The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make with Visual Content (And the Simple Fix)

Speaker A: Here's something that might make you rethink every piece of visual content that you've ever put out. Believe it or not, consistency matters more than creativity, and I know that's a hard pill to swallow, especially for marketers who pride themselves on being creative. But my guest today, Jim MacLeod, makes a compelling case that the number one thing holding most brands and businesses and personal brands back visually isn't the lack of good ideas. It's a lack of visual discipline. And in a world where AI tools like Canva and ChatGPT are putting design power in everyone's hands, whether they have a design background or not, that gap is only getting wider, not smaller. If you want to up your visual and creative game, you'll want to make sure you listen all the way to the very end of this next episode of the youe Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

Speaker B: Digital Social Media Content Influencer Marketing blogging, podcasting, vlogging, Tiktoking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side because Neal Shafer is your Digital Marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing One episode at a time. This is your Digital marketing coach and this is Neal Shafer.

Speaker A: Hey everybody, welcome back to episode number 445 of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. I am your digital marketing coach, of course, Neal Shaffer and and I have a really special episode for you today, one that is a little personal for me and I think is going to be genuinely eye opening for a lot of you. I want to remind you at this juncture that I for the first time announced on my weekly newsletter of the next book that I am working on which is going to be about the convergence of all the artificial intelligence education and experiences that I've been sharing and insight that I've been sharing here on this podcast together with all of my advice on personal branding together with the topic of writing and specifically writing a book. So if that sounds like your jam, and I think even if you are not interested in writing a book, just learning about the AI processes that I'm using to help me write a book and obviously about personal branding which I've never really devoted a lot of book pages to in my previous books, I think you'll want to keep up to

Speaker C: date on what's happening with that.

Speaker A: So make sure you go over to newsletter if you're not signed, um up to my list. So I can keep you up to date and be on the lookout for when I, you know, mention.

Speaker C: Sort of Click here if you want

Speaker A: to join my my arc team and get first access to the book as well as all the other things that I plan to do to promote around it. All right, hopefully that made sense. As I like to say, I don't tell a lot of people this, but my first language at home is Japanese. If you know me, I've spent time in Japan and my wife is Japanese

Speaker C: and I met her there and lived

Speaker A: there for 15 years. So I often have to, after speaking Japanese all day with my family, switch gears and speak English. So sometimes I say some things that don't sound they come from a native English speaker. I know it's sort of funny, but yeah, that's sort of the reason why. So I'm always sort of shifting those gears back and forth between English and Japanese every day. So forgive me, give me a little bit of grace if I mess over some words of the English language as a result. Okay, let's get to the topic of today's podcast. So something I've been thinking about a lot lately is we're living in this moment where AI image generators, and it used to be, you know, things like midjourney where we had to sign up for Discord, which I did not like to do. And then Canva, Adobe Express brought these into the visual tools that we use. And now we have visual tools just inside of Claude, ChatGPT, Google, Gemini. So all of this has made it easier than ever for marketers and business owners to create our own visual content without necessarily relying on anyone else to do it for us. And on the surface, it sounds great, but here's the problem, and I'll be honest, because I've been guilty of this myself. Having access to design tools is not the same thing as knowing how to design. And when we don't know what we don't know, we put things out into the world that look like they were made with a template, because they were. And maybe you see these a lot as well on an Instagram or a Pinterest. Or we generate an AI image that feels somehow off, and we can't quite explain why visual marketing is more important right now than it has ever been. Every social platform, every YouTube thumbnail, every email header, it all communicates something about your brand before a single word is read. And to be honest, I think a lot of us are winging it. So that's exactly why I Am so excited to bring today's guest onto the show. Jim MacLeod is a graphic designer turned marketer, or more accurately, both at the same time, and the author of a brand new book called the Visual Marketer published on Joe Polizi's Tilt publishing platform. With a forward by my social media cousin, Mark Schaefer, I think that gives you enough street cred about Jim. Jim and I go back about a decade to when he spoke at my Social Tools Summit conference, the conference that I co founded back in 2014 and 15 for those that might remember. And he spoke about visual social media for B2B companies. And his thinking was ahead of its time then and it still is now. So to give you a preview in today's conversation, you're going to learn how to build a visual brand identity that people actually recognize, even when your logo is invisible. Why your visual content needs to serve your audience's expectations before it serves your own creativity and how to research what those expectations are and how to approach content repurposing with a consistent brand identity baked in from the very beginning, including a pillar content strategy that Jim maps out in his book. This is one of those conversations that made me want to go revisit my own visual branding the moment it was over. And I think you are going to feel the same way. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Jim MacLeod.

