Creating Amazing Podcast Episode Visual Graphics That Gives Maximum Impact

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Hey everyone, this is Tom and Tracy on Feed you'd brand. Today we get to talk about one of my pet peeves in the brandcasting, podcasting, content creation world that we live in. And that's about graphics that have really great visual impact, or my pet peeves, graphics that don't have that kind of real visual impact that I think they should have and so easily could have.

Well, and I think we really need to define what we mean by visual impact graphics. And Tom and I kind of think of it as like feed stoppers. Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. So if you're like scrolling through your Facebook feed, what gets you to stop? Right. That's the ultimate goal of visual impact. Right. That's what we want. And we have the school of thought which we fight clients all the time on. And it drives me crazy.

I'm surprised how much we do do have to really emphasize this point with people.

Right. And you know what it is? It's usually the branding, the PR and the marketing agents, the ones that they're more about the style of things and less about the content of things. Right.

And I would say the graphic firms.

Those kind of things.

I would also say they're more about the consistency of style and presentation of their client's brand. It's that consistency word that I really want to emphasize here.

Yes.

Because I am of the opinion. I think you are too, Tracy. That consistency of graphics for highlighting your content from day to day and week to week is not what you should be going for.

Right. There's really a struggle, a difference of opinion in this marketplace about how this works. But we can tell you from all of the podcast episodes and all of the blog posts that we've done and all of the graphics that we've done over time, and we've done thousands, easily. Easily thousands. Right. Because we do at least two for every episode. Even on our own podcast. That would be a thousand right there practically.

Right.

So we've looked at that over time and we know that the ones that have sameness. So in other words, you have the same format on your graphic header or on the square that you create as Your featured image, the ones that have the same exact stylistic sameness to it, same color background to it. So the title might change, okay, the words might change, but the visual way that it looks with the layout of it and the color placement of it and the typeface all look the same from one to another. Those rank much lower than ones that are different.

And when you think about it, it really makes sense because if you're scrolling through LinkedIn and you're going through the Pulse and you're seeing all these different articles that people are putting up there, you are scanning through, well, different people look at different things. There are people that are more visually oriented, are looking at the images going. People that are a little more, I guess, analytical might be reading the titles that are going by. But let's just talk about the visual impact, because really that's what we're talking about today as you go through and you're looking at all those. If people use that same format image from post to post and only change the title or change an image within it, an ingredient image within really looks the same. People scroll by there and they think they've read it before, it doesn't grab their attention. It doesn't say, hey, I'm different, look at me, pay attention to me, right?

And it also doesn't provide that visual cue to the title, which is really what we strive to do is have a visual cue that matches the title of whatever that might be. So maybe it's about money and we want to have money in the background, so we want to have a visual cue to financial management. So it's a difference and we try to mix it up all the time. So there's a couple of really important things. Also I want to point out is that another issue is when somebody comes to your Facebook page. So, for instance, it's your page, and not everybody does that, remember? Because usually they're looking in their own feed. But let's say they just found you and they go to your page and they scroll down your page and if every single post looks the same, they're highly unlikely to like your page because they think you're spamming them with constantly sending out the same message again and again and again, the repeat message, which is always feels like push sales. So if they look the same as they're scrolling through that quickly through your feed and they're like, oh, I definitely don't want to like this page. I'm just going to get stuck with the same message pushed at me, right?

So I want to just go in a little more detail as to where some of this comes from or what we don't like, where we see it coming from. And I'm going to give you a real example. You can go to a website and check out right here in another couple minutes. So this happens, you know, some graphic designer or marketing person lays out a style guide for your business, and then if you have, let's say, a podcast, and you're gonna create this graphic image for every episode, and usually the ones that are problematic are where they have the host headshot is there and the guest headshot sort of side by side. And then graphically, everything else is identical. Same background, same pattern, same colors, same fonts. The title, like you said, Tracy, changes. But think about that. Every single week, the host is just one person. The host headshot never changes. So the only thing visually, as you see image from week to week, that changes is the guest's headshot. And a lot of times it's just not enough within that image to make a visual impact, to be a difference. So it comes from this idea of, well, this is my podcast and I'm promoting my brand, and I need to really present my brand, and that's got to be in a consistent, certain format, certain style. Well, I understand that argument, but in this modern world of social media, which is what we're all competing for to get attention on social media, that kind of image is not going to do you a lot of credit. It's just not going to be very effective. So here's an example.

