Small Businesses: Why You Should Focus on Your Visual Content

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Payman Taei, founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning web design and development company that creates custom web and mobile sites and applications for businesses and organizations.

You’ve been working hard and churning out long-ish blog posts and articles along with a few images but to your dismay, you’re still not getting enough traffic or engagement on your blog. In this age of all sorts of big data, people are often bombarded with a lot of information they either don’t need or don’t know how to consume.

Three-sentence paragraphs, bullet points, sub-headings and bold font can only do so much to hold someone’s attention on your blog. It’s probably time to take your visual strategy to the next level.

But there’s an easy way to do it. If you want more people to read, share and engage with your content, visual content is a perfect answer to hold the attention of busy, distracted and hyper-engaged people.

Visual includes everything you can think of and have seen on a blog — infographics, graphs, piecharts, videos, memes, cartoons, maps etc. Using visuals, your message is conveyed much quicker and more effectively than writing a 1000-word article. Not only that, visuals get shared a lot more than text.

Still not convinced? Here are 6 reasons why you should consider going visual.

Recommended Reading: Top Tips & Resources To Creating Content People Want To Share

1. Visuals are snackable

Big data is making people restless – we want to consume more and in less time. Visuals fit the bill perfectly. They are snackable, yet provide immense value.

The Two Leaves tea company’s website hardly looks like your typical e-commerce site. It’s got stunning photos of their products and a tea-picker as the background of the site’s pages. This sets them apart from their competition as a refreshing brand and also highlights their hand-picked tea. Natural!

2. Visuals are Memorable

Depending on how you utilize them, visuals have the potential to be as memorable as you want them to be. Who can forget the success kid meme used so cleverly by Virgin Media? Surely this made you chuckle, didn’t it? There’s nothing more “visible" than visuals.

(Image Source: newrisingmedia.com)

Another example is the yTravel Blog. Run by a husband and wife team, their Facebook page regularly posts of travel tips among other visuals on their social media page. They’ve obtained 26,000+ likes on Facebook and 4.3 million followers on Pinterest by using this simple visual strategy.

(Image Source: facebook.com/ytravelblog)

3. Visuals are attractive

Open a magazine and you’ll notice the first thing that grabs your attention is a visual. It could be an ad or a featured article. Heck, you probably bought the magazine in the first place because of its cover, right?

Design-made-easy program Canva uses a lot of beautiful and shareable design tips that don’t need much text to accompany them.

(Image Source: blog.canva.com)

(Image Source: blog.canva.com)

The point here is that visuals attract attention. It’s all about making sure that you use the right visual for your marketing to create an impact in your customer’s mind.

4. We’re wired for this stuff

Did you know that cute images arouse the same pleasure centers in your brain the same way sex, a good meal or drugs does? 90% of the information that come to our brain is visual. It’s also processed 60,000 times faster than text.

Hence, why your brain just loves visual content. This is why marketing company and blog, HubSpot, uses cheeky YouTube videos to teach marketing lessons. Their YouTube channel page uses humor to present a point in their videos. And what’s not to love about their Gangnam Style parody, aptly titled "Inbound Style"?

The work that they’re doing using visuals must be working as they’ve now got more than 200,000 likes on YouTube.

5. Everyone "Gets" Visuals

The great thing about visuals is that they’re in a universal language that everyone can understand and remember. Take a look at your social media feed and you’ll realize that what cuts the noise is probably an image or a video.

The reason is visuals will simplify complex ideas (infographics, graphs), tell a story or teach a concept (video scribes, illustrations) and overall, improve a reader’s experience. Dan Zarrella explains the effect of hashtags and quotes using two simple graphs.

(Image Source: danzarella.com)

He found that the effect of hashtags boosted retweets by 55% and tweets with quotation marks increased retweets by 30%.

(Image Source: danzarella.com)

But what if your clients are businesses? Can you use visual marketing successfully? Turns out, yes you can.

B2B email marketing company, Constant Contact, is killing it on Pinterest. Their “Quotes for Small Business Owners" board ranks #2 on Google, with more than 6,000 board followers. To top it off, they’ve neatly divided their page into 111 boards so there’s something is for everyone. The result? More than 21K followers on Pinterest.

6. Visuals are like roadmaps

A good visual strategy will show your readers what they should do next. Should they click on an “Add to Cart" button? Do they leave a comment? Where do they go next?

In this way, they build trust. They lay a roadmap for your visitors while humanizing your interaction with them, as demonstrated by the previous HubSpot video. Once people “like" you, they become better prospects and are more receptive to what you suggest.

Conclusion

Visual marketing should be one of your objectives in 2014. You may want to hire a graphics person to design visual elements. Yes, it could be an expensive investment but in the long run, it should pay off.

But, if you’re lacking in finances or more of a DIY person, there are easy-to-use online tools that you can use to create infographics, CTA banners, presentations, animations etc for free.

Don’t just stop there – make sure you also test your efforts. Measure what’s working and what’s not. You never know, 2014 could be the year that you go viral!

View the Original article

Square Releases Spanish Version Of POS App To Support Latino Businesses

Square is releasing its point of sale app, Register, in Spanish, in an effort to onboard more Latino businesses. The company says Square Register, dashboard reports and analytics, online market, and mobile products are now localized in Spanish across the U.S.

Square is also going on a national tour to connect with Latino sellers and their communities in Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Latino-owned businesses comprise 22.4% of Florida businesses, 20.7% of Texas businesses and 16.5% of California businesses, according to the company.