Speaker B: You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neal Shafer.

Speaker D: Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the your, uh, digital Marketing coach podcast. You know, it's always great to have an author on the podcast, but when that author is an old friend and there's a story behind it, it makes this even, even more meaningful, both for me, for guests, and hopefully for you. So we're gonna roll the clock back around 10 years. Yes, there was life 10 years ago before TikTok. And 10 years ago I actually, with a co founder, co founded obviously a social media marketing technology conference called the Social Tools Summit. And this was held beginning in Boston where my co founder was located. And as we were reaching out to potential speakers and I wanted to bring on actual corporate practitioners, there was a gentleman from Extreme Networks. Now, if you're in the B2B space, like I was very, very famous prominent company in B2B, you know, technology, but he wanted to speak about visual social media. Now this was during the time one of my bloggers, Julia Campbell, she's very big in the Pinterest and nonprofit space. She was talking about Pinterest. We had Sue B. Zimmerman for those that remember was there. She was our fellow like Instagram content creator for the day. And my guest today, Jim, was up there on stage actually speaking about visual social from a for a B2B company. Now, as I mentioned, he is an author. He just came out just a few months ago with this book. The visual marketer Mark Schaefer wrote the Forward. He's on Joe Polizi's Tilt publishing platform. He has a praise for the visual marketer from David Armano. These are like three of my favorite marketers and people in the world. So it's been well vetted and I just want to read you. Uh, Jim was very nice where he mentions me in introduction. About a decade ago, Neal Schaefer, a now marketing authority, consultant and speaker, contacted me. He was organizing a new conference and wanted me to speak at it. He invited me because he said I had a story he hadn't heard before. A designer who later became a marketer. At the time, I didn't think my career arc was that unique. Over the years, I've talked to many marketers who admitted their jobs would be easier if they had my design background. And I will tell you, and as Jim points out in his book, and I'm sure he'll talk about today, we know that the. The world of marketing today is visual on, um, any social media platform, on, on web platforms, wherever you are, on, on YouTube. So as marketers, as business owners, as consultants, as entrepreneurs, we all need to get better with our visual. And I can't think of any better person or any better book to introduce us as to how to do it than Today's guest, Jim McLeod. I know that was a really long introduction, Jim, but a heartfelt welcome to the your digital marketing coach podcast.

Speaker E: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Speaker D: Yeah, a man, a few words, but obviously a man of great experience and intelligence and a lot to share today. So I guess let's begin with that path. And I know one of the things you do, Jim, the last time I ran into you was at Joe Polizi's Content Entrepreneur Expo and you were talking about helping graphic designers with their business models, with their businesses. You're also a marketer. Let's begin with sort of that transition from graphic design to marketing and B2B marketing, no less.

Speaker C: How did this all start?

Speaker E: Yeah, so I was working in just as a designer for different companies in the early stages of my career, and then it landed at Extreme, or the company that eventually became Extreme. It was called Enterisys at the time before Extreme acquired them. And it was a small 15 person marketing team. But these people were so advanced in so many different areas. And I'd worked for a marketing agency in the past. I worked kind of adjacent to marketing, but this was the first time I was really sitting in all of those marketing meetings, all the kind of brainstorming and session and just strategy meetings and I really started to learn a whole lot. And I'd been building websites up until that point, so I kind of, kind of also had this sideway in. But once I started to see it all come together then it kind of dawned on me. It was like, oh, what I'm doing because I'm already touching every piece of marketing that's going out except for press releases, you know, so I already see everything that's coming through because the creative team, the design team ended up almost being like the central hub for everything that marketing was doing. And so that really just, I really started to understand how it all comes together. And then I was able to actually start suggesting things and get into branding and content and social and all of a sudden, you know, graphic design just kept kind of spreading sideways into all these different areas.

