Amy Balliett: Visual Content Strategy – Episode 60

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Amy Balliett grounds the power of images in strong narratives. Her visual stories deliver the kind of content that humans are hard-wired to crave.

Amy and her team pair word people with picture people. In her office, content strategists work side-by-side with visual-communication experts. This tandem creates strategically driven visual content that addresses the visceral human preference for images.

Amy and I talked about:

• the origins of her original visual brand, Killer Infographics
• the history of the rise of modern infographics – which first arose as a link-bait tactic for SEOs
• the impact of the iPhone and social media on increasing the demand for visual media
• how that demand worked in tandem with natural human wiring that favors visuals over text
• the rise of visual media sharing
• how her word staff interacts with her visual staff, and how most of her executives have a writing background
• the importance of words in visual communication
• how she once said, “text is dead,” and was promptly and properly corrected
• the emergence of Buzzfeed-like, headline-driven culture
• the foundations of their research and practice methods – from font theory to color theory and illustration styling
• the advantages of having been acquired by an insights-and-research firm and how that has helped them double down on their work to understand their audiences and their goals
• how a project they did for Comic-Con shows the importance of adapting branded images to the immediate communication intention
• the role of the content strategist at Killer Visual Strategies
• the importance of having narrative drive the visual story, not design
• how their process starts – right after the discovery process – with the content strategist crafting the narrative for the project
• how she helps writers with long-form content backgrounds adapt to creating the concise, short-form content that is their specialty
• their brand transition from Killer Infographics to Killer Visual Strategies
• the differences between information visualization and visual storytelling
• how she helps her Fortune 500 clients formulate and implement visual strategy
• their discovery that in 2019 90% of marketers found that their most important content-marketing tactic was having a visual communication strategy

Amy’s Bio

Amy Balliett is the CEO and founder of the visual content marketing and communications agency, Killer Visual Strategies (formerly Killer Infographics). She owned her first company, a candy store and ice cream parlor, at the age of 17 before heading off for college. She subsequently built a successful career in SEO and marketing, and has headed up SEO at several companies. In 2009, she and her then co-founder partnered to build lead-gen-based websites, but in the fall of 2010, the business pivoted to an entirely new model: visual communication design. In the years since, she has grown Killer Visual Strategies to become the industry leader, driving visual strategy and campaigns for global brands including Microsoft, Boeing, Adobe, Nikon, Starbucks, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United Nations, and more.

Considered an expert in her field, Balliett speaks at dozens of conferences each year including SXSW, Adobe MAX, SMX, and more. She is also a regular teacher at The School of Visual Concepts, a guest lecturer at the University of Washington, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

Human beings have always been hard-wired to prefer visual content. So, when smart phones and social media emerged about 10 years ago, the stage was set for a new wave of visual communication. Amy Balliett jumped on that wave when she launched the legendary design firm Killer Infographics. Nowadays Amy calls her company Killer Visual Strategies. Her transition to a more explicitly strategic approach reflects what we’ve learned the past 10 years about how to craft purposeful and engaging visual narratives.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 60 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Amy Bailliett. Amy runs Killer Visual Strategies, which you may know as Killer Infographics. That was a while back. Well I want you to tell us first a little bit about your background Amy, welcome.

Amy:
Yeah.

Larry:
And tell us a little bit first about the name, the transition into that and then a little bit about your background.

Amy:
Yeah, definitely. So you know, when we launched the company, Killer Infographics, in 2010, it was a very different content landscape. Infographics were all the rage and at the same time Killer Infographics was actually a pivot from a different company. And so we didn’t actually expect it to become a full service visual communication agency. It actually ended up being this kind of consistent reactive pivot where we grew out of accident and popularity.

Larry:
Meaning that like just visually needy clients showed up.

Amy:
Yeah, yeah. So, basically what happened was, it was an August morning in 2010 and my old business partner came to me and said, “I thought of a really cool name for a website, Killer Infographics.” And I checked and it’s available online. And at the time we had a business model where we were launching a bunch of different websites and monetizing them in different ways. So we had decided that Killer Infographics could be a directory of infographics. And that we would do reviews of those infographics and charge people for their reviews.