While an IPO is reportedly on hold, onboarding more businesses appears to be one of Square’s major goals right now.

The payments company has been actively exploring ways to bring on businesses, both large and small, onto the platform. We heard Square has been debuting more custom pricing deals for medium- to large-sized businesses with more payments volume, and ramping up sales hiring. Square has also started offering cash advances to merchants.

Appealing to Latino businesses is a smart tactic–and outreach strategy will be key in whether the company can bring a meaningful amount of this segment of merchants online.

Unbabel Launches A Human-Edited Machine Translation Service To Help Businesses Go Global, Localize Customer Support

Today, you can be anywhere in the world in a matter of clicks. Thanks to globalization and the plucky old Information Superhighway, our world is shrinking. Inquisitive globetrotters can pop over to Google Earth, pilot through volcanoes in Hawaii or navigate a few Norwegian fjords and still be home for dinner. Vasco de Gama? Not impressed.

The sheer number of people not only coming online but shopping, watching, learning and consuming online — from every corner of the globe — is staggering, and every business wants to take advantage. Businesses now know they need to be where their customers are and that they can’t be one-size-fits all if they hope to thrive in today’s global marketplace.

The problem, of course, is that their new, global customer rarely seems to be speaking the same language. Not surprisingly, translation remains a big, expensive problem for businesses today. Most companies recognize the importance of localizing their websites and content, but few have the time, money or inclination to go one step further and localize that rapidly updating content or section of their site, their FAQs or their customer service interactions.

For most sites, these last two points, especially, are usually what break the budget — for those lucky (or smart) enough to even have a line of the budget dedicated to translation spend. This is where Unbabel wants to help. The Y Combinator-backed startup is launching today with a new kind of online translation service that aims to make it easy and affordable for a business of any size to translate all of its online content — from marketing collateral and FAQs to customer service emails, both static and dynamic.

To save businesses from breaking the bank on translation services, Unbabel has developed technology that combines machine learning-based auto-translation with crowdsourced editing to offer quality translation at what it claims is “one-fifth” the going rate. By contracting Unbabel directly or by using the company’s REST-based API to integrate translation directly into their workflow, businesses can translate all of their website’s content in a flash at $0.02 per word.

Now translating over 30,000 words/day for over 30 customers, Unbabel’s secret sauce leverages artificial intelligence software and its stable of over 3,100 editors (or translators) to translate a website’s content from one language into its customer’s language of choice. First, its machine learning technology translates the text from source into the target language, at which point it uses its Mechanical Turk-style distribution system to assign editing tasks to the right translators, who then check the translation for errors and for stylistic inconsistencies.

Unbabel editors work remotely, via their laptops or mobile phones, on translations, which co-founder Vasco Pedro says provides the key to faster translations. This, combined with the efficiency of its task distribution and administration algorithms, provides a level of efficiency that allows editors to earn up to $10/hour working for Unbabel.

The startup is also hoping to appeal to businesses looking to cater to international customers not only by offering integration through its REST-based API or by allowing them to quickly fill out their online form to order translations, but by offering email-based translation as well. To help with international, localized-style support, Unbabel offers businesses the ability to provide customer support in a customer’s native language via email as well at $3 per 150 words. Businesses can simply send an email to a language-designated inbox it sets up with Unbabel, and the company will reply with a translation in less than an hour.

Beyond email, Unbabel also offers a separate pricing tier for FAQs, which allows businesses to translate their user’s comments (and their own) so they can follow all the whole conversation on their website at $5 for every 250 words. In turn, businesses can use the startup’s translation technology to translating their social streams, as Unbabel will convert each tweet, post and comment into their language of choice at $1 for every 50 words.

This means that businesses can send Unbabel what they need translated online, through its API or by email, which the company then converts into micro-tasks, automatically translating the source and turns over to its community of editors to refine. The content is then delivered, recombined and translated in near real-time. Today, the startup supports nearly 14 languages, including English to 13 other languages, or nearly any combination thereof.

However, co-founders Vasco Calais Pedro, Sofia Pessanha, João Graça, Bruno Prezado Sliva, and Hugo Silva tell us that they’re working to add more languages to its roster, and hope to begin supporting new languages over the course of the coming year.

fTranslate your user’s comments and your own, follow all the conversations on your website.

Unbabel helps you provide customer support to your international customers in their native language. Just send an email to a language designated inbox and Unbabel will reply with a translation.

Unbabel editors work on their laptops or mobile phones, this is key to faster translations.

irst, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence software translates the text from source to target language.

For most sites the last two of these especially can rapidly break any budget set aside for translation. Unbabel intends to change this using sophisticated technology that combines machine learning based auto-translation and crowd-sourced post-editing. This latter also uses machine learning to optimize the set of editors applied to a job.

Combining auto-translation and effective human editing as a service is unique and new. With Unbabel, for the first time it is now affordable for a website to translate all of their content, both static and dynamic, from marketing to FAQs, to customer service emails.

Unbabel also has released a REST-based API with which companies can integrate translation directly into their workflow. The company is growing rapidly and currently has nearly 2600 translators and are translating over 25,000 words per day for over 40 paying customers.

Unbabel was founded by Vasco Calais Pedro, Sofia Pessanha, João Graça, Bruno Prezado Sliva, and Hugo Silva. They have raised funds from Y Combinator, YCVC, Faber Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners. With over 700K words translated thus far and over 40 paying customers, Unbabel has raised just over $400K to date from Y Combinator, YCVC, Faber Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners.

For more, find Unbabel at home here.