Speaker C: With marketing and I mean before that were was your original strength graphic design or is that something you more acquired as you got deeper into marketing?

Speaker E: No, graphic design. I've got a bachelor's in graphic design. I originally wanted to be an illustrator and studied graphic design as a backup to that, but then found I really enjoyed design. So I was just ah, a designer, you know, straight out of school and working with the marketing teams, you know, it kind of, it lit a new fire under me that I didn't know I originally had. It was one of those things where it's like, oh, I wish I'd almost studied this in the beginning. But because I have that design background and a lot of design is figuring out what's the most important thing, what do I want the viewer to see. And a lot of the basics of design can easily be layered onto the basics of marketing, which is think about the end user, what do they want? What problems are you trying to solve? And design is very similar in a lot of those ways.

Speaker C: So did you see once you were part of this, you know, 15 person marketing team is not a small marketing team for a lot of the people listening to this podcast by any means. But once you saw how marketing worked,

Speaker A: did it give you this clear?

Speaker C: And obviously this was, I think you began at extreme, the 2010s. So over time has your approach to this design approach to marketing, I guess how has it changed over the last decade to get us fast forward to where we are today?

Speaker E: Yeah, it's, I'm always looking at things. The design aspect of it forces me to look at things from the end user point of view. And so that, that applies to ux, that applies to digital, applies to a lot of different areas in marketing. So that, you know, I'm not just making something that looks cool, I'm making something that lets the viewer know the basics of can they solve my problem? Do they understand my problem? Can they solve my problem? Can they solve it now? Right. So it's a lot of what's the message, what's the story that's going into the design, but then also the marketing campaign and marketing messaging overall. So it all fits nicely together.

Speaker A: So, Jim, um, I've worked with a

Speaker C: lot of designers in the past, both with clients and myself with, you know, other freelancers. You are hyper focused on the end customer. And after reading your book, the Customer Experience as a graphic designer, I haven't really met other graphic designers that have that focus. They're more focused on the design trends and sort of the look and feel. And I've never really heard them talk about customer experience, customer expectations. Would you say you're an outlier? I mean, how were you able to have that perspective where I think a lot of others in your industry, and there are some that do, don't get me wrong, but a lot that don't. How did you become different? Or am I misunderstanding your fellow graphic designers?

Speaker E: No, there definitely are some. And I know when I first got out of school, my only goal was to make it look cool. Right? Just I wanted something that would really grab attention. But then I was able to work with some great creative directors and some great marketing folks to really kind of change my perspective on things. And that, that really helped me a whole lot. And then actually working with a bunch of junior designers and kind of seeing that, that evolution where they, they're uh, coming out of school and they're laying things out and you know, I could kind of see, well, if you flip that headline and subhead, it's going to resonate a lot better. Or if you put that image over there, you know, people are going to be able to come in and think of it that way. One thing I talk about in the book is how people kind of view through the actual image or the graphic or whatever. And thinking about that, your graphics become so much more successful. And I worked with this one professor who was great, where we were doing a Creative review. And he banned the word like. It doesn't matter whether you like something or not. It has to work. Graphic design has a job to do. It has to convey a message and get somebody to take an action. It's not about something pretty. It's not art, it's design. So hearing that, you know, just learning things over the years, you know, it doesn't matter whether you like it or not. Is the design. Is the graphic doing the job it's supposed to do? So there are some designers who are great at that, and there are other designers who just want something that looks cool. And because I've looked at, I can't tell you how many hundreds of portfolios over the years as a hiring manager, and I can see who knows how to get a message across and who's just designing something cool. And it's. It's one of those things that. That just kind of comes with age and hopefully if you're in the right environment, because, you know, my first couple of jobs where I was just doing straight design, if I didn't have the right creative directors and bosses along the way, I might not have gotten out of that. Is this cool design that I was originally focused on?

