Visual Content is a large part of life, and it’s about to become even larger especially with the announcement of Facebook’s name change to ‘Meta’, to encompass their larger mission to make all of the content consumed in our lives a reality. Virtual reality that is. With content (no matter how you interpret it) visuals help us attract and engage new and existing users to our brands, platforms, and products. 

According to HubSpot, “Content brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less” now combine this type of content with visual assets, and you have 65% more people likely to remember the information. 

So, how exactly can we create content (we aren’t talking about boring infographics either) that is visually appealing and can form a relationship with the intended audience? 

Engaging Visual Content needs Creative Structure

When creating visual content, you should always take the basic principles of graphic design into consideration to craft visually appealing and effective content. According to Canva’s, 25 graphic design tips for non-designers and beginners, they say that “the application of graphic design is vast and versatile”.  Making a big difference for even the smallest of details.

Here are some basics to remember when creating visual assets that appeal to your users across traditional channels and social media platforms 

Brand Consistency 

Your visual content marketing strategy should directly reflect your overall brand. Having brand consistency ensures that you are always delivering messages aligned with your core brand values and tone. This can be simple things like using your branded logo or keeping the same color palette throughout your visual elements. 

With consistency, it can lead to higher visibility and recognition when consumers start to think of your brand as soon as they have a need.

Loews Hotels solved this challenge in a fun and engaging way by incorporating lots of Guest-Generated content. Loews even ran award-winning campaigns like #TravelForReal resulting in thousands of pieces of engaging content that their marketing team repurposes in magazines, advertising, on social, online, and on booking pages. 

The use of User-generated content in Loews Hotels’ marketing campaign led to…

• 62% increase in social engagement
• 85% increase time spent on booking pages on website
• 4X increase in revenue from brand-site bookings

Loews reveals that it’s marketing success isn’t just due to their ability to scale content, but to use content that celebrates their guests and creates an emotional attachment to the brand. This not only makes for organic and engaging marketing assets, but shows other guests that they also have a chance to be celebrated, and that Loews cares about them.

Picking your Typeface

It’s important to know that when selecting your typeface or font, it needs to stay consistent with your brand to boost content marketing efforts. The human brain processes visuals with calculation, so it’s important to always use simple, easy to read text if you already don’t have a branded text. 

Whitespace is everything for Image Optimization 

A graphic that is overfilled with clutter can make it hard to follow for your audience to get the overall ‘picture’. This can decrease your overall internet traffic as search engines are now using visual content as another form of SEO to determine if your images are “visual search” worthy for visitors on social media and websites.  

According to Search Engine Journal, it’s recommended to do the following to make sure your image is high-quality, and that will improve your chances of getting on the image search results pages for Google and Instagram. 

• Use a descriptive image file name.
• Add alt text – this is a relevant “factor” and is also for usability.
• Add captions.
• Supply image description (recommended for Images Galleries).
• Create images XML Sitemaps (required).
• The content surrounding the images must be consistent with the image itself and not overcrowded. 

With all this said, incorporating UGC into your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is a sure fire way to win it all in terms of gaining domain authority. As your content is shown as useful (low bounce and high engagement) your content will naturally rank higher. This higher ranking content is more likely to be linked or referenced by other content. 

Unlocking Originality: UGC is the Key

User-Generated Content (UGC) is a pillar for enhancing many steps of your buyer’s journey.

1. When a consumer first learns about a product or service
2. When a consumer compares the product or service to others
3. When a customer orders their product or service
4. When a customer receives their product or service
5. When a customer gets the benefit/result of their product
6. When a customer engages and shares their experience with the product or service

In fact, consumers want real content and can often decipher this from stock photo-type material. For your visual marketing strategy, UGC is more important than ever, as viewers look for others just like them who have bought or used services they are looking into. 

Picking your Graphic Design Platform

Whether you are a professional-level user or just getting started, Canva is great for creating quick mockups and social graphics. But, did you know that even with Canva’s many free, customizable templates you don’t have to sacrifice your creative edge? 

