Creating 10x Visual Content For Social Media Mastery With John T. Meyer Of Lemonly [AMP 090]

Creating 10X Visual Content For Social Media Mastery With John T. Meyer of Lemonly Exclusive interviews continue from Garrett Moon’s book, The 10X Marketing Formula, which features top marketing professionals who uncover uncommon marketing mindsets, methods, and growth strategies. In this episode, we’re talking to John T. Meyer, CEO and co-founder of Lemonly, which is a visual marketing firm. John started Lemonly as a way to educate people about how digital media is a way to reach customers, and eventually the business ended up specializing in infographics. Lemonly helped build and pioneer the infographics industry, and it has evolved into visual storytelling - the secret sauce.
By A CTIONABLEMARKETINGPODCAST

Some of the highlights of the show include:
  • Humans are visual creatures bombarded by messages; infographics make the world less noisy and confusing
  • Infographics transitioned from visualizing data to a storytelling formula, where there is a beginning, middle, and end
  • Core types of stories offer familiarity and ability to predict what will happen
  • Lemonly starts with content by creating an outline that features the goal, 3 main points, and summary/call to action
  • Web of Content: Where will content live to connect and hook pieces on mediums
  • Issues related to driving traffic through visuals on various social media mediums
  • Visuals grab people’s attention, but you need a good story for ROI
  • Other options available, but Lemonly offers person-to-person relationships
  • Examples of 10X ROI results from visual content
  • Infographics fail and don’t live up to full potential when delivery is blurry, squished; don’t do all that work, and then stumble at the end.
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If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Quotes by John T. Meyer:
  • “We’re going to help really build and pioneer this industry of infographics, and now it’s really evolved to what we call visual storytelling.”
  • “When we say info, or data, or content, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean quantitative.”
  • “How do you tell a story in six seconds? I think you can, but it’s a different beast.”

Creating 10x Visual Content For Social Media Mastery With John T. Meyer Of @lemonly via @CoSchedule

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Transcript:

Garrett: Hey, everyone. This is Garrett again. Welcome to the 10X Marketing Formula exclusive interview series, and today I have the pleasure of hosting my good friend, John Meyer, who is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Lemonly. Lemonly is a visual marketing firm that creates understanding through visuals and they've done some amazing work through brands like Netflix, Marriott, Under Armor, one of my favorites, Major League Baseball, and many others. Even more excitingly, they also hail from a sister state here to CoSchedule. They are from South Dakota. So, welcome to the show, John. John: Hey, thanks, Garrett. Happy to be here and us Dakotans, we gotta stick together. Garrett: That's right, and especially in these cold winter months as November starts rolling around. John: Absolutely. Absolutely. Garrett: I think as we were just kind of talking before the interview here, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the Lemonly story, how you got into creating visual graphics and building these great, exciting company in South Dakota. John: Yeah. I wish I could say like some entrepreneurs I saw this vision and I had a dream that I knew how to solve the world's problems, and I created a company, but it doesn't always work that way. I moved back to South Dakota about eight years ... almost nine now, and my brother started a company called 9 Clouds, which he still runs today. They do inbound marketing. At the time, we moved back to South Dakota in 2009, and we're telling people, "Hey, South Dakota, like ... social media. There's this thing called Facebook and your customers are looking for you. And have you heard of Twitter?" And we got a lot of, "Facebook's a fad and what's a Twitter?" And we spent a lot of time trying to educate. We'd go to church basements and rotary clubs and just try to get out the word that this new platform, right, that this digital media is a way to reach your customers. As first time entrepreneurs do, you kind of do whatever you can to pay the bills and turn the lights on, and so we made WordPress websites or we designed some logos. I remember one time we went to ... I think our very first customer, actually ... we went to a lady who went to church with us, where we grew up in Brookings, South Dakota, and she said, "Well, my computer's not working." We walked over and she had a big ... one of those old school towers. The hard drive and a CD rom or something was kind of kilter in her disc drive. So, we banged on it. It fell down and then ejected out, and she wrote us a check for 50 bucks. Garrett: Nice. Problem solved. John: And so ... yeah, we thought we were ... all of a sudden, we were IT guys. And that was really the program ... was we never narrowed in and picked a niche. And 9 Clouds since has, and had much more success, but we were really kind of aimlessly wandering, trying to find our real value. And around that time, our first hire at 9 Clouds, Amy, who is now my co-founder and creative director at Lemonly ... amazing talented designed. We kind of hired her thinking, "Well, maybe we'll do some design work. Who knows? But you know how to run a Facebook page." We were back when we were doing that stuff. And in 2011, we started seeing all these infographics. If you remember back then, it seemed like every third tweet had the word infographic in it, and what was interesting about them was a lot of them actually weren't that great. Some of them were just kind of okay and they were on TechCrunch and Mashable and Time Magazine and ... and so we said, "What if we do that? And just do that one thing really, really well? And try to be kind of best in class at infographics?" And so we formed Lemonly really actually under 9 Clouds as a little side project and it just took off. That winter ... the phone rang and Marriott called and then we put that logo on the website, and Marriott leads to ... one of their friends worked in Major League Baseball and we just kept going. And we really decided to stick our flag in the ground and say, "We're gonna help really build and pioneer this industry of infographics," and now it's really evolved to what we call visual storytelling. So, it was a classic kind of [inaudible 00:03:51] effect. Learned your lesson. Maybe pit it a little bit and created a company ... really just trying to be very hyper niche and hyper focused on what we were good at, and that's the story of Lemonly. Garrett: That's awesome. I absolutely love it. So, talk to me about ... you kind of used that phrase ... I mean, we kind of talked about infographics and ... I mean, I do ... I remember you guys were super early in that sort of trend and as it was coming up. But what makes them great and then what kind of lends itself to this visual storytelling term that you're kind of working on now? John: Yeah, you bet. So, I think you have a lot of colliding factors, right? So, we have this idea that we as humans are visual creatures. So, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster ... and that's a quantitative example. I think a qualitative example is the classic you remember people's faces but you don't remember their names, right? You go back to a high school reunion, you're like, "Oh, crap. That person's walking over to me. I know them. Like what's their name?" We're wired to be visual people. And then you throw that into the modern world where we have messages flying us at thousands and thousands times a day. Social media, advertising, marketing, content, big data. All this stuff. And so we kind of think the world's pretty noisy and a little bit confusing, and so when you take that visual narrative ... and then you go even deeper into our wiring. I mean, back to the ... origination of mankind, the way we passed information was through story as that's a way ... when something has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and rising conflict and a solution, we like that. And that's seen as natural to us and attractive to us. So, we felt like that intersection of visuals and storytelling was the best way to either make something that's confusing easy to understand or make something that's boring more entertaining. And that's really where Lemonly tries to live, at that intersection. Garrett: That's interesting. So, I think infographic, it kind of always has this ... implies like information and graphics. So, you're talking like we're visualizing data in some way, and think that was ... probably, at least in the early days, very much the formula. Has that changed with visual storytelling? Has that evolved? And if so, how? John: Yeah. Good question. I do think ... and maybe it was just what our clients asked for, maybe it was our individual strengths at Lemonly. We have some good data-vis examples and we have some true infographics, but our style really started to lend toward this more illustrative storytelling with that kind of beginning, middle, and end. So, I think what you see ... yeah, that original infographic ... and that was a problem in 2011. Some infographics were just a lot of pretty charts, and some infographics were they took the text and just made it larger and changed the colors, but didn't really have any graphics. You really need both. But when we say 'info' or 'data' or 'content', it doesn't have to necessarily mean quantitative, right? You could have a top 10 list or ... Like you guys have made great visual content. Top 10 reasons to write a good headline, and maybe ... maybe there's actually no data ... or maybe there is. I think it's the merge of the two and so I think ... One thing we've noticed, and maybe where our company has adjusted from, say, an infographic company to visual storytelling