 Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months.
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. List, then draw The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline. And that’s how we proceeded. It went something like this: Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as:
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as:
And so on. Chart your course Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline. It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. It takes all of about two minutes. We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today.
0 Comments
 We recently helped to knock out a video for a client that really paid huge dividends; read: “landed more business.” Along the way, we often found ourselves leaning away from “corporate,” and toward “Hollywood,” in our approach to this video, which was being crafted for a very small audience: the C-Suite.
The story of this video’s genesis, and then later, greater success, lends itself very nicely to a helpful article. So here we are. So what was the challenge? Mind you, we’re under NDA, so we’ll be cloaking this story in anonymity. But the gist will remain. And it goes something like this: Our client—a consultancy—had recently wrapped an initial “quick-win” project for a client of theirs: a large, respected enterprise. Then one of the people on our client’s team—a very smart sales rep—had an idea. It went like this: This “quick win” which our client had just created for the big enterprise, was really only known, and appreciated, by the enterprise person who was sponsoring the project. Couldn’t we parlay this “quick win”—this foot-in-the-door—to a “bigger success”--i.e., a stay-in-and-grow—if only other people in the enterprise knew about it? Sure, the sponsor was delighted with the project. But the project itself was complex, and very difficult for her to quickly explain to her superiors. (She, like us, wanted not only recognition for the great quick win, but to allow our consulting client to do more great, game-changing work.) So the idea of “Let’s make a quick video about this” (the sales rep’s suggestion), quickly took hold. That’s when we were called in. Dueling dashboards The project in question here involved a series of business analytics sub-projects, which delivered unprecedented decision-making power, in the form of easy-to-read graphical dashboards. The idea of “dashboards” isn’t exactly revolutionary these days; what made these particular dashboards so sexy was the fact that they captured information which had previously been impossible to capture. (We won’t say how, here. That’s a trade secret of our client.) But there were a whole lot of dashboards. Each one was richer than the one before. Even a fast-paced video would require about 20 minutes to describe them all. Think. C-Suite. Do you really believe they’ll sit through a 20-minute video, describing dashboard after dashboard in detail? You’re right. They won’t. Thus the boundaries of this assignment. The movie vs. the trailer An important ingoing consideration was: What should the run-time of this video be? The easy and obvious answer was “About two minutes.” Two minutes! Impossible? If you take it literally, yes. If you take it creatively, no. Here’s how we structured the thing—and this is really the impetus for this article, because you can liberally steal from this structure, for similar assignments that will cross your plate, whether they’re videos, or PowerPoint decks, or RFP executive summaries, or whatever: The video first laid out, in decent detail, the initial challenge of this “quick-win” project: How could all of this un-capture-able data be captured? Then it quickly laid out the methodology, and set the stage for the main part of the video: An overview of all these sexy new dashboards. We say “all.” But that’s misleading. Here’s how it worked: We singled out the coolest, sexiest dashboard, and showed it first. We described it in detail, with sufficient video and screen-time to show it in action, to dive into its various live charts and graphs and really show off its whiz-bang technology. And from there, we switched gears. Now that we 1) had shown just how cool these dashboards can be, and 2) basically created “the halo effect” for the subsequent dashboards, we were able to 3) breeze through just the highlights of all the remaining ones. This wasn’t a problem. It was an asset. It was a “hit ‘em hard, then knock ‘em down again” moment. In the video, it’s just overwhelming, all this goodness! You totally understand what’s being presented—and then you’re wonderfully overwhelmed by just how much awesomeness there is. It actually accelerates as it goes! When “the lights come up,” you’ve got this sugar-rush high. You want more. Can you say “movie trailer”? Going viral The “movie trailer” analogy is an apt one. The idea of a trailer is to get you to want more—indeed, to buy more, in the form of a ticket. Guess what the enterprise execs did? Yep. They bought more. So this frantically-knocked-out video—which, again, was originally intended for an audience of maybe a half-dozen people—paid for itself a zillion times over with follow-on work for our client consultancy. Here’s the nice little “icing moment”: The enterprise execs were so delighted with the little video (we wisely framed it as “Look at What Our Enterprise is Doing!” rather than “Look at What The Consultancy Did for Our Enterprise”), that they had it posted on the enterprise’s intranet, for all of its thousands of employees to see. The execs wanted to spread the love, and the excitement, and the enthusiasm. And how many of those employee-viewers will go on to become executives themselves, someday? At that enterprise... or another? Talk about icing the cake. Need help with that “Hollywood challenge”? Contact us. We help businesses with these types of projects all the time. We’d love to help you, too.  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.  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. |