Amy:
So that was the monetization aspect of Killer. And then we bought another domain, Submit Infographics because it was 2010 a keyword rich domain mattered in 2010, so we launched it as Submit Infographics by Killer Infographics. About three months in, no pardon me, three weeks, sorry, three weeks into this we had people coming to us angry about the reviews that we gave them, saying, “If you could do better, design my next infographic for me.” And they offered us money. And so we said, “Okay, this is actually more money than our websites are making. And we need to make a living somehow. So let’s design a couple infographics and see what happens.” And I honestly, things just kind of snowballed from there.

Larry:
I’m trying to remember when infographics became a thing and maybe you made them a thing. I don’t know. It’s a good-

Amy:
No, it would be great if we did, but no, we can’t claim credit for that. In 2008 that’s when they really started hitting the content marketing space. There are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I could unpack all the changes, technological changes that happened in ’07 that shifted us to a visual content marketing world. But I mean Facebook, Twitter-

Larry:
Pinterest.

Amy:
… the iPhone, all of that, like so much happened in 2007 that changed how we consume visual media. And so in response to that, infographics, which had been around for centuries, you could argue that the first infographic was a cave painting on the wall. So infographics have been around forever, and they’ve been used in art forever as well. But they became a solution for backlinks and for content marketing. In 2009 their popularity started to really hit the States, because they started in Europe.

Amy:
So in ’09 they started to hit the States more. And by 2010 a lot of domainers were using them regularly. People who had a bunch of websites and wanted to just fill those websites with a lot of content and link bait. And so infographics started as a link bait tool and an SEO tool. And it’s actually all of those domainers and their kind of voracious need for content that really serves the popularity of infographics. And so we kind of got in just at that tipping point. And in Q4 of 2010 we had 14 orders. In January of 2011 we had 40 orders. So all of a sudden we were an infographic agency. But for us, infographics were just one piece of the puzzle as we started to learn how to produce them properly. And I think that’s really important to know.

Amy:
We did not do them well in the beginning. We weren’t paid well in the beginning. We were paid 300 bucks an infographic. So we did 300 bucks worth of work. As we raised prices and brought in better talent and continued to grow properly, it just became very clear that the reason infographics were a success were because today’s audiences crave visual information. Because of things like all the new social networks. Because all the new back then social networks. Because of the iPhone changing the way we take in information, we were all suddenly a consumer society inundated with content and information in ways we were never used to. And visual information is what we’re more naturally inclined to consume.

Larry:
You’ve said, I’ve heard you present a couple … Several times and talk about that, was it 91% of people prefer visual content over it?

Amy:
Exactly.

Larry:
Now I’m just curious, is that a natural human thing? Like as soon as this came along, did everybody prefer that, or did this grow along with your mastery of infographics and visual communication in general?

Amy:
It’s a mix of everything. I actually just finished writing the first draft of a book of mine that’s coming out in June that Wiley Publishing is putting out. And the start of that book talks about the nature versus nurture of visual communication. We have a big part of our environment that has pushed us as a consumer generation to create visual content, but that worked very well in tandem with our natural inclinations. The largest part of our brain is our visual cortex. If I say the word dog to you, you’re not going to think of the letters D, O, and G, you’re going to probably picture a dog in your head. That’s because we don’t think in text. Our brains were never wired to think in text. In fact, our brains are actually hardwired to process visuals as quickly as 13 milliseconds at a time. We can process and store information from visuals. It’s a completely different realm than text. It actually takes an average of about eight seconds to comprehend a full sentence.

Larry:
So that you said there’s one 100th of a second to grasp an image-

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
… versus like somebody who speed reads, that’s 500 words a minute, that’s not even close.

Amy:
Exactly, exactly.

Amy:
So we’re just, I mean we are inherently visual creatures. Before we had written word, before we had verbal communication, we were communicating with visual content, with cave paintings. We were expressing ourselves through visuals and you fast forward to today. Now we get rewarded because of our visual content. It fuels the vanity of our very beings on social media. We’re surrounded by tools that make us all professional photographers. We have constant entertainment streaming into our living rooms, blockbuster entertainment on a regular basis. All of this media is at our fingertips, not just to consume, but we have all the tools at our disposal to also create.