For effective visual storytelling, simply use the TINT integration on Canva. Here you can upload your UGC straight to the Canva Editor to start incorporating trusted, authentic visuals into your designs to humanize and strengthen user attention. 

With social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram we can make the connection that no matter the type of visual content (video content, ebooks, memes, gifs, etc) it can be just as important on these media channels as traditional mediums like white papers, landing pages, and blog posts. But, one thing’s for sure is that incorporating User-Generated Content within your curated graphics can be the key to ultimate optimization to maximize reach, engagement, and clicks. 

Start creating engaging visual content with UGC, talk to a visual content expert now.

The post How to Create Engaging Visual Content Using UGC appeared first on TINT.

The perfect content creation tool doesn’t exist? Well, we beg to differ. At TINT, we know the importance of incorporating User-Generated Content (UGC) into different visuals. That’s why we integrated with Canva. 

In just a short time, Canva has become ‘THE’ online design and publishing tool with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Marketers love it, and the platform offers a wide array of features that allow you to create exciting visuals without extensive graphic design knowledge or experience. 

With it’s drag-and-drop interface, a whole realm of content possibilities opens by providing the ability to easily incorporate the best UGC and Employee-Generated Content (EGC) from TINT into Canva to create stunning graphics and visuals, all with the touch of a button.

Turn UGC Into Branded Visuals 

Every design needs visual content that is eye-catching and true to your brand’s standards. With the TINT-Canva integration, tap into the authentic voice of your customers and fans by easily uploading your best user-generated content directly from your TINT account into Canva to create stunning visuals sure to resonate with your audience. 

In this fast-paced digital world, attention-spans can be snapped away with the tap of a finger. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy in knowing which companies are using Stock photos and staged photo shoots, and which ones are authentic and transparent (UGC and EGC).

UGC is content that has been created, published and/or submitted by customers and fans of a brand. This is true word-of-mouth and the most effective way for brands to articulate the value of their products and services through real-human experiences to other humans. Combine UGC with an amazing kick-butt graphic design platform like Canva, and you have yourself a winning team for your brand. 

93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by people more than content created by brands. Learn more in our State of UGC report. With Canva you can design a wide array of visual content for paid and organic channels, and with TINT, you can incorporate trusted UGC!

Take Canva’s recent,  #CanvaDesignChallenge. The design challenge in particular is to create a fun visual using…Llamas! And, it just so happens that we have a desk llama (courtesy of the awesome people at Classy Llama) that would be a perfect contender for this contest. 

Using a pre-built template it was easy to create the visual above while incorporating our own UGC; The llama wearing a spiffy TINT bandana . 

Share your UGC Centric Design Back to TINT

Don’t waste time uploading and downloading files – our integration with Canva lets you finish the job all in one motion by allowing your UGC to be accessed in Canva, designed, polished and completed, and then shared back into your TINT account. 

Sharing back to TINT allows you to seamlessly use other content optimization features like Attention Score. Attention Score can help you discover deep insights on particular elements within your visual content to see what will grab attention and inspire action from your audience. Doing this will help you optimize the visual for better conversion-driving results. 

To start creating your own UGC Magic, connect the TINT app to your Canva account now. 

Don’t have a TINT account? Talk to a UGC expert now.

The post Now In Canva, Your Best UGC appeared first on TINT.

In a world of many marketing tools and models for creating winning strategies, it’s not a secret that social media paid advertising can be highly effective. But the path to success is not always exactly clear.

Using the best practices, imagery, and tracking past ad performance still may not be enough to guarantee a winner with your next campaign. In fact, creating high-converting ads to get even the minimum ROI takes time, testing, and a LOT of strategy. Fortunately, we’ve included several secrets to success in this article to drive higher conversion and engagement rates by analyzing key insights within your content.

Get to know your target audience

The importance of knowing your audience is the very foundation that makes for a successful paid campaign. But, as more business begins to saturate the paid advertisement space, a rise in cost-per-clicks is making marketing teams’ overall conversion goals harder to achieve.