is almost this stretching of content that we see. Meaning content in 2017, almost 18, is getting either longer or shorter. So, you can think of like that New York Times ... almost investigative journalism that has a ton of data and graphics and illustrations, and you spend 10 minutes reading this content. Or the other way, which is the gif, right? Or the microcontent that you see on social media. And we almost think of the infographic maybe as the middle of that. You can read infographic probably in 90 seconds, 2 minutes, but then you can go either way. Long or short. And that's one thing we've seen changed since we started the company. Garrett: Interesting. I know you guys have some done animation in videos and pre-roll and some of those types of things as well, right? It's kind of evolving to these moving graphics as well. John: Yeah, and that even has shrunk too. It was the three minute ... we did almost a four or five minute video a few years ago for a doctor, who would come in and have his patients watch this video on the iPad, which is a very captive audience. Now, we're very much, "Hey, explain your video. Don't go past that 90 second threshold. Less than that." And then you're right, now we're even ... the six second ad is kind of like the new thing and that pre-roll ad ... because you can't skip it. You have to watch it. So, how do you tell a story in six seconds? And that's something we're working on too, and I think you can but it's a different beast to tackle. Garrett: I like this concept of storytelling because I think we focus on mediums a lot. We focus on, hey, infographics as just a medium. We focus on video as a medium. But story is really, I think, the thing that can really set visuals apart. So, how do you know when you're doing planning with a client or for your own team ... how do you know once you have the story right, like where the narrative is? John: Yeah, so ... one resource I really recommend is a guy by the name of Donald Miller, who's an author, and he's got a workshop that I attended in Nashville called Story Brands and ... Now, you can do it online, of course. He's digitizing. They actually just released a book so ... depending on how involved you want to get. He's a really great example of how to tell a good story. We've kind of created our own process but his point is that there's only really so many types of stories in the world. I think he says about seven or eight types. So, whether you read a book or a movie, often we have these same narratives. The hero's journey, and they're faced with a problem and often they find a guide or someone to really take them along to solve that problem. You get a glimpse of maybe what life looks like if they don't. What does failure look like? But then what does success look like? And hopefully that rising conflict, and then a resolution. Yeah, that sounds like a whole lot to break down in that six second pre-roll ad, but I think it is those core stories that ... the formats that help our brain ... like we find familiarity as a human being, and we almost can predict what will happen. He says after you go through this workshop, "It's gonna ruin every movie you see after that because you can almost predict it." So, for us, it starts with the content. I think the tendency is to think about the mood board or the wire frame or, "Let's jump and start designing." But really what you put in is often what you get out, so we have to start with a good content. A good brief. And so, for an infographic, we say one, maybe two ... we really like one ... but maybe one and half pages of content in say like Word doc or a Google doc. So, we're often working with clients to edit and really reduce because our biggest pet peeves are the infographics that scroll and scroll and scroll forever, which is kind of exactly why we tried to make an infographic to avoid that. So, I think the industry as a whole is leveling up from some of the days where it was just a mumbo-jumbo of throw everything under the sun and call it an infographic. But, yeah, so ... to really get to your question. I think how do you know a good story is ... we start with ... like we harken back to high school, right? When your English teacher would say, "Okay, you gotta write a research paper but, first, you gotta create an outline." So, what's the thesis? What's the goal? What's the point? And that can be even marketing. So, I want people to click this link and like our Facebook page, or download our app, or download the whitepaper. So, what's the goal? Three main points. What's the summary? Or in marketing speak, maybe the call to action. It can be as simple as that. So, thesis, three main points, and summary. I'd say start there and then you can really dive in deeper. Garrett: Oh, love that. I think that's perfect. At 10X Marketing Formula, we talk a lot about having one call to action for every piece of content that you publish and really understanding and thinking about that before you do it. And I love the idea of taking graphics to that level as well. That's perfect. Talk to