Visual Marketing & Content Repurposing with @ryanmccready1 of @Venngage #vcbuzz

When it comes to visual marketing, we can never have enough tools! New image editing and enhancing tools bring new strategies and new ideas of how we can re-package our content into something awesome.

With that in mind, we are featuring another great image editing tool today: @Venngage

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About Ryan

Ryan McCready is content editor, social lead manager and sometimes designer @Venngage

@Venngage is an infographic creation and editing tool that allows you to create beautiful infographics, reports, posters and other graphics

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a social media marketer? Please share your career story!

About 5 years ago I created a tech news site that reviewed new startups/gadgets, and realized that I would have to become a social media expert to stand out in that space. So spent a year or so building my skills and following before joining Venngage.

And since then I have been leading some part of our social media efforts. Right now I am very focused on expanding our Pinterest traffic, which has grown 10-20x over the past year.

Yes! It wasn’t exactly an accident but didn’t think I would ever be a social media manager. I got my degree in Economics!

Q2 What is @Venngage? And can it help in content marketing?

Venngage is a graphic design tool that has thousands of templates that marketers can use. With everything from social media graphics, to annual reports, and even mind map templates. Really if you need to design something for your marketing team, Venngage has it.

Not a single one! Think they are not worth the time at this point.
— Ryan McCready (@RyanMcCready1) September 10, 2019

You can check out all of our templates here

And our blog is full of design guides and marketing articles.

Woooo! Thanks! We are really working hard on creating new templates each week. #vcbuzz
— Ryan McCready (@RyanMcCready1) September 10, 2019

Q3 Are there some creative visual marketing campaigns @Venngage can help with? Maybe some examples?

Like I said in my previous tweet, if you need to design something Venngage can help you out. Our marketing users not only use our templates for things like posters or newsletters but also internal communication visuals like mind maps or decision trees.

One thing that I have seen work really well lately on LinkedIn is to create small presentations on Venngage like this. They get like 10x more engagement than flat images, and go “viral” or trend all the time.

I can see how those can be easily re-purposed on other platforms! RT @RyanMcCready1: create small presentations on Venngage https://t.co/wy9DxMUTWK #vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) September 10, 2019

Have you studied Pinterest strategy much? Just today we were discussing whether to delete a pin that outranks our own content, hoping our content will then rank OR leave it as an alternate path because that might not work @RyanMcCready1 #vcbuzz
— Gail Gardner (@GrowMap) September 10, 2019

I usually go through my boards and delete low performing pins, but I’m not sure about this situation. I think you should leave it and instead focus on boosting the other post.

@GrowMap This can also happen with Youtube videos. Actually happens a lot to me! #vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) September 10, 2019

@seosmarty My thought was that we don't know whether deleting a pin would cause our content to rank. Maybe nothing would appear then and you'd be shooting yourself in the foot to delete the pin. The odds are they are going to get to your site anyway. #vcbuzz
— Gail Gardner (@GrowMap) September 10, 2019

I'd agree. Deleting should not help your own site to rank better… At least that's my guess #vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) September 10, 2019

Agree!

Mainly because we share so much content, I don't think it hurts to clean up the "bad pins." #vcbuzz
— Ryan McCready (@RyanMcCready1) September 10, 2019

Q4 How to use @Venngage for content repurposing and why should anyone use repurposing as part of their content marketing strategy?

At Venngage we repurpose content from all of our blog posts, & sometimes that content even gets turned into a template. One of the easiest things you can do is turn any lists/step by step instructions into a simple infographic or presentation as I shared earlier.

A4 The 50 Places I put in Where to Repurpose Your Web Conferences as Video Content work just as well for @Venngage and any other type of content or visual #vcbuzz
— Gail Gardner (@GrowMap) September 10, 2019

Almost all of the visual content I share on social is an infographic or simple graphic that contains useful/helpful content from that article. I hate sharing just a simple blog header or stock images, those just add to the noise instead of standing out.

A4 The #1 reason you should turn your research into custom images is so that other writers can add you to their content easily. I can think of 1 short infographic I used on 4 different sites – very large sites with attribution/link to source. #vcbuzz
— Gail Gardner (@GrowMap) September 10, 2019

Oh yes! This is how we built the Venngage blog in the early days. We created a Game of Thrones infographic that got so many links and traffic, that it brought down our site for a day or two.

AGREE. Wrote a whole article about it actually: https://t.co/wQsO4tl36Z #vcbuzz
— Ryan McCready (@RyanMcCready1) September 10, 2019

TRUTH! Catch more of your audience around the web by being everywhere! #vcbuzz
— Hire Bloggers (@hireblogger) September 10, 2019

Yes! More touchpoints that can push people towards your brand.

@RyanMcCready1 What size square image works across all social media? Doesn't Twitter cut off the top and bottom much of the time if your images are square? #vcbuzz
— Gail Gardner (@GrowMap) September 10, 2019

Yes! I guess I don’t share much on Twitter. But for LinkedIn, Pinterest and Facebook, I always go square.

I have found Pinterest is just visual SEO, and you can approach it the same way you do for Google. So instead of chasing trends, we strive to rank on big keywords.

Q5 What are some visual marketing trends you’ve been excited about?

I’m very excited about the explosion of tools that are making design easy basically everyone. You don’t have to be a designer to create something great for social.

In fact, I have created ALL of the recent images on Venngage’s social platforms with Venngage. And I’m not a trained designer at all!

My GOOD friend now works for @TailwindApp, so I'd recommend looking at that tool for Pinterest analysis and posting
#vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) September 10, 2019