When you should use the Picture Superiority Effect for your Public Relations campaign.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you've got value locked up in an organization, you're just trying to share that by using some simple and some cost-effective and also some time-efficient ways of sharing it. Now, one of the things to think about is the use of different kinds of formats. And I'm thinking about that because I've just been looking at the Speak PR program, and I'm working on the Engage element. And engage really is about creating impactful content so that people can understand and engage and possibly to share or to amplify the content that you have created. So on this show, I'm going to talk about different ways that you can create compelling content and how I've been using the tool Canva today to create an infographic to explain engagement levels. So let's just dive in, shall we, to today's episode, which is all about how we can create content. Now, content creation is probably the number one problem that people have. They often have got the message already and they know who they want to talk to. How do you format that into something that's appealing? Well, 90% of all information is transmitted to the brain by visual means. So touch, hear, taste, smell— these are actually only receiving 10% of all the information that we're taking on. So if we're not creating visually appealing content, we're missing out on a massive, massive opportunity. Now, um, also amazing is that the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Pretty amazing, really. And I guess it's just all prehistoric, really, isn't it? That we are, um, all living still with some of the prehistoric, uh, tool sets that we've got. And it's called the picture superiority effect. Coined in 1971. Basically, it means that we can see the, the rhinoceros or the tiger coming after us before we want to read about it. So how do we then translate this into making content that's appealing? Because many people think public relations, for example, is really all just about sending press releases. Well, of course it's not. Now, 65% of people are visual learners. And 50% of our neural tissue is in some way connected to our vision. So we really need to be thinking about creating content that might have text, but also includes graphics. And this is, of course, the domain of the infographic. So infographics are where we incorporate text and pictures And there's one piece of research that shows that infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles. And here's why. They are immediately impactful because you see them, and especially now with the attention span of people being less than maybe 6, 8 seconds, you hear different things, but certainly everyone is speed dating content right now. Infographics are very shareable. And whereas if there is content which is text, people have to cut and paste large bodies of content, but if it's a quick picture, it can be shared. We can also illustrate, for example, data through graphs, through charts, much more efficiently. And most people, including certainly me, are not particularly oriented towards numbers, but we are towards charts. So an infographic also can carry colour, for for example, and logos. So if you're looking at your brand awareness, it's very hard to do brand awareness, if not impossible to do that through text, but you can with graphics. You can also, of course, have some degree of web SEO improvement, because if you're sharing content and it's tagged, and for example, you save the file name with your company name in it, then it will help on the links, especially if people repost or even embed that in their own websites. This is, of course, why people ask you to embed their articles or their graphics in your website. So what we know, of course, is that people are prone to images and even more prone to moving images, which, of course, is why TV is so powerful. Anyone that's watched the TV when you get on the aeroplane, for example, You'll see how everybody stops reading the newspaper or reading a book and starts eventually to watch the television. So how do we create content then that can be useful? Well, I'm going to just tell you the tool that I've been using to create a graphic for the Speak PR program, and I'll tell you just a little bit more about the pricing of that when I tell you what I've been doing. So I'm trying to work to illustrate how people can develop content which is shareable. So what I've got is a chart, a graph, and on the top I have engagement level, and on the chart I've got 4 squares. In the top left-hand square under engagement level, I've got the word hard, and in the top right I've got the engagement level saying easy. And on the north-south axis, or the vertical axis, I've got the subject matter. And at the top of that, or the north part, I've got new. And at the bottom, or the south, I've got old. So I've got an— I've got a 4-way chart, 4 quadrants. Top left is content that is quite hard to engage with but is new. And in the top right, I've got content which is easy to engage with and is new. I've got in the bottom left, I've got content that is quite hard to understand and is old. And in the bottom right, I've got content which is old but easy to understand. So then what I've got in my top right where it's easy to understand or easy to engage with, and it's new content, it's highly shareable. This is the kind of content that we want to be creating— content which is easy for people to understand but also new