me a little bit about the separation ... I want to get into social media a little bit, but before we start that ... I mean, I think ... we referenced this earlier. In 2007, you had bracket, bracket, infographic, right? And that was the blog post and maybe a couple sentences. How have things evolved? I guess ... maybe I'd ask like this, like where's the separation between visual content ... visual storytelling as the content itself versus on social media and using it for promotion? John: Yeah, so we talk to our clients a lot about, what we're calling at Lemonly, kind of this web of content that in 2018 ... we'll just call it now ... you have to create a web of content to really connect the pieces. So, it's still that hub and spoke model of we're driving people back somewhere. We still ask all our clients, "Where will this live? Where's the home base for this content? Is it your blog? Is it your homepage? Landing page? Maybe a partner website? Where do you want it to live and where do you want to drive people back?" But I almost really think of our content almost like legos. It really has to be able to stack out and then also break down, which is convenient for us to as a business. We're trying to get them the whole experience but we're not just making infographics anymore. We find that we're often working with our clients in kind of a ... selling almost a kit or a bundle of content. So, it's the infographic as maybe the anchor piece, but we're gonna take that infographic and split it into five pieces of what we call microcontent, maybe the individual stack can stand alone or the two charts next to each other can tell a story. And then maybe a couple of them we're gonna animate or turn into a gif or a little video. So, as you guys know, we've gotta optimize for each platform, which I know creates more work, but content looks and feels very different on Instagram than it does on Pinterest and Twitter, and each platform has some nuances too. I mean, think of Instagram. You can do stories or you can do like the gallery. You can do some really cool stuff to use your visuals in unique ways, and so I kind of call it the visualization of the web. So, we've witnessed our six years of the company, the Facebook newsfeed got wider. It's hard to remember these days but Twitter didn't use to have any visuals in the stream, and then along comes Pinterest and Instagram, which are entirely visual, and then, of course, Snapchat and stories. I think we find that, yeah, you can't just plop the infographic with a couple paragraphs into the blog. Now, that still works but first we've gotta get them there to the blog, so how do we take that story and either tease it or break it down? Sometimes, we'll gate content, right? So, we'll almost do a CliffsNotes version and then you get the full thing. You get the whitepaper. Garrett: Yeah, so I was thinking about that, like this microcontent. You kind of almost thinking of those as, in some cases, as like hooks, right? John: Yes. Garrett: Kinda hooking them and getting them back to the content itself. John: Yeah, absolutely. Yep. And so much of media, I think, repeats itself and whether it was back to the days of a movie trailer or a quick commercial, TV ad, like now we're just doing that on the web in many ways, right? It's the hook to ... like the quick ... "Watch this show tonight at seven o'clock." It's that hook and then, hopefully, they watch at seven and get the full story. Garrett: I think we all just heard local news. "Bismarck man makes this out of wood ..." John: Exactly. That's like ... [inaudible 00:15:25] but that's the six second ad before we called it that. Garrett: Well, it's kind of interesting ... how do you guys go about determining that? What is the hook or what's the piece of this graphic, or even the part of the story, that narrative that you're telling that's gonna be used on social in these microcontent pieces? John: Yeah, so certainly we'll think about the clients answer to that, "What are your three main points?" And I think that's always a ... you can almost see a visceral reaction when we ask our clients to pick their three main points, because they'll sit there and say, "Well, I have 15 facts," or, "I have 20 data points. I can't pick three." But it's not the individual fact. It's what are the three things you want someone to take away after they read your story, right? You think about if you read a book about ... I'm reading a biography right now about Abraham Lincoln. Like what are the three things I'm gonna tell you about Abraham Lincoln. There's obviously ... it's 42 hours on Audible. So, there's way more than three. But ... so we'll either take one of those or this is where I would allow for the creative design types like, "Also, what's maybe the coolest looking? What was their most compelling chart or the best animation?" It's okay, I think, in that snackable hook content to also just kind of choose the flashy one a little bit as well. So, whether you hook by most interesting fact or most compelling visual, I think that's how we typically