Amy:
So we’re in this amazing visual era as a society right now, as a culture. And part of it is driven by the fact that technology has made it possible and that a lot of what’s successful online and what drives the revenues of the biggest companies out there is the visual media aspect of those companies. So that’s part of it. But the other part of it is just simply visual content gets to the brain 60,000 times faster than any other form of communication that exists. This is who we are, this is … Our base instinct has always been to connect visually to learn visually. Text based communication is something we evolved to, so-

Larry:
You’re reminding me, I’m reading a book right now, oh shoot I’m spaced on the name, it’s kind of like the style guide for the 21st century. It’s like, oh Strunk and White. They weren’t idiots, but they’re got a lot of stuff wrong. And the guy’s a neurolinguist I believe, by training. And he talks about like a lot of the … Only from the other side of the equation, the writer’s side, like you know, we’re kind of hindered in our oral, in our verbal, or written communication by these evolutionary heritages. So that’s so interesting. Well I guess that’s one of the things I really hope we can get to is like how all this stuff works together. Because virtually every other guests I’ve had on this show has been a word person.

Larry:
And you’re like, I’ve told you before, I’m embarrassed that you’re the first visually oriented person I’ve had on here. But so I guess I’d love to talk a little bit about how these insights that you’ve had, what the back and forth, because you have like four or five word people on your staff, right?

Amy:
Yeah, definitely.

Larry:
And so just maybe start with your workflows and procedures and just kind of how you work, how the word people interact with the visual people.

Amy:
Yeah. And you know, one thing to note, even so I have word people on my team who are … That’s their sole job. They’re paid to be word people. At the same time you look at my executive team and I’ve surrounded myself with writers. I actually think that the more successful companies out there, if you really look at the talents of their exec team, most of them probably have writing as a core talent. Because I think that if you’re a great writer, you can embrace empathy far better. Because to tell a great story, you need to be an empathetic person.

Amy:
And so there’s a lot of value in surrounding yourself with amazing writers. And with us, we believe that 50% of any successful project rests in the narrative of that project. So when we do the work that we do, we still have to research and find the right statistics to tell our story. We have to come up with the right calls to action. We have to have the right intro text. These are all things that are still important to bring the message forward to the end viewer.

Amy:
The difference is really that we want somebody to be able to look at the content that we produce and without reading a single thing, have at least one takeaway, if not a full understanding of the main topic. That’s the idea of visual communication. With visual communication it’s not about saying text is dead. In fact, I actually said that once-

Larry:
That wouldn’t go over well at Confab, I’ll tell you that.

Amy:
Yeah, I said that once in my early days and I was properly corrected. It’s not that text is dead. It’s that people are inundated with information. Because we’re inundated with information, when people are faced with a paragraph of text, they will only read 20% of that paragraph of text. That is a statistic that HubSpot has tested numerous times.

Larry:
Well that gets into something that I think writers and word portrayers have learned a lot. As you break up those walls of texts, you have bullet points and [inaudible 00:11:54] heads and terse, and being like not being forward and wordy like I tend to be.

Amy:
Yeah, you make it as digestible as possible. So in that vein, look at Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed is one of the most engaging text-based platforms out there. Its content is shared more widely than most news resources, but they have a rule of thumb. For every 100 words or so they include an animated GIF or some sort of visual that summarizes that text. And so when people consume a Buzzfeed article, they’ll read a headline and look at an image, headline, image, headline, image and go through it that way and then if they want they’ll go back and read the text.

Larry:
Interesting. Now have you done … Is there like eye tracking studies-

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
… and things that show?

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
Okay, this is a scientific fact.

Amy:
Yeah.

Larry:
Well, and that meshes with what I know about what I’ve learned about how people scan pages. That’s interesting. And has that changed over the 10, 12 years you’ve been doing this?

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
That behavior is actually …

Amy:
Yes, yeah. We’ve become a headline driven culture. We didn’t start as a headline driven culture, but as the years have gone by and as the ability to access content has become easier and easier, we have become that headline driven culture in so many ways, it even drove the 2016 election. It’s probably going to drive the 2020 election as well.

Amy:
The thing about visual communication is accepting the fact that whatever you write isn’t what’s going to be the thing that hooks the audience. It’s not going to be what gets somebody diving deeper into your content. Instead, the visual, the book cover if you will, is what’s going to get people to crack open that book. So we’re in the business of designing the best possible book covers we can. That’s really what it comes down to. Creating something that in that one visual says so much that it compels the audience to say, “I’m going to click through and learn more, or I’m going to open up this ebook and learn more, or I’m going to download that report.” And so when you look at the headlines that even win, they win when they’re paired with the right visual, they don’t win-

Larry:
Like the Buzzfeed example.