With a little bit of research and guidance, you can quickly hone in on producing a winning ad that will resonate well with your selected audience. In your beginning discovery phase, start by brainstorming traits of buyer personas who will more than likely complete a conversion with your offer. Find out usage patterns with what devices they use. Are they mostly on desktop or mobile devices? This will be important when mapping out the placement and sizing proportions of your ads. Then, develop a lookalike audience composed of website visitors and/or of your existing book of business. Create a list of niche specifics when purchases are made through your brand or competitors. Check into their demographics and what social platforms they may spend most of their time on (this is where you will find the platform that makes the most sense to advertise your product or service on). 

Let’s take Instagram as an example, the biggest visual content and social commerce channel used by over 1 billion people per month. According to Hootsuite’s 44 Instagram Stats that Matter to Marketers in 2021 report, Instagram is the 4th largest mobile app on with an estimated 81% of people using the social media platform to research products and services. With this information, we can make the correlation it may be wise to run a paid brand awareness campaign on the picture sharing now turned eCommerce app to gain the most exposure to your product and build brand loyalty. 

Finally, with these insights in mind, you can start strategizing attention-grabbing content that will resonate well with custom audiences.

Create attention-grabbing visual content pieces for your paid advertisements

Ever heard the saying, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover?’ While this can be true in many cases, what you don’t want is for this to speak truth to the product or service you are promoting within a paid ad campaign! Your image content needs to shine to gather interest from your audience and deliver the value proposition. The use of User-Generated Content will help greatly in this effort by offering a look into actual customer experiences with your product. When other users view your product being handled by another ‘human’, a real person, it helps create a sense of trust and authenticity and doesn’t come off too salesy.  

Attention is an increasingly scarce resource. In visual content, placement of images, logos, and text can influence the attention and decision-making process of the intended audience. As digital channels become more saturated, the need to make scroll-stopping content that people actually view continues to rise. To gain a comprehensive outlook on how your content will visually appeal to the targeted user, use TINT’s Attention Score to analyze several pieces of content to identify key attention points. This will help you hone in on visual content that may perform the best because of the amount of focal attention it will receive from your prospect. 

The more you are aware of how your content is perceived by your targeted audience before you publish, the more it will help with your overall ad spend and delivery. 

Copywriting that will make your targeted users want your product

Strong visuals within your ad are important, but without strong copy, your advertisement can become irrelevant fairly quickly. 

To write compelling ad copy that will lead your prospect to initiate an action with your ad, you will need to first have an idea of the type of language that will resonate well with your ideal customer, this will be found in the discovery phase of getting to know your audience. What action words resonate well with them? Use this type of wording and tone within the headline and copy to begin a relationship with the viewers. Once you have this, the next step is to add persuasion points to the ‘why’. Why does your customer need your product or service? What value will this bring to them? Defining your product within your copy not only peaks the users’ interest but begins to create a thought within their mind about your company. Maybe they aren’t keen on purchasing at that moment, but with the right wording (and frequency caps on your advertisement), you can create a brand awareness that will stick in their minds. 

Go big on the Call to Action

Once you’ve identified the appropriate engagement graphics, ad targeting, copy and perfect prospect it’s time to get them to complete an action to boost conversion rates. Let’s circle back to the previous feature we used to rate and identify attention points in your content. With Attention Score, scan the image to identify specific visual assets that highlight, where your users’ attention will focus. This can help to achieve the ideal platform for your call-to-action to drive urgency and gain the most clicks. 

Successful lead generation or purchase actions depend heavily on the best user experience, meaning your CTAs must be clear and point to a clean destination or landing page for viewers to complete the intended conversions.

Converting paid ad traffic requires the right mix of art and science. Remember, optimizing ad conversions starts with the right people with the right visual content and ad copy that matches your product or service solutions to their problem. No matter if you’re deploying ads on Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform, you can optimize visual content for higher conversions with Attention Score. 