choose. Garrett: How about channels? Is the channel ... like the networks and stuff that you're gonna publish content to to drive traffic ... How do you go about that? Is that generally based on the client themselves, or are there kind of tricks or certain networks that tend to do a better job of driving that traffic through visuals? John: Yeah, so we learned the hard way on like Facebook. The days of just plopping an infographic ... I mean, part of where ... you wish you could say the hooks and microcontent was what we thought of all along, but people did used to just plop their infographic in Facebook and then it would look terrible. You'd get these two sidebars of white kind of space and it would get shrunk into the middle, and it was basically illegible. That's where it almost started. Is we would pull out ... You could even do like a command shift four on your infographic and take a screenshot, and just upload that as a piece of microcontent back then just to drive them off of Facebook, because it just wasn't very friendly. Now, we've tried a few things like ... what do they call it? The canvas ad ... that Facebook paid? We've done that with a few clients, which is interesting. You get a little bit limited when you're playing in someone else's playground, but that's some cool stuff. I think ... where was I going with that? A lot of times with the clients, it's often, "Where's your audience too?" Sometimes, our clients aren't on Facebook because it might be a big corporation like a Samsung or a Marriott, and sometimes they're all in on Twitter or they don't want Twitter. So, there's a little bit of that too. We kind of work with what they have when it comes to channels. But, yeah, also paid, obviously, is cross-all sort of content right now. We have to experiment more and more with paid, because you can't just put it up there and get it seen. So, paid on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Pinterest all looks a little bit different. That's, as you guys know, that's a tough part of the game today is just staying on top of that. We have an infographic on Facebook about how to post infographics. Very meta. I feel like every six months, we're redesigning that piece of content, that blog post, just to make sure that it's still relevant because then you have the ... with paid, you got the content rule of text to space. So, that kind of ... how much text you can use, percentage-based. Honestly, as of this recording, I don't even remember the rule right now. I'd have to ask my team because it changes so often. Garrett: How about ... like Instagram where there's no ... I mean, that's always challenge, right? Particularly if you're using social to drive to content, just because no URLs. So, does that change your guys' approach and the type of micro visuals that you're releasing for tools like Instagram. John: Yeah, I think so. And even from URLs, whether you're using a Bitly link or a short link ... I think you almost have to treat Instagram as their ... brand awareness, like they feel something and they feel an emotion or understand a story, but really hooking them and bringing them to a blog ... especially on a mobile device ... I think is less important. So, how can you treat it more natively so that they think of something and then, of course ... this is where my team is way better than me ... if they do view it there, you can have like a lookalike audience or bring them back when they do come to Facebook on their desktop and learn a little bit more there. But, yeah, we really like to play with Instagram. We'll do a pitch. You can follow Lemonly on our Instagram. Just even, I think, for those ... if there are agencies listening to this or people creating content, it's such a fun playground to tell a story about your brand and your culture, and I think CoSchedule would be another good example of doing that. I think in 2017, brands have personalities and so we use like Instagram on Lemonly, or even our Twitter on Lemonly, to tell a story about our company, and so that's everything from culture to recruiting to ... even internal, just so that our existing employees feel something about the company that they work out. Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. I agree completely. One thing I'd ask about would be quality. I mean, I think about ... I'm sure everybody who's listening has visited the Lemonly website and they're as impressed as everyone else with the qualities of your guys' visuals. Design is fantastic. John: Thank you. Garrett: How ... I mean, how important is the design in that process versus that narrative, and how do you guys kind of find the balance? And then maybe for someone getting started without those design resources, what else can they focus on instead, potentially? John: Yeah- Garrett: About three questions there in one but ... John: Sure, sure. I mean, yeah, we think the amazing design at Lemonly is critical but also almost table stakes, I think, because design is such a subjective thing when ... our website is designed to be an inbound marketing tool