Discover the Best Invoice Design for Public Relations

Invoice design for Public Relations

hello and welcome to this episode of speak pr my name is jim james and this is the podcast for you if you've got value locked up in an organization you're just trying to share that by using some simple and some cost effective and also some time efficient ways of sharing it now one of the things to think about is the use of different kinds of formats and i'm thinking about that because i've just been looking at the speak pr program and i'm working on the engage element and engage really is about creating impactful content so that people can understand and engage and possibly to share to amplify the content that you have created so on this show i'm going to talk about different ways that you can create compelling content and how i've been using the tool canva today to create an infographic to explain engagement levels so let's just dive in shall we to today's episode which is all about how we can create compelling content now content creation is probably the number one problem that people have they often have got the message already and they know who they want to talk to how do you format that into something that's appealing well ninety percent of all information is transmitted to the brain by visual means so touch hear taste smell these are actually only receiving 10 of all the information that we're taking on so if we're not creating visually appealing content we're missing out on a massive massive opportunity now um also amazing is that the brain processes visual information 60 000 times faster than text pretty amazing really and i guess it's just all prehistoric really isn't it that we are um all living still with some of the prehistoric uh tool sets that we've got and it's called the picture superiority effect coined in 1971 basically it means that we can see the uh the rhinoceros or the tiger coming after us before we want to read about it so how do we then translate this into making content that's appealing because many people think public relations for example is really all just about sending press releases well of course it's not now 65 of people are visual learners and 50 of our neural tissue is in some way connected to our vision so we really need to be thinking about creating content that might have text but also includes graphics and this is of course the domain of the infographic so infographics are where we incorporate text and pictures and there's one piece of research that shows that infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles and here's why they are immediately impactful because you see them and especially now with the attention span of people being less than maybe six eight seconds you hear different things but certainly everyone is speed dating content right now infographics are very shareable and whereas if there is content which is text people have to cut and paste large bodies of content but if it's a quick picture it can be shared we can also illustrate for example data through graph through charts much more efficiently and most people including certainly me are not particularly oriented towards numbers but we are towards charts so an infographic also can carry color for example and logo so if you're looking at your brand awareness it's very hard to do brand awareness if not impossible to do that through text but you can with graphics you can also of course have some degree of web seo improvement because if you're sharing content and it's tagged and for example you save the file name with your company name in it then it will help on the links especially if people re post or even embed that in their own website this is of course why people ask you to embed their articles or their graphics in your website so what we know of course is that people are prone to images and even more prone to moving images which of course is why tv is so powerful anyone that's watched the tv when you get on the airplane for example you'll see how everybody stops reading the newspaper or reading a book and starts eventually to watch the television so how do we create content then that can be useful well i'm going to just tell you the tool that i've been using to create a graphic for the speak pr program and i'll tell you just a little bit more about the pricing of that when i tell you what i've been doing so i'm trying to work to illustrate how people can develop content which is shareable so what i've got is a chart a graph and on the top i have engagement level and on the chart i've got four squares in the top left hand square under engagement level i've got the word hard and in the top right i've got the engagement level saying easy and on the north south axis or the vertical axis i've got the subject matter and at the top of that or the north part i've got new and at the bottom or the south i've got old so i've got an i've got a a four-way chart four quadrants top left it is content that is quite hard to engage with but is new and in the top right i've got content which is easy to engage with and is new i've got in the bottom left i've got content that is quite hard to understand and is old and in the bottom right i've got content which is old but easy to understand so then what i've got in my top right where it's easy to understand or easy to engage with and it's new content it's highly shareable this is the kind of content that we want to be creating content which is easy for people to understand but also new in some way and in the bottom right i've got content which is old and easy to understand it's possibly shareable and in the top left quadrant i've got content which is fairly hard to understand or hard engagement level but new and it's possibly going to be shared especially within for example a vertical maybe a b2b specialist group and in the bottom left i've got subject matter which is hard to understand and it is old so that then makes it pretty much unbearable so trying to describe this uh this four-way matrix where you want to be in the top right hand side of the matrix highly shareable content is new and it's easy to understand but of course with one picture i'm able to share that message straight away i think i'll probably give you the idea by trying to explain it but you better see it easily when i publish it so what content do you have that actually would be much more easily explained with a picture than with the kind of text now i'm using canva pro to draw this very simple chart i pay 17.98 per month for the canva pro i could get for 167 uh if i bought the annual um and that would make my life much easier you can downgrade as well so i'm using this every month so i would be saving three dollars a month four dollars a month in fact if i um booked annually 22 is what i'd be getting off you can also use another platform called visme and all of these have great templates so canva for example i've got instagram story instagram posts facebook posts facebook cover i've got linkedin i've also got infographic templates in here as well i've got business presentation business website logo business card invoice all of these are very easy to use templates and they come already with things like stock photographs that you can use and you can also then link these to your social media account so that's what i do i can actually share a graphic direct to social media if i want to but i can also create a team account so i've actually introduced other people working on the project with me to my canva account and then we can collaborate so the the canva app and we've also talked about one called vizmi also has some courses online for example as social media mastery with 92 000 students uh already listed there so you can take a large number of courses including uh presentations to impress personal branding and so on so when we look at the content that we want to share in our articles and in our uh news and on our websites making it visual is going to appeal to people it's going to appeal to more people and it's going to appeal to people in a greater way and make it easier for them to share than if they have to read understand and then cut and paste the best bits use a tool like i'm trying to use canva i'm not a designer but what i have found is that some of the tools and the templates and the free graphics and the elements that are available within canva mean that i can at least communicate what i want to to the level that it's better than the sentences or the paragraphs that i'd have to write what you can do of course is then to send those to a graphic designer on fiverr up work which is what i've done for example with some of the the larger more complicated graphics is to send it to someone to get all the fonts right to get the colors right and so on so even if you're not a designer it's important to think about using visual elements and visual graphics in your marketing as long as it doesn't become hilarious and even if it does that may be part of your marketing so think about how you can communicate visually even if it's just taking a an excel spreadsheet and putting the top numbers into a chart that becomes a graphic with a headline and because you can actually embed actual photographs that you have taken on your phone you can upload those to canva or to visme and you can embed them within your storyboard so the tools are there for us non-artists to use now i'm creating the speak pr course using canva for some of the graphic elements and infographics so could you use canva or visme or any one of these other tools to just lift for your audience what you're saying into another realm make it visually appealing because we've seen that the picture superiority effect of 1971 is not going away and social media the attention span is getting so short because the content is so constant that standing out is more and more difficult asking people to read long form content is becoming more and more unacceptable and what would happen is you just end up in the bottom left hand quadrant of my shareability matrix so think about making graphics think about making them simple compelling and colorful if it's complicated to do the process made the graphics simple start with baby sit-ups that's all i'm doing so i hope by sharing what i'm working on in my journey that this will help you with your journey to communicate the value in your business my name is jim james thank you so much for listening to this episode of speak pr if you like it please rate it please share it if you'd like to subscribe to our newsletter please come to eastwestpr.com or if you'd like to get involved in a mastermind with me on the speakpr dot co website you can find out all about the speak pr methodology of storify engage amplify and know and our six week mastermind thank you so much for listening and until we meet again i wish you the best of health a profitable business and that you keep on creating great stories using some graphics