To learn more about the conversion-driving power of UGC and Attention Score, request a demo of TINT today.

The post Paid Advertisement Hacks: How to Make a Winning Campaign appeared first on TINT.

In the digital economy, attention is the scarcest resource. Long are the days of gazing at your content, thinking it’s good, thinking that people will pay attention, but not actually knowing until it is published. There’s a new sheriff in this marketing town, a first-of-its-kind pre-planning content feature in our platform that allows you to look behind the eyes of your buyer to visualize how your content will be perceived before you publish. So, let’s all give a big warm welcome and find out all about this powerful new functionality in the TINT platform.

Visualize and observe Attention Scores BEFORE you post

Visual assets in your UGC Studio library can be scanned using our Eye Tracker technology where AI analyzes your visual content instantly to create a heat map, predictively highlighting areas that will catch the attention of the user.

The TINT Attention Score Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is built on extensive neuroscience research and trained on one of the industry’s largest eye-tracking databases to accurately predict behavior and visual attention which in turn influence the decision making and buying behaviors of your audience.

Ready to get started? Click here.

Gain a comprehensive understanding of why your content will or will not convert with Cognitive Demand and Clarity Scores

The makeup of visual content, placement of images, logos, and text can all influence the decision-making process through visual attention. Beyond the heat map, TINT Attention Score gives you an in-depth analysis of your content including cognitive load and clarity.

Let’s break down what Cognitive Demand and Clarity scores mean when analyzing your content for attention-grabbing details. 

Cognitive Demand scores the level of time and difficulty it takes the user to understand your content. A low score indicates that a user can process the content within a few seconds. This is good! The lower the better when it comes to cognitive demand. A high score means users will spend much more time processing the content. Hard to comprehend imagery can cause the viewer to ignore or simply scroll on without engaging, and we don’t want that!

Moving on to the Clarity score, this is based on how visible the key areas of your content are. If key areas of the content are hard to see, clarity for the user will be low. If multiple areas of the content draw attention in a clear way, the score will be higher. 

Talk to a TINT Customer Success Specialist 

Attention is a scarce resource and research has found that less than one third of ads get the full attention of an audience.  Visual content that gets attention is essential when it comes to strategically planning content campaigns, whether that be on a channel using an organic or paid approach.

Say you are planning a paid ad, set to launch on social media. You’ll want to be sure the content is achieving the expected engagement for a campaign within a set budget and goal. An ad that is not seen is worthless and even with ads that ARE seen, every second counts as the longer people looked at an ad, the bigger the effect on Return on Ad Spend and conversions.

The age-old method of choosing the “right” content is by relying heavily on benchmarking data, competitor research, and a little bit of Marketing gut and what “looks good”. But none of these can guarantee how the content will perform or resonate with the target audience, and before now there hasn’t been a way to gauge the attention grabbing potential of a particular piece of content. Sure, once a campaign is running we can change out images and rearrange text, but at the cost of budget, opportunity, and time wasted. 

The role of visual attention in the interaction between the environment and the mind and its influence on the consumer cannot be overstated. As you can already see, choosing the right visual content to publish across channels and campaigns is a daunting task, and to be realistic, sometimes scary. TINT’s Attention Score allows us marketers to be able to look behind the eyes of our user, learn what will grab attention, and use the instant results to test and optimize visual creative BEFORE publishing to maximize attention and drive the desired behaviors.

So how can you get access to TINT Attention Score?

Speak to one of our TINTtastic experts today!

The post Want to know how people will perceive your content? There’s a tool for that appeared first on TINT.

SEMrush found that “engagement increases by 28% when consumers can view a mixture of user-generated product videos and official brand authored content.” This mixture can account for the majority of an event’s advertising. But, how can you put these practices into play with your esports marketing strategy? Check out these 3 helpful tips on how to use your attendees to curate content that will create lasting impressions for your event and it’s sponsors. 

Attract UGC Twitch Content through Virtual Contests

Creating and finding content for your event can seem daunting, but why not have your event attendees do it for you? A simple yet effective way to beef up your esports marketing strategy is to set up a social media contest specific to your gaming event. This engaging activity can dramatically increase the overall engagement from your streamer attendees and esports leagues to create meaningful user-generated content (UGC). TINT makes it easy to attract UGC. Digital signage and projection can display a TINTmix, now with a first-of-its-kind integration with Twitch. The website embed pushes live stream content to remote audiences. TINT moderation tools make it easy to curate and display the best content.

These contests can be fun and showcase ‘the best’ attendees ‘’trick shots’ in Call of Duty, crazy combos in League of Legends, or any game that you see fit for your contest. This has the potential to create tournaments at your event, all while encouraging friendly competition amongst entertainers, and excite your esports fans for a chance to see their submission make the cut on your event’s digital screens.

Get Creative with your Merch

Making your merch wearable is one thing, but making it instagrammable is another thing. Although the esports industry is still fairly new, follow trendsetter esports team, LA Thieves (100 Thieves) footsteps and become a stronghold for fashion in your event merchandise. Incorporating fashion-forward statements on your attendee’s attire and accessories can cause them to want to share more content of themselves at your event while sporting your merchandise. Take it one step further by partnering with esports athletes and endemic brands for a sponsorship your attendees will resonate well with.

Entice your guests by creating a special hashtag for them to easily share content with a chance at being highlighted and shared with your followers.

Don’t forget the After Party, Stay Engaged with Attendees

All too often we fail to remember after an event may be the most important step in curating everlasting memories and impressions that leave your guests wanting more. Set up email campaigns, virtual ads, giveaways, and regular social media content even after your event has ended to keep up with your fan base and attract new esports enthusiasts for the next.

Curate your after-event marketing strategy by catering content to competitive video gaming audiences categorized by the genre of games they like:

• Player vs. Player (PvP)
• First-Person Shooter (FPS)
• Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
• Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA)
• Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)

and what your event will offer them. 

The days of your event being drab is now over. Especially in a newish industry like esports. Take the initiative to up your event’s game to the highest level (get it?) and create an event worth remembering for many attendees and esports professionals. To start the conversation and drive attendee engagement at your next conference or convention, whether involved with gaming or not, TINT can help collect and showcase social content in many fun and exciting ways. Request a demo here.

The post Social Media for Esports Marketing: Using Unique Content to Get More Fans Engaged appeared first on TINT.

Now let’s take a look at what TINT has been up to!

TINTmix: now with Twitch and Facebook connections

Instead of choosing one platform over another, why not compile content from all? We continue to make our TINTmix boards more inclusive by adding connections with Twitch and Facebook Video. Simply create your board using our many layouts, and add the URL of the media you’d like shown. Take it one step further by picking the duration of the media to be played.

Oh…And did we mention that our Twitch connection is the first of it’s kind in the market?

Search and Filter Text Within Images

Advanced OCR allows for you to manually filter for images that contain text or search text within an image to easily filter for brand specific content or a particular keyword, and yet another way to quickly find the content that is right for you.

If you are interested in utilizing this feature, please speak to your TINTastic customer success rep! Don’t have TINT yet? Click here.

Pause Social Feeds instead of Removing

Say “bye bye” to removing feeds and “Hello” to our new pausing feature! Gone are the days of removing a feed to have all your collected content disappear. This new feature will allow TINT users to keep the content already collected and re-start at any time.

Cookie consent for Experience Builder

A feature request by one of our customers (you know who you are) that coincidentally made for a great upgrade to our overall user experience! The new cookie consent pop-up feature in our UGC experiences, social contests, and campaign creator platform, Experience Builder, will make it easier than ever to create experiences that are fully compliant with GDPR requirements.

For more information on these amazing updates and more, request a demo or speak with your customer success representative!

The post TINT Talk: July 2021 Product Updates appeared first on TINT.