and to get people to fill out contact forms, and so they see the logos for validation and credibility. They look at the portfolio to say, "Yeah, these guys can do what we're looking to do." But, man, I feel bad sometimes for the designers because ... I think it's world-class work, but it almost becomes this expected, right? More of the secret sauce probably lies in that storytelling and maybe ... and I think we even have to step back and give ourselves more credit, and tell that to the team often is ... "All 20 of you ... you guys have ... we've told over 2500 stories in our 6 years, so you know how to take a concept and either make it more interesting or take a concept and make it more simple." And that I do think is probably ... the visuals will get them there because they're pretty, but if you don't have a good story then it won't work, right? At the end of the day, we wanna ROI on our marketing, our storytelling, and content. That's what I'd say on that one. For those who maybe don't have that budget or don't have those design resources, I totally get it and that's ... You guys are a software product ... that's the difference, right? So, at Lemonly, we're trying to pitch the service model because where we think our special value is actually probably the person-to-person relationship. So, you get a dedicated project manager, and this is where we really lean into our South Dakota roots and so ... We're working with clients in New York and San Francisco and LA. They get lemon bars in the mail when they sign up to be with Lemonly, and they get a handwritten thank you note by the designer who actually made the infographic at the end, because we have to do that stuff, because the alternative is, "Yeah, you could use a Canva, or you could use Infogram, or ..." What's the other one? Piktochart. Those would be three tools that you can get started today for either free or almost really close to three. I think Buffer makes one called ... Pablo? I think it's called? Garrett: Yeah, that sounds right. John: Maybe we don't want to reference Buffer on this podcast. Sorry. Garrett: No, that's fine. John: But, yeah, so there are tools out there where you can kind of take a nice looking photo, put some decent type on top of it, and write some copy and go, and totally use that if you have to because ... I mean, I tell clients now there's no reason in ... you shouldn't really have a social media post without a visual in today's world because ... you almost have to, right? Garrett: You do. John: Just a status update on Facebook just doesn't work anymore. Garrett: I think, actually, the Twitter 280 revolution has probably only emphasized that even more. I don't know if you've felt that way but like as you're scrolling through these big blocks of text ... I've kind of felt like images and graphics stand out again. Where they've kind of gotten to the point where everyone's using them but that extra text really creates more variety. John: Yeah, and this is ... that's really fresh, as of recording, and so I'm curious how that'll ... Everyone is backlashing against it and you saw ... I am finding myself, when I see that block of text, kind of naturally just my thumb goes up and I scroll past it. So, I think you're right, the more people use that, or maybe don't ... if they don't adapt to it ... that visual becomes even more important. Yeah. Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is a 10X Marketing Formula and 10X Marketing Formula is all about getting 10 times the results, right? So, really focusing on the best types of projects, the best types of content. Can you give me some stories and some examples of where your clients have gotten these huge 10X results from visual content? John: Yeah, I can think of one right off the bat ... and I think it's a case study on our website, on the homepage. We worked with a software company out of San Francisco called Demandbase, and they do what's called ADM. So, account based marketing. And sometimes what we like to do is we'll kind of talk about that stacking of content, that web of content. We did an infographic, which was almost a CliffsNotes or summary version of a larger whitebook ... sorry whitepaper E-book ... mix those words. So, the infographic drove them from ... we broke it down in the social, drove them to the landing page, and the next little infographic was, of course, a form. "Want the full story? Download our whitepaper or our E-book." They told us they got a 980% ROI on that little campaign, we'll call it, with little microcontent infographic whitepaper because what they did is they would book demos of their product from people who filled out that gated content, and then they're selling ... I think it's generally enterprise software. So, a pretty good ROI on the investment they made with us at Lemonly. So, that was a fun one. And then a cool one just for us is ... we don't get to do this as much when we're busy ... but way back in 2012, I think ... this is timely because of Halloween ... but we did a pop culture inspired Halloween costumes, and we also