We'd rather have effectiveness than so. And Tom and I talk about constant inconsistent is one of our biggest importance, but we want you to have constant and consistent growth as well. And if you're defeating that purpose by people not clicking on you, by people not choosing to listen, by people not responding to when it's in their feed, then we have an issue.

Yeah. When we talk about constancy and consistency, we're talking about in creation of new content, of creating original material in your voice that's getting put out there on a consistent and constant basis.

And that means original visual impact graphics as well.

It does. So I'm going to give you an example. This is a client of ours who we have been working with, I don't know, since sometime in. Not quite a year yet, I guess he had a podcast already. He was already a podcaster. His name is John Livesay, and he has this podcast called the Successful Pitch. It's a great podcast. And if you're at all interested in.

How to I love the podcast, it's awesome.

If you're at all interested in learning about what it takes to present to investors, to pitch to investors properly, his is a podcast you may want to listen to.

Well, it's from the investor's point of view, which is really unique.

Right. So you can learn what their looking for, what they want to see in a pitch. So anyway, it's a great show. So if you go to the blog post for this podcast on brandcastingyou.com under Feed your brand, you will see our blog post for this episode and you'll have a link we'll have in there to John Liveset's website and an image.

So that you can see what we're talking about.

Right. And I would encourage you to go to his blog and look at it because you will see that in his first 80 or so episodes that he ever did, he had this kind of a format of image. It was the same week to week, only thing that changed was the guest headshot and the title, but it was in the same color, same fonts. And even if you just scroll through his own blog, you will see how visually it's just the same, the same, the same. You have to really read those titles to really know what's different and to learn what you might want to click on and learn more about and listen to an old podcast and then get to about episode. I don't know, I think around episode 90 or so is where he started working with us. And you will see every single thumbnail image in the blog feed is unique. Every header image at the top of every blog post is unique. And those same assets are what he uses to push it out on social media. So now when you see any post that John will make on Facebook or LinkedIn about his posts to spread his message to the world, you will see that no two posts look alike anymore because every single image is unique. Now there is an ingredient of that image, a small ingredient, which we highly recommend for everyone to brand it as the successful pitch podcast. But it's a small square image in use of the lower left or lower right corner. Depends on the image that week, where it would fit best.

There's occasionally some podcasters who like a whole band across the bottom, which is up to them. It doesn't matter how you want to do it. You can have an ingredient somewhere, but you basically want to make the majority of the image look different. And one of the things that we strive and I go back and audit our team on occasion and make sure they're really doing it is we also don't want to have sameness in any kind of color from week to week. So I try to get them to mix up the font colors, the background colors, the images that they choose. And if we end up with too many in a row, the same, I give them a hard time and say, hey guys, you got to mix this up better. You got to be thinking about what you did for them last time. Pull it up and look at it. Because we don't want to see that, especially in the course of a month. So if they're doing four episodes or eight episodes in a month, we want to see differences between them all so that there really is a variety that happens in the feed, in their own blog post, on their own blog page and the feed in their social media.

Yeah, you've really got to put yourself in the shoes of a viewer on social media. Anybody who will be out on Facebook or LinkedIn scrolling through their feed and they're looking for things that catch their attention, right? They're not looking for ho hum, boring stuff. Right. They're waiting for something to jump off of the screen and grab their attention. And if they think they've seen it before, they're just going to keep on going. It's really the same thing when you think about it. Another analogy is you're in the supermarket and you're walking down the aisle of food. You're walking the aisle, maybe the cereal aisle or something and you aren't going to pay attention to Cheerios because you've seen the Cheerios box a thing thousand times walking through that aisle in the store or the Rice Krispies and all this. Now there's certainly brand consistency there, but what are you going to notice? You're going to notice something walking down that aisle that's different, that's a different color, that's a different image that jumps out and grabs your attention.

