After a successful Series A of fundraising (see the VizWorld interview here), Visual.ly, the world’s largest marketplace for infographics and other visual information design projects, took their expertise a step further, according to Lee Sherman (@lsherman), co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Visual.ly, to offer what they call campaigns.

Visual representation of a Visually Campaign

Visualization of the elements of a Visually Campaign

In an interview shortly after the announcement of the new offering, he spoke with me about campaigns in a straight forward way.

“It’s not as complex as first appears: essentially, it puts together a lot of pieces we did before. We haven’t really changed the kind of projects or content that we produce, but we were hearing clients wanted help with content strategy as well. We’re not an agency, but the genesis comes from a lot of us having background doing content strategy, so we know a lot about it.”

He outlined an important shift in thinking that clients will need to adopt about themselves to make Campaigns work for them:

  • Become a publisher
  • Treat this visual content as journalism
  • Become known for producing good content
  • Consistency is important
  • Get the story out

He then simplified the strategic reasons behind creating campaigns into two main goals: 1) become a thought leader in a specific area or subject; and/or; 2) develop leads.

“Depending on a client’s goals, it comes down to ‘right content, right time, right frequency'”

Expanding on content produced by Visual.ly’s information developers/designers, he mentioned ‘microcontent’; pieces that are popular in social media, including vine videos animated GIFS, and single panel graphics for Facebook newsfeed. As an example, he said, “A campaign might include 4 infographics and a video: then we do a Vine (or a double Vine) from the video and distribute it out of multiple social media channels. This becomes a cross platform/cross channel campaign strategy in one tidy package.”

Visually Campaign breakouts

Models of Visually campaigns ( Source: www.visual.ly.com)

I asked him if this was ‘repurposing content’, an expression I recalled from the first days of creating web content out of traditional marketing materials, such as brochure copy, newspaper advertising or other media. He paused to think about it, and then chuckled, “I remember that, yeah. But this is driven by the customers: We’d rather you think of 4 pieces, and that it’s all centered around a theme. And something else that’s different is the other tool we’re offering now, called Native Analytics.”

“Native Analytics track performance of infographic or video on Visual.ly. First, it tracks the performance through embedded code. And, following our nature, it’s given in the form of an infographic. Finally, it comes with the campaign, as performance is all part of the strategy.”

 

His closing thoughts were about not only Visual.ly, but the larger ideas of marketing visual content for brands. “Campaigns and Native Analytics changes how the marketplace works. We’ll still offer individual pieces, certainly, but Content Strategists are now needed in the marketplace. We saw ourselves as a proxy for what the real-world marketplace is: Are you trying to reach traditional media, or are you trying to go viral? What’s the story you need to get out there? Again, it’s a bigger picture driven by our clients’ needs.”

Visual content that tells big stories, brands becoming publishers, thinking of wider themes and producing multiple pieces in a variety of formats… it’s all a bigger picture for Visually and for the thousands of marketplace members.

As I had mentioned from my last interview, Data Visualization Scientists looking for work should take a look at joining Visual.ly. Now I’ll add Content Strategists to the list of visual thinkers who would do well to become members there.