Amy:
Yes. They don’t win just alone as a headline.

Larry:
Interesting. Yeah, that kind of gets, one of the things I’m loving in this world right now is the way sort of UX practice is coming in. Well there’s a lot of back and forth between UX and the content in, within, and across the content world. And something you were just saying about like knowing what’s going to grab that. UX people are huge on research and doing more like, because we both come out of marketing. I think that’s more of my publishing and marketing for me but, but I still have these kinds of sales and marketing tendencies from my early career to be sort of wanting to validate things.

Larry:
And as I kind of shift, but I’m able increasingly lately to shift gears into that ethnographic researcher thing. And just like, “What are you trying to accomplish here?” I mean, and this goes right back to SEO, we were talking about SEO a little bit before. Discerning user intent is such an important part of that. And I think that that’s why UX and SEO have always been such a great pairing. Do you know what kind of research or how do you get to that point of having insight about what’s going to grab them?

Amy:
So we have a lot of tools at our disposal for that. First and foremost, there’s just simple things like font theory and color theory where you can really sit down and say, “What font is going to catch the attention of this audience, as well as tell my story in the best possible way.” There are so many different type faces that exist out there and the thing is is you can look at different fonts and have different emotional reactions to them.

Amy:
There’s a funny story about one of the first Microsoft OS systems that came out and it had this little dog walking around and telling you how to use the OS.

Larry:
I remember that.

Amy:
The dog’s speech bubble was in Times New Roman. And then this guy at Microsoft said, “Well dogs don’t think in Times New Roman.” And he invented Comic Sans, and that’s how Comic Sans came about.

Larry:
Oh, to the dismay of-

Amy:
To the dismay of many-

Larry:
… many typographers.

Amy:
Many, but at the time it was the best thing since sliced bread. And the idea there was simply “a font says so much.” It brings about personality and it connects with the end viewer in many ways. So we can consider font theory, we can consider a bit of color theory, but color theory is a bit of a mixed bag. But we can at least consider what colors will maybe catch the eye of the audience.

Amy:
And then we can consider what illustration style will catch the eye of the audience as well. So we take all of that into effect, but we also have … Us at least at Killer Visual Strategies we have a parent company that’s an insights and research firm.

Larry:
Oh, I did not know that.

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
Okay.

Amy:
So if we want to, that’s actually new, we merged … Well we were, pardon me, we were acquired by them last year. Pardon me, it’s the start of 2020. We were acquired by them at the end of 2018. I just forget that we’re already in 2020 right now.

Larry:
[inaudible 00:17:12].

Amy:
But yeah, so we have this great asset that we get to work with if we want to really dig in the nitty gritty of consumer behavior and specific audience segments. So we can gather all that information and then knowing that informs everything we do after that. So before we do any project for our clients, we take the time to understand the audience and the goals. And that’s also part of visual communication. We’re not designing pretty pictures for the sake of designing pretty pictures. Everything we do is about marrying form and function. Designing with the intent to drive the end audience to take an action in some way, shape or form.

Larry:
Yep. So do you have like style libraries or just insight about which fonts a book, which … Remember this is an interesting thing because so much, a lot that’s happening in the content world is about structuring content, marking it up in semantically meaningful ways. Tucking it away, displaying it in a context-sensitive way later, which is in that front end display of the later is like it’s really, because you’re doing this as sort of an integrated visual storytelling piece. Have you ever had occasion in your work to do sort of like a content-here-presentation-there, design that front end at the other, at the display level. Like that’s a pretty common thing in interaction design and UX design, but it sounds like you’re more …Like you have coherent visual stories that you’re getting out to the world. That’s more of what you’re doing.

Amy:
That is more what we’re doing, yeah.

Larry:
Is it? Yeah.

Amy:
And yes, we do have style libraries that we work within that we’ve built over all the years. But still everything we do is custom. So we’ll pull from the style libraries to create the right mood board to really make sure that we’re testing our hypotheses about the audience. But when it comes to actually putting pen to paper and executing on the content, it’s always original illustrations, original iconography. Because when you’re visualizing information, it has to be custom.

Amy:
Imagine, I’ll give you an example. DreamWorks came to us, this was back in 2013, and they came to us for two infographics for Comic-Con. And they said, “In these infographics we want you to use our already created CGI characters throughout.” We came back to them and said, “We can do this, but if we’re going to use,” it was penguins was one of the stories. “If we’re going to use a penguin posed in a dancing pose, we have to write content that fits the dancing pose. But the content that you want us to write has nothing to do with the dancing. So we can’t marry that visual with the information. Let us instead take your CGI characters and put them in the footer of this designs that they’re here. But let us custom illustrate a different set of penguins doing the actual actions that we’re talking about so that nobody has to read to understand what they’re looking at. Instead they can look at it, glean the information, and then read to understand further.”

Amy:
So for instance, if it’s about ways to navigate Comic-Con and we’re showing a bunch of penguins, maybe going to a Q&A session at a panel, we don’t have to then write, go to a Q&A session at a panel. Instead, what we can write is text that furthers that. Here are five questions you can ask. That’s what we could write. So you get the information when you look at the visual, they’re going to a Q&A session at a panel. We get rid of that redundant text, because we’ve created a custom visual.

Larry:
Got it.

Amy:
So that’s-

Larry:
As you’re talking I’m seeing the benefits of thinking visually, and in that sort of interplay too. Because I think everybody has a similar intent. You want to get their attention, engage them, and move them on to the action that you want them to do. I guess I want to go back little bit more to the word people in your organization and how that all fits together. Because I think that’ll be of a lot of interest in my … Both like I love all that what you’re saying about the visual stuff, but how the word people work with, both in your place and maybe if you’ve discerned any principles about this, like how word people and image people can work together.

Amy:
Yeah, definitely. So at Killer we call our word people content strategists, and I think that’s really important to consider. They’re great writers, but they also are thinking strategically about what they’re writing. And that’s really important. That’s what we look for. We look for a writer who is going to take into account at all times what the design implications are of the decisions that they’re making. As well as whether or not they’re speaking in the right tone for the brand and for the target audience. So those are three big priorities for them.

Amy:
But we purposefully have separate word people and separate designers, because if the designer was doing the research and writing out the content, they would write a narrative that matched what they wanted to design, not a narrative that matches the message and story we need to tell the audience. So that’s why we keep them separate.

Amy:
Now, our process always has us first coming together as a project team, identifying the needs of the project, building a creative brief, working with the client to set expectations. But once all that’s done, the very first phase in production is content. So our content strategists have to do the research and write the narrative first. They have to package that narrative up in a very succinct way. For instance, avoid long sentences whenever possible. If you think you’re going to write a very long paragraph, go talk to the designer and discuss how this can be visualized instead of written out, because we don’t want any paragraphs in the content.

Larry:
That’s what I’m immediately curious about is what percentage, because it’s great. I mean, starting content first, story first and then go from there. I’m curious like what percentage of the words, because your whole point is to do this visually, how much of that just kind of like you must be masters, it just like the absolute minimum number of words to convey what you want to.

Amy:
We really are. In fact, oftentimes clients will send us their initial scripts saying that they spent weeks paring it down, getting it to where it needs to be. And then our content team will take two hours and send them an updated script that is significantly pared down. Still tells the story and the client’s ecstatic. And so we are very, very skilled at telling things in the most succinct way as possible. But it takes training.

Amy:
When we hire our content strategists, most of them show the traits of being able to do that, but they’re long form writers to start. So we have to train them to get to that short form positioning. It’s kind of like if you’re going to write an outline for a report before you write the report, the outline is what we want them writing.

Larry:
Got it.

Amy:
That’s the amount of content that we want them producing.

Larry:
You’re reminding me of another thing that’s going on in the content strategy world now is there’s a huge growth in the UX writer and the content designer, product content. There’s a whole different bunch of names for that, but that’s very short form, very … It’s like working, collaborating with designers, interaction designers, visual designers, researchers and everything to get just the right words in those interfaces.

Amy:
Yep.

Larry:
And there’s sort of a … And a lot of those people come from journalism or publishing or someplace, and so it must be very similar-

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
… training and needs that you’re addressing. How do you do that? How do you bring people onboard? How do you kind of break them up that long form habit and get them thinking more …

Amy:
We actually start by testing them before we hire them. So we’ll give potential writers some different assignments, not client assignments. Actually rarely are they actual assignments for a visual end piece. Usually it’s, “Tell us why you are the best person for this job in 20 words or less.” So we put them in a position of having to talk about themselves in the shortest, most succinct way as possible. And honestly, the minute you are forced to talk less about yourself and self-edit in that way, it becomes so much easier to edit content that is not something so emotionally ingrained in your own psyche.

Larry:
That’s so funny, you are saying a very similar thing to what my last guest, episode 59 Tamara Adlin, who’s a persona expert, one of the things we ended up talking about was the growth of the UX discipline, kind of contrasting with the growth of the content strategy discipline. But one of the things she said about UX, one of the insights that they had was like, “We have to UX our UX.”

Amy:
Yeah.

Larry:
And so what you just said is in that same ballpark.

Amy:
Exactly.

Larry:
Do what you’re going to do. Yeah, interesting. Well, I just noticed we’re coming up on time. This always go so quickly, but I just want to make sure that we haven’t left anything out that you want to get in. Now, is there anything last, anything that’s occurred to you during the conversation, or are just in your mind?

Amy:
I think we went down a few rabbit holes and didn’t dive into the pivot or the change of the name to Killer Visual Strategies.

Larry:
Oh right, I would love to hear that, yeah.

Amy:
So you know, when we were Killer Infographics, that was our primary focus was infographic design for the first couple of years. But as we grew as a team and started to really recognize that infographics played a part in content marketing, but that there are all these other types of visual media that could be equally, if not more powerful than infographics. We wanted to make sure we were bringing that content to our clients as well. And it was around 2014 that we said, “We’re not an infographic agency. We are a visual communication agency.” Now, at the time a lot of our competitors were calling themselves visual storytelling agencies. And we personally believe that visual storytelling is a product of visual communication. Because visual communications, the foundation, it’s very basic. A women’s bathroom sign, that’s visual communication, an icon that tells you so much without having to use text. That is visual communication right there, a recycling sign, anything like that.

Amy:
Visual storytelling is when you take that foundational element, when you take the idea of visual communication and you walk somebody through a narrative to take them to an exact conclusion. But there’s also information visualization, which is equal to visual storytelling and what that is, is when you visualize information without an intro or a conclusion. You let the viewer just look at the information and come to their own conclusions, come to their own understanding. It works really well with data viz. Information visualization really fits well with data visualizations.

Amy:
But I don’t know if you’ve ever seen our Puget Sound tech universe poster that we did for the WTIA. Well worth checking out, but it visualizes the connections of every tech company in the Seattle and Puget Sound area, and there’s no narrative to it. It’s just something you can stare at for hours and find the connections yourself. So that’s information visualization.

Amy:
So we said we’re a visual communication company and we decided that anything that we deliver to our clients, as long as it spoke visually, because that’s our core purpose is to speak visually, then we would do it. So we added in motion graphics, interactive content, eBooks, the list goes on. And within about a year or two after that, major brands were saying, “You guys understand visual strategy better than I do. We need you to build our content strategy for the year.” And so we just kept evolving as a company. And at this point, what we do for our clients is yes, if somebody needs a one off project, we’re there to help you, because we’re not going to say no to working with you and getting our foot in the door to build a relationship and hopefully one day earn your business for more work.

Amy:
But in the same vein, it’s Q1 right now, we’re doing 2020 content planning for the majority of our clients, many of which are Fortune 500 companies. So a lot of what we do is sit down and say, “What is your visual strategy for the year? What types of content are we going to have to produce so that we can make sure we’re accomplishing your target goals for the year?” So we’re going to identify what types of eBooks we’re going to create for gated content. We’re going to identify where we’re going to develop motion graphics and what types of conversion rate optimization we want those motion graphics to drive. What’s going to be your social presence and what types of social content do we need to create? So that’s the kind of whole umbrella of visual strategy and that’s why we changed our name.

Larry:
Got it. Okay, so you hit all the questions I had about that. There’s so much. I’m also going to mention the overlap with branding and with their other content people and all the other marketing stuff they’re doing, but I get it. But companies are starting to think about visual communication strategy as an important stream of their overall strategy.

Amy:
90% of marketers in 2019 found it to be their most important tactic when it came to content marketing was visual strategy.

Larry:
Wow.

Amy:
And 91% as we talked about earlier today, 91% of today’s audiences demand visual content as their first form of information delivery from a brand or service.

Larry:
That’s a great spot to end it actually.

Amy:
Yes.

Larry:
Punctuation mark, thanks so much Amy. Really great talking with you.

Amy:
Definitely. Thank you.