Speaker C: Very cool. And, yeah, I think anyone who has ever. Well, not everybody here is an author, obviously, but if you've ever written a book and you think about the design elements of a book cover, you could design something cool. But if it looks out of place on Amazon, when someone is looking for a book on that subject or on that genre, you're not going to sell. It's not going to do its job. So, uh, yeah, that's really a great concept. And I think a lot of people listening probably already have their mouths open saying, oh, my gosh, I've never thought about my visuals that way. So before we get into some of the actionable advice that you've promised for today, and I think you've already given us a lot to think about in all honesty, in the short amount of time. What led you then to actually write your book? The Visual Marketer.

Speaker E: It was listening to Mark Schaefer's book Known, and it was, you know, like, all of a sudden, it just hit me like a, um, bolt of lightning where I was like, oh, you know, because it's all about, like, what are you going to be known for? What's the one thing that you can do that nobody else can do? And I realized, oh, I've got this, you know, this Venn diagram of design and marketing and that overlap there I can. I can really help people learn these things because going back a couple steps, when ChatGPT came out and everyone started to adopt AI, and there were AI image generators before ChatGPT, but ChatGPT is really, when it hit the mainstream, I immediately realized a lot of designers are going to lose their jobs because now you're going to have marketing managers who are like, I can do, uh, it myself. Or a team of seven designers might only need three or four designers. So I realized a lot of designers are going to lose their jobs and how can I help there? But then once I had that kind of realization of what this book could be, I realized that means a lot of marketers are going to have to become designers because they're using canva, because you're using AI, because they're using all sorts of do it yourself tools, but they don't have the design knowledge and skills that graphic designers, trained graphic designers have. And they don't realize what they don't know.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker E: Uh, like everyone says, good. They can only see as much as they know. But the thing is, as you learn more, you get better and better and better. You know, think about drawing or painting or really any skill you think you're great until you learn a little more. Until you learn a little more. You know, my son likes to draw. He thinks he's as good as the top artists in the world right now. He's still got a ways to go, but he looks at that stuff, he looks at his drawings and somebody else's drawings and sees they're almost on the same level. You know, I know more than that, so I'm always trying to help him push up. Same thing applies to marketers who don't realize that the stuff that they're putting out, all sorts of gradients and drop shadows and just every crazy PowerPoint thing that they can put on there, they don't realize that that's actually bad and taking away from their designs. So I wrote the book to say, here's what you can do to actually make your designs effective. If you're a marketer, you don't have a design background.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Thank you for your contribution. And you're absolutely right. I do feel myself included. More marketers and entrepreneurs are using AI to generate those images without that background. Right. And, uh, you know, it's funny, I was, uh, originally an art history major at Amherst College, and the worst grade I got was introduction art, because I thought that this drawing I did that was worth 50% of my grade was awesome. But then after I heard the professor's critique. As you said, there is, you know, you're never at the top, there's always someone above you. It's a long, lifelong learning process. Right. That we can't expect. Just because an AI tool promises with a prompt to be able to generate something doesn't mean it's good. And you know, I've talked to some people that have generated websites using Gamma, which was originally created for presentations, and it just doesn't look right. So from a feeling good perspective that you were able to use AI to generate a website, congratulations. But will it really do its job based on how we're used to engaging with websites is a whole other story. And I believe that there's a huge delta and I see you nodding that, that you know, this delta that we need to bridge, that I know your book will help. So. All right, let's get into where we start. So in your book, you start with the concept of a brand identity. And part of branding obviously is being consistent. So for all those listening that have nilly willied, maybe they've used various canva templates over time, like myself, I'll be honest, my visual branding is probably a little bit all over the place. Where would you start for everybody listening of, uh, starting to sort of get all of your brand identity in one consistent place.

Speaker E: Yeah, it's almost a little bit of a pyramid if you think about it. So you've got your logo at the top. You want to always be consistent with your logo. Then beneath that is going to be colors and typefaces. If you can own a color, you know, just stick to that one color all the time. Same with typefaces or different fonts. You want to stick with that and just be consistent with that. And then you get into imagery and maybe content you create and it's kind of. It bows out as you get deeper into it. But the main thing is establish your logo. And then almost on equal footing is colors and typography. Because if you use the same colors and typography all the time, then people will start to recognize that even if your logo is not on there, or your logo is just kind of, you know, more subtle on there, because you know the most popular brands in the world, you know their color. Right? Coca Cola red, Home Depot orange, T Mobile, magenta. Right. Like you just say one of those words and a color immediately pops into anybody's brain because they have hammered down on their colors and they own their colors. And I think that's, that's one of the things That I see a lot with Canva and I see this with Instagram. You know, I'll look at somebody's Instagram page and you can tell it's all Canva templates and it's all different colors. Like, they're never consistent with their colors or their typography or anything. But if you can just kind of lock that down, which is where the pro version of Canva becomes helpful, because you can establish your, your brand identity in there and then stick to that. If you can just be consistent with those elements, then you're going to be in good shape. You're going to be way ahead of everyone else.

Speaker C: So every social media post, every banner should stick to those colors then. But I guess my question is, you know, and everybody who listens to this knows that I'm an Adobe Express brand ambassador. So when you say Canva, I say Adobe Express. But hey, pick your poison. Same concept of a brand identity, but the brand identities there push you to have like 5 col. And let's say, like me, you have a, uh, logo that's just blue and black, but you want to have a call to action button, which is probably better to have like in an orange or a different color, how many colors? And then, you know, there's the choice of, well, how do you pick sort of complementary colors to that main fun color? So I guess two questions for you. Number one, how many colors is acceptable for the brand identity? Even Coca Cola? I mean, red is primary, but I'm sure they have secondary colors.

Speaker A: And then number two, are there tools?

Speaker C: I know that there are free online, you know, sites that recommend colors. What would you recommend for someone that wanted to pick outside of their logo, these complementary colors, to be able to use, you know, more colors and generate more emotions while still having consistency, if that's possible.

Speaker E: Yeah. One of the things that's good to establish when you're figuring out your colors is what your color percentages should be. M And some of the more advanced brand style guides that you'll see will say, okay, 73% should be this color, 22% should be this, and then this and then this. And they'll break it down so that when you're looking at an overall canvas, are you following that brand standards, those color guidelines? Because especially if you have a lot of different designers working on it or a lot of different marketers working on it, some might not like the primary color, so they'll just play in the secondary color palette. And some might over index on the primary color and they really shouldn't so when you have that kind of breakdown, that really helps establish, no, you're using too much red. No, you need to use a little more red. Your CTA should be this or, you know, your border should be that. You can establish a lot of that with your, with your brand style guide. When it comes to selecting your colors, Adobe actually has a great tool just called Adobe color color.adobe.com and you can drop your primary color in and it gives you complementary colors, tertiary colors, and there are like five or six different options you can choose. And you punch in your one number and it'll give you the four colors to the sides of it and it'll show you where on the color wheel they sit. So if you're like, ah, this is a little too brown, you can try to slide things in and this one will shift, but it'll also shift this one over here because it's trying to keep all five colors in harmony. And kind of getting back to your question about how many is a good number? I've seen as few as three, and I've seen as many as 20. But it needs to be clear that this is your primary, this your secondary, this your tertiary. Sometimes it's these colors are only used in this vertical, or these colors are only used with this sub product line. But the whole thing, you know, it depends on the size of your company, but the whole thing needs to be cohesive so that everything can work with your primary color and your logo.

Speaker C: So let me thank you for that, uh, excellent advice. I want to ask you, and we're going to talk a lot about AI, since we already hinted at it. How good would you Say is asking ChatGPT the same question that you would go to Adobe Color to look for?

Speaker A: How I mean, AI is good for

Speaker C: some things, better for others, worse for others. How good do you think it is at, uh, color recognition and color recommendation today?

Speaker E: It's pretty good. I would actually use Google Gemini instead for that. Just because Nano Banana is far out exceeding what, uh, ChatGPT's image capabilities are, and everybody's leapfrogging each other. Every three to four weeks we get a new model. It's like, oh, this is better than anything else we've ever seen. And two months from now ChatGPT will be in the lead or something. It's constantly changing. But as of today, right now, Google Gemini tends to be the best when it comes to creating graphics. So I would imagine that with colors it would do the same thing.

Speaker A: Gotcha.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker C: And just a, uh, case in Point I was at Adobe Max as the Adobe Express brand ambassador and even the Adobe Firefly folks, we're talking about Nano Banana over their own Firefly image generation engine, although Firefly can now handle any of those. So it just goes to show you that I think we're all in agreement there. So we now have, we understand the importance of that visual brand identity, of being consistent. You've given us some tools and techniques to develop those colors, some rules as to how we use them, in addition to collaborating with others on our staff or freelancers or whoever we end up using. I guess the next question is how do we align? Part of it is it has to serve a purpose and it has to match our audience's preferences. So you say that we can use psychology, neuroscience and strategic content mapping to align our visual content. Now that we have the basic brand identity down, what are sort of the next steps? We have a campaign coming up or we want to create a, uh, YouTube thumbnail, whatever it might be. What are the first steps in now aligning, uh, our visual content with our audience's preferences?

Speaker E: Yeah, so first and foremost going to be understanding your audience. You know, who are your Personas, who, what are they looking for? What are they attracted to? One of the things I dig into in the book is figuring out where your competitors are in the space, what they're doing for visuals, and then figure out where they're not. You know, what's the white space, what's the missing area with all of your competitors? You know, if everybody in your industry is blue based, go to red, go to purple, go to something else. But then it's, is everyone using photos? Is everyone using illustrations? Is it all AI? One good example is the, you know, caffeinated drinks, you know, the kind of Red Bull monster. Like a lot of them are extreme sports and like bright colors and sharp lines and it's really exciting. Except for Red Bull, which is those like little simple illustrations. The Red Bull gives you wings illustrations. And it's kind of interesting that monster and everybody else goes so hard into that kind of esports, you know, loud X Games type visuals. In Red Bull, the, the leader goes in a completely different direction. So it's kind of interesting that they've broken off and nobody else has really kind of followed them on that path. But then the other thing is you want to stand out from your, your competition, but not so much that it looks like you're standing in the wrong crowd. So one of the examples I give in the book is Goldman Sachs and I actually, I Hired a designer to create a Goldman Sachs logo that looked like a Swedish death metal band. And so it's all like, the vines and the dripping blood and all that. It's like, all right, it's obviously not Goldman Sachs, but it's cool. Yes, but it's one of those things where, uh, like, okay, you want to stand out, but you can't stand in the wrong crowd with that. So understand what your audience is looking for, what they expect, because you don't want to have to them to have to learn new things. You don't want to create friction where they don't know what they're looking at. So you need to stay within your playground, kind of where your competitors are playing, and then figure out how you can stand out within that playground.

Speaker C: For some listening, it might seem a little esoteric. I mean, it is art, right? The art of being human and understanding other humans.

Speaker A: Are there any, you know, tools you can use?

Speaker C: I've seen companies rebrand and their new logo just seems off. And it reminds us of how we have emotional attachments to logos and to visual, you know, brand identity. Are there any tools that we can use that you know of or that you recommend to help us better understand our audience's expectations? I suppose looking at our competitors, obviously, because our audiences are also looking at competitors, is, is one way to do it. Any, you know, thoughts on that subject of other tools or ideas or techniques that you might recommend?

Speaker E: Tools, I don't know, because you're. The best feedback you're going to get is from actual customers or prospects. And a couple years ago, I went through, uh, a rebranding exercise, and we interviewed, I don't know, maybe 50 customers, and through multiple sessions, you know, what do you think of this logo? What do you think of this logo? And it's a long, painful process, especially if you're the designer who worked on some of those logos and you've got a whole focus group saying, that's awful. But, you know, designers have to grow a, um, thicker skin when it comes to those sort of things. But it. Talking to those people, you start to hear, you know, what they like about what, what already exists and what they think about others in their space. Because in a lot of the industries I've worked in, you're not the only person or you're not the only company in your industry that your customer buys from. So they'll buy a little from you, a little from somebody else, a little from somebody else. So they see all of your marketing materials and all of your products. On a regular basis. So you can ask your, if you ask your customers about that, they're going to tell you what they like about yours and what they don't like about yours, and then also your competitors too. And so that's where you want somebody who really understands customer research in order to dig into the. Okay, you've given us all the feedback about us. What about the competition, what about the others out there, what do you think of them? And then that's how you can really get great feedback to figure out where you want to move forward.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's excellent advice. And it's just another reminder of the power of actually asking your clients, asking your customers. And I believe the best mechanism to do this is not a once out of the moon, uh, you know, survey monkey, but actually establishing a community right, of customers, of fans, of advocates that you can great avenue to tap into. And obviously not just for what should my visual brand identity be, but really what should my next product be or whatever it might be. So a, uh, great reminder that another thing I wanted to ask you, and you had hinted just getting more into, you know, we have our brand identity and we've gotten some feedback as to how we need to align it with our customers. And I think that alone, if you can do that, you're way ahead of most companies. But let's get into the art of repurposing. So now that we have this and there are tools out there, I mean, Riverside FM is one tool that we're recording this on that allows you to repurpose. But you know, obviously Adobe, uh, Express, Canva, uh, just create one and then, boom, you have like 30 different pieces, different dimensions, different languages, what have you. What would be your advice? Because repurposing is such a central skill for marketers today, what would be your advice to be able to repurpose but with this consistent brand identity in mind?

Speaker E: Well, uh, the first thing I like to do is figure out what the pillar piece of content is and then go backwards and go forwards and so, and then to create a calendar of all these different assets that are going to be created that lead up to the pillar piece of content and then everything that comes afterwards, the post promotion. So I have an entire page in the book dedicated to this massive flowchart of like it's maybe a couple months of how much time you spend and what you're releasing leading up to the pillar piece of content. And again, you know, surveys is kind of how it starts because you want to identify the pain and then you identify the solution to the pain. And then, you know, so you identify the pain with the survey and then say, hey, everyone's having this problem. Then a week or two later you come out with like, and here's the solution to that problem. So you kind of back into your product in that way from a marketing standpoint. But everything should be brand aligned at that point. Well, the early stuff doesn't necessarily need to be brand aligned because it's more industry focused. So let's say you do a survey and you release um, a webinar or an infographic about that. Your infographic at that point shouldn't be company branded. This is what customers are saying because it's more industry wide than actually your customers. As you get into the actual solution and your, your pillar piece of content in this case, then you get into the branded assets because then it's oh, uh, I recognize that purple like we see here on Riverside. That means that, you know, Riverside has solved this problem and they're going to be able to help me with my, with the problem that I have. So early on you don't want it to look like it's too branded because then it's, it's just content, it's propaganda. So. But if it's more kind of thought leadership, people are more likely to read into that and it ends up building trust. You know, you've got your logo and colors maybe a little bit at the bottom, but then as you get more into the solution side of things, then you want your visual identity to come to the forefront, is you want people to be able to tie that solution in with your visual brand.