in some way. And in the bottom right, I've got content which is old and easy to understand, it's possibly shareable. And in the top left quadrant, I've got content which is fairly hard to understand or hard engagement level but new, and it's possibly going to be shared, especially within, for example, a vertical, maybe a B2B specialist group. And in the bottom left, I've got subject matter which is hard to understand and it is old. So that then makes it pretty much unbearable. So trying to describe this, uh, this 4-way matrix where you want to be in the top right-hand side of the matrix, highly shareable content is new and it's easy to understand. But of course, with one picture, I'm able to share that message straight away. I think I'll probably give you the idea by trying to explain it, but you'll be able to see it easily when I publish it. So what content do you have that actually would be much more easily explained with a picture than with the kind of text? Now I'm using Canva Pro to draw this very simple chart. I pay $17.98 per month for the Canva Pro. I could get for $167 if I bought the annual, and that would make my life much easier. You can downgrade as well. So I'm using this every month, so I would be saving $3 a month, $4 a month in fact, if I booked annually, 22% is what I'd be getting off. You can also use another platform called Visme, and all of these have great templates. So Canva, for example, I've got Instagram story, Instagram post, Facebook post, Facebook cover. I've got LinkedIn. I've also got infographic templates in here as well. I've got business presentation, business website logo, business card, invoice. All of these are very easy-to-use templates, and they come already with things like stock photographs that you can use. And you can also then link these to your social media accounts. So that's what I do. I can actually share a graphic direct to social media if I want to, but I can also create a team account. So I've actually introduced other people working on the project with me to my Canva account, and then we can collaborate. So the, the Canva, uh, app— and, and we've also talked about one called Visme— also has some courses online. For example, has Social Media Mastery with 92,000 students, uh, already listed there. So you can take a large number of courses, including, uh, presentations to impress, personal branding, and so on. So when we look at the content that we want to share in our articles and in our news and on our websites, making it visual is going to appeal to people. It's going to appeal to more people, and it's going to appeal to people in a greater way and make it easier for them to share than if they have to read, understand, and then cut and paste the best bits. Use a tool like I'm trying to use Canva. I'm not a designer, but what I have found is that some of the tools and the templates and the free graphics and the elements that are available within Canva mean that I can at least communicate what I want to, to the level that it's better than the sentence or the paragraphs that I'd have to write. What you can do, of course, is then to send those to a graphic designer on Fiverr or Upwork, which is what I've done, for example, with some of the, the larger, more complicated graphics, is to send it to someone to get all the fonts right, to get the colors right, and so on. So even if you're not a designer, it's important to think about using visual elements and visual graphics in your marketing As long as it doesn't become hilarious. And even if it does, that may be part of your marketing. So think about how you can communicate visually, even if it's just taking a, an Excel spreadsheet and putting the top numbers into a chart that becomes a graphic with a headline. And because you can actually embed actual photographs that you have taken on your phone, you can upload those to Canva or to Visme, and you can embed them within your storyboard. So the tools are there for us non-artists to use. Now I'm creating the Speak PR course using Canva, uh, for some of the graphic elements and infographics. So could you use Canva or Visme or any one of these other tools to just lift for your audience what you're saying into another realm, make it visually appealing? Because we've seen that the picture superiority effect of 1971 is not going away. And social media, the attention span is getting so short because the content is so constant that standing out is more and more difficult. Asking people to read long-form content is becoming more and more unacceptable. And what would happen is you just end up in the bottom left-hand quadrant of my shareability matrix. So think about making graphics. Think about making them simple, compelling, and colorful. If it's complicated to do the process, make the graphic simple. Start with baby steps. That's all I'm doing. So I hope by sharing what I'm working on in my journey that this will help you with your journey to communicate the value in your business. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like it, please Rate it, please share it. If you'd like to subscribe to our newsletter, please come to eastwestpr.com. Or if you'd like to get involved in a mastermind with me on the speakpr.co website, you can find out all about the Speak PR methodology of storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and know, and our six-week mastermind. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health. A profitable business and that you keep on creating great stories using some graphics.