” question becomes easier to answer. A rule of thumb: The narrower your focus, the easier this becomes. If you know, for example, your audience consists primarily of logistics executives who are seeking to reduce costs for overland transport, that rapidly narrows down what you should convey in the infographic, in a very good way. As always, you want to respect the viewer’s time. Assume that they’re jammed. Never assume that they’re going to cuddle up with your infographic and read every word. So keep those logistics people focused on logistics, or whatever the case may be. Here’s another basic guideline: Less is more. You simply can’t say everything about your business in a single infographic. It pains us to even say this, but too many companies actually try. Narrow your focus. Consider the job at hand. Think of what you must do, who you must convince, and what action you want them to take. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, this requires a lot of discipline, and we haven’t even gotten to the execution yet. In other words, infographics are hard. We’ve worked with ad agencies that have spent months developing a single infographic. Think of it like a Super Bowl TV commercial: Well done, it zips by in 30 seconds. But you know they spent months making it. How to create an infographic Step 2: Prioritize By this point, you’re very well armed. You understand your target audience and their needs, and you know what you want to tell them, in the infographic. The hardest part is behind you. Take the next step in Word. Write down all the bits of information you want to convey. Don’t worry about sexy wording; just make a list. Bullet points are fine. Now look at that list, and rearrange it. Find all the most urgent stuff, set it in big/boldface, and move it to the top of the list. Then find all the least urgent items, and set them in a smaller size or italics, and move them to the bottom of the list. Ta-dah. You’ve carved the thing into three big chunks: Urgent, average, and less-urgent/detail. Now, some of the “Average” items will be qualifiers of some of the specific “Urgent” things; similarly, some of the “Details” will be qualifiers of discrete “Average” items. That’s good. So now, move them around, so the list looks like this: Urgent Item 1
Urgent Item 2
Urgent Item 3
Of course, it won’t look exactly like that. Some of your urgent items will be stand-alone's. That’s fine. Now, take that list, and do a “Save as...” in Word. Call your new doc something like “Infographic Text 1.docx.” Now you can play around with the actual verbiage. So something like “Fast Response” becomes something like “99% Same-Day Turnaround.” Yes, use numbers. A lot. They’re the “info” in “infographic.” And your Urgent/Average/Detail might shake out like this: 56 Locations Nationwide
See how all of your work from Steps 1 and 2 is paying off? How to create an infographic Step 3: Execute This is the last step—the step that far too many companies believe is the first step, to their peril. Unlike them, you now know exactly where you’re going. This step is fast, cost-efficient, straightforward, and fun. You have all the cool verbiage in your “Text” document. You know, from your target-audience exercise, what kinds of colors, images, and moods will resonate with them. You know which items in your “Text” doc are the most urgent of the urgent ones. You even came up with a cool title for your infographic (such as ABC Logistics Support at a Glance, to play out our above example). Now you can search stock libraries such as Shutterstock for cool images, icons, and backgrounds. Cast a wide net: Grab more than you need. Keep your eyes open for surprising images you hadn’t expected. (We have a cool article on that very topic: New Approaches to Stale Stock Images.) Then, you either hand off all these images and text to your graphic designer, or take the next step and use either a dedicated app such as Illustrator, or an easy-to-use online tool, such as Canva, to design the thing yourself. (If you go the latter route, be sure to look at the different infographic templates they offer; you can tweak any of them to your liking.) Need help? We know about infographics, because we help our clients with them all the time. We can help you, too. Simply contact us today for a friendly, no-obligation consultation.  Each year, we wrap up our blogging at Copel Communications with a roundup of our top articles. In case you were unaware, we alternate our posts between our two core audiences (which certainly overlap): 1) consultants, and 2) creatives. And by “creatives,” we mean ad agencies and direct companies that turn to us for creative solutions, in marketing, advertising, and writing.
This post is a compendium of articles for the latter audience. (You can check out the one for our consultants here.) We think you’ll like these. If you’d missed any during the year, here they all are, replete with summary teasers and links. And hey, if you liked any of them the first time around, you may well enjoy a refresher!
Do you have a creative topic you’d like for us to address in the coming year? Or do you have a creative challenge you need solved? Either way, contact us. We’d love to hear—and to help. |