talk about the infographics or the content and the visuals. This kind of debunked that one, I guess, because it was just little icons, little characters, all with the different pop culture costumes from that year. Whether it be politics, movies, music, current events, reality TV, and that one just blew up. You never know how to get viral hits but probably 1.5 million views or so online. I think we had 50 or 60 leads the next week from that, and made it on Mashable and ... so, yeah. Those are fun. You just never know what'll hit and what resonates, but all that was ... I mean, there's maybe 20 words on that infographic and it's just a little legend on the side, in case you don't know what Batman looks like. But, yeah, that was- Garrett: Nice. John: ... one that we got a 10X return ourselves. Garrett: I like that. I think that's two really good examples, and very different examples, right? I mean, the Demandbase one is really about ... I like this idea of kind of creating this whole package. I think it's easy to think of an infographic, right, as the content itself. But you're using an infographic as part of the narrative and ... that's continued in this whitepaper, that's continued in the demo, and so it's kind of connecting all those together. It's actually promotional tool in itself, and I think that's pretty cool. John: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's something we're gonna be exploring even more and more in the near year ... is telling a story across the different channels, as we discussed in this podcast, and then making it all tie together. Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so 10%, right? So, 10% is the opposite of 10X. Kind of small results. Just talk a little bit about what ... you don't necessarily have to go to a campaign that failed, but what are some of the things where you see visuals or infographics fail and just not live up to their potential? And what are the common threads amongst those? John: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we even have this sometimes happen to us. It's like nails on a chalkboard when we hand over an infographic to a client ... and because we're more of a partner-vendor, not often like agency of record, since we work with these Fortune 500, we don't always get to be involved in, say, the launch or the delivery of the content. We had a client ... I won't name them ... but they took the infographic and then pumped it through like PR news wire, where it just gets spread across all PR channels. And it was picked up on ABC News and NBC News. It was a big national event and it was blurry. You couldn't even read it. It was squished and it didn't ... They didn't tell us kind of the dimensions that they needed, or once it went through this PR news wire, it maybe just got- Garrett: It's like permanent retinal damage for your design team. John: I know. Exactly. Exactly. You kind of shy away. You don't tell them that it happened. So, that's a part that we even have thought about ... maybe we need to spend more time on is the delivery of the content because if you ... It's like training for a marathon and then you have bad shoes, or something like that. You go through all the training and then, when the day of the race is, you decide to go barefoot. So, I think there's almost ... the back to the basics probably to your 10% is just thinking, "Okay, where will this live? What's the URL? Can I get a look at ... what's the average blog width?" I mean, a little history lesson, the reason we think of ... most people think of infographics as that long narrow JPEG is they were originally designed back in 2010, 2011, to fit the average blog width, which at that time was about 600, 650 pixels. Because kind of a lot of blogs had that two thirds, one third kind of layout. And so that still holds mostly but now, of course, most people have 50% mobile traffic, and so we're getting into making responsive infographics that will adjust for phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, and so just the delivery of the content. Yeah, you don't want to do all that work and then stumble at the end. Garrett: Yeah. That's a great tip, actually. You think about graphics that you've pulled up on social and once they're on your phone, unless you're pinching and zooming, they're really hard to digest, really hard to read. I mean, that's ... John: Yeah. Garrett: That's pretty amazing, actually. John, this has been excellent. I think there's a ton of great stuff that our listeners can get that will help them with their 10X marketing efforts, so thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. John: I bet. Yeah, thank you, Garrett. This was fun. Fun to chat content and thanks for having me. Subscribe to the Actionable Marketing Podcast
About the Author

Nathan is the Head of Content & SEO at SimpleTexting. He's a demand generation enthusiast, content marketing advocate, and team player. He enjoys spending time with family and friends, running ultra marathons, and canoeing in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn.