We’ve spoken about the power of “newsjacking”: inserting our clients’ voices into relevant breaking news cycles, such as the latest technology developments in driverless cars (client: BoldIQ) or the alarming trends in school-based violence (client: Haystax Technology). Newsjacking can be a highly effective method for elevating a company’s profile and demonstrating expertise on a specific issue or topic.
But visual storytelling continues to rise in significance for its ability to succinctly raise awareness of a company’s brand and even demonstrate thought leadership. With attention spans hitting new lows for consumers of media, journalists and bloggers are looking to deliver stories that grab attention and clicks through compelling content. On top of this, editorial deadlines are quickening while staff sizes diminish, driving demand for easy-to-use content.
Working with our clients, RH Strategic has helped address this need through the development and distribution of infographics to tell stories, garner media attention, and engage large audiences through social media. To be effective in the use of infographics, we must carefully consider three questions:
- What message or story will be valuable to our client?
- What trends in the news will interest journalists, bloggers and their readers?
- What kinds of content will be engaging through social media?
Many infographics we see fail to address the latter two questions. These are often created with sales and marketing goals in mind. These types of infographics are overtly self-serving, they don’t tell a story, and they have little or nothing to do with trends in the news. This is why it is critical to have strategic PR expertise behind any campaign that involves the use of an infographic. Otherwise, the outcome might be a pretty, well-designed visual that ends up living on a lonely web page without additional value.
Visual storytelling has been a key component of our success with client Randstad Technologies. Working with our design partner, we have built several infographics that address the aforementioned questions, leading to meaningful media, social and digital results. An example of this was an infographic titled, “5 Mobility Trends for the Modern Business.” Given Randstad Technologies’ expertise in mobile and enterprise app development, this was relevant to their PR goals, and it was a newsworthy story for tech writers targeting IT decision makers.
We posted the infographic on the company’s blog, shared it with media and bloggers, and distributed it through social channels with a subset of creative images taken from the larger infographic. The campaign yielded several media stories, such as FierceMobileIT, and high engagement through social media, including 220 social shares from the blog alone.
As demonstrated in this case, visual storytelling done correctly is a worthwhile PR investment.
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RH Strategic is the PR firm for a hyper-connected world, delivering integrated traditional, digital & social media strategies for technology, healthcare, and public sector markets.