Speaker C: So it sounds like Jim, I mean, that's brilliant by uh, the way, but it sounds like you've sort of aligned brand identity with customer research with almost like one of my favorite books is the Lean Startup, almost like the development of an MVP with your content already ready at every stage of whatever stage you're at in the development and then release and promotion. Would that be a great way of, you know, if, if you have a product launch, if you want to, if you don't know what your next product's going to be or what your next book's going to be or what your next big, you know, ebook's going to be to literally from your book use that process to not only be able to create the visual content, but it will actually help you create the actual product. Is that a safest, you know, assumption to make?

Speaker E: Yeah, that, that would be obviously, uh, probably a longer timeline because you can't you know, do a survey and then release the product 30 days later.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker E: But yeah, it is. It's that same basic model, but on a larger scale.

Speaker C: Yeah. That's brilliant. Wow. You know, in such a short period of time, we've covered so much.

Speaker A: You know, is there anything else from

Speaker C: the visual marketer that we missed today? I think, you know, we, we covered a lot of the great stuff, but any other advice you want to give everybody out there about becoming more of a visual marketer?

Speaker E: The big thing I PR that I really try to say is, is consistency matters more than creativity, which is really tough when you're dealing with a lot of creative people, especially designers, but even marketers. You know, there's a lot of creativity that we want to put into these things. But you can't be too creative when it comes to your visual identity. You know, things need to look unique. You don't want people to think that they're seeing the same visual every time. But the reality is you need to be consistent. You need to keep your colors in your typefaces, in your logo treatment and your photo treatment or your image treatment. That needs to be consistent across the board for a couple years when you, when you first launch it, because as soon as you get sick of it, people are just starting to identify it and recognize it. So you need to keep consistent with it. And it's, you know, it's. It's this kind of weird thing where I repeat myself so many times throughout the book because I'm trying to be consistent with that message of, uh, be consistent because it's really the most important thing when it comes to visual identity and visual marketing.

Speaker C: Excellent advice, Jim. Some great advice for all of us. If people want to buy your book, learn more about you, you know, what you do, how you help not just graphic designers, but businesses as well. Uh, where should we send them?

Speaker E: Visual Marketer Co is the site where they can check that out. It's also available on Amazon. And Jim McLeod.com is my primary website. M A C L E O D. And then I'm on LinkedIn also, so I'd love to connect with anybody who's interested in this topic.

Speaker A: Awesome, Jim, thank you so much for,

Speaker C: you know, not just being a friend, not just for writing, you know, a standout book that's going to help a lot of people, but also for sharing, being so generous and sharing all your advice today.

Speaker E: Thanks for helping inspire this. Because like I said in the introduction, like, you're the one who first made that, that kind of connection that I hadn't even seen yet.

Speaker C: Oh, it's all you, my friend. You actually took action, which is my

Speaker A: keyword for the year.

Speaker C: But, uh, yes, thank you. Uh, once again, Jim, thank you.

Speaker A: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jim as much as I did. A great guy, an open sharer, and really is a sage when it comes to all things visual marketing. Honestly, I think we could have kept going on for another hour, as you

Speaker C: probably thought as well.

Speaker A: You know, here's what I keep coming back to from everything Jim shared today. As soon as you get sick of your visual brand, your audience is just starting to recognize it. I think that one insight alone is worth the price of admission. Most of us refresh our visuals way too early, right when momentum is building. Consistency is the strategy. And to be honest with you, before my interview with Jim, I was thinking of redoing my logo for Neal Shafer. And talking with Jim made me rethink that approach. So if this episode opened your eyes to how much visual marketing matters and how much opportunity most of us are leaving on the table, I'd love it if you grabbed a copy of Jim's book, the Visual Marketer, like I have. You can find it at visualmarketer.co or on Amazon. And a huge thank you to Jim for being so generous with his knowledge today. Well, all that's left to say is this is your digital marketing coach, Neal Shafer, until next week, signing off.

Speaker B: You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcast.nealshafer.com get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes@neilshafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neal has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time. Um, on your digital marketing coach.