Which is why those cereal boxes and all of those mix it up on occasion and change up the outside of their boxes. That's why Wheaties was doing so well with putting different sports figures on the COVID of their box. Well, who is going to be on my box of Wheaties this week? Right? And so that's really where they did something unique and caught the attention of moms and the kids going down the aisle. Because this was pretty old at that time. There's a lot more mom shopping. But they did and that's how they managed to differentiate themselves. And that visual impact is in graphic form is huge. So I want to Also mention it. So we were talking a while back. I mean, this is like almost six months ago, at least with a PR agent who is one of our brandcasters. And when we were discussing why hers wasn't gaining traction, why she wasn't gaining a lot of traction in the early days, and I did an audit of her podcast and her blog post page, I discovered that her assistant was changing the images. We were providing these graphic images for them to use, and they were changing them out to the same old image. So we were giving them the good new graphics, but they weren't being used by her assistant. And she was like, I didn't realize that. I mean, she felt that they needed to go back to the brand synergy of what we wanted. The visual impact we were going for was keeping our brand streamlined. And I said, well, this explained the whole thing of what we just discussed about how this is when you're flipping through the feed and when you're looking through it, it looks like she was like, I can't believe that. I didn't really think this through. I tell my clients the same thing because she would coach them on doing press interviews, Right? And don't wear the same thing in every video, in every interview, every time you do this, because what happens is, is that it looks like you did them all in one sitting, right?

Well, especially if you're doing a series of videos for either webinars or maybe it's a different chapters of a book that you're presenting that are being put out in different things. And if you're going to record a series of videos in one day, that is always the number one rule. You gotta change your shirt, your blouse, your jacket, whatever, for the backdrop. Even if you're recording four in one afternoon, you gotta have four different outfits. Even if your hair is the same, your clothing color is enough. You gotta change it up.

It is where you start and your background. And that's also another thing. You don't want to start each video with the exact same backdrop. And, you know, she was like, of course. That makes such sense. I tell them the same thing because why? Because people think they've seen it before and then they don't watch it.

Right.

You always have lower viewership, lower listenership, lower click through, lower conversion. So consistency and constancy is about putting out original, but we want to also give it visual impact graphics to make sure that it looks original.

Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself. Like I said, this is one of my pet peeves. When we get a new customer who says, oh no, no, no, all of our graphics have to be this particular way. I was like, yeah, those are the.

Ones who have style guides like all planned out by their graphic team. And their graphic team is very. Yeah. And so this is where you really have to fight for this because this is your authority, this is your brand. This is where you want to gain more power. You need to use every single tool in the toolbox that we're giving you. You need to use them all because you are struggling to be seen above 1.2 billion websites on Google and you are struggling to get heard and read from hundreds of thousands of feed that's going through your phone in any given minute, on your mobile feed, on any social media platform too. Too many things to not to have enough visual impact.

Yeah, I mean, eventually it becomes a conversation with a client or somebody who's interviewing us about this subject. Well, okay, you can have consistency in your visual image and have everything look the same from post to post, or you can have more people find your stuff. You can have a greater impact out there on people and build an audience and build a bigger following. Which one of those would you rather have? Most of them become convinced.

That's right. So I bet the numbers don't lie. I mean, we do thousands and thousands of podcasts that we've done and blog posts that we put through and graphic images that we've created. And when there is this mix, it works every time compared to the ones that do not. There is a definite percentage difference, I mean a high percentage difference in the click through rates.

Yeah, and as a company, we wouldn't have a staff of graphic designers who are full time employees doing nothing but creating these images every single day if we didn't need to.

Right.

We're not going to spend money on something that doesn't provide a significant return for us and for our clients.

So we hope this has helped you. And as always, we have images and other visual cues for you on the blog post@brandcastingyou.com in the feed your brand section and we invite you to take a look at them and to send us some feedback. We'd love to hear from you. Make a comment, send us a message on social media edyourbrand and let us know what you're up to.

Yeah, we're always happy to have a healthy discussion and even a little debate about some of these things, as long as it's all civil and professional. And don't forget, we've also got links at that blog post for some of our clients websites where you can see examples of this, but I think the one we were talking about earlier is a real good example because you can see how it changed over time.

Right. And we'd love to invite you to check out brandcastingyou.com app and check out our new app. We're testing out something really cool and new and we're really excited about it. You could basically have feed your brand right in your phone with its own app button and you could get the podcast, the blog posts, messages, all in one place. You don't have to search through your feed anywhere else to find all that you need about feed your brand.

Yeah, you don't even have to go and go into itunes, all that. So it's kind of cumbersome to go in to subscribe to a podcast. You could just have the app, it's free and you'll always have it right to your phone as soon as it comes out. So anyway, check that out and thanks for listening everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy on.

The feed you'd brand podcast.

It.