How Brands Are Using Instagram Stories

Klear analyzed 149 brands in 8 different industries to see How Brands Are Using Instagram Stories to drive sales.

Just last year, brands faced a big issue on Instagram: sharing external links with followers. Can you recall posting about a new blog post on your account and having to direct followers to your bio to click the link? No one cared to take the time to go to your account and check out the content. This wasn’t a convincing nor effective method and the low rate of user responsiveness made this a big loss of interest for marketers.

Although just a few months after the birth of Instagram Stories, came their golden solution to every marketers’ problem.

Instagram introduced a “swipe up” feature, allowing brands to link a URL to their story, creating a “see more” option below the post. Then if users wished to see further content, it was only a swipe away, thus creating greater user compliance. The linking component is only available for verified accounts. For the marketers who can use it, it’s a dream.

We were already aware of the popularity surrounding Instagram Stories, but we wanted to see how brands are utilizing this newer feature. We decided to follow 149 top brands in 8 industries – including Amazon, Adidas, JetBlue, and Coca-Cola – to see what do they share on their stories and where they guide their followers to.

Read more at Klear.com

I like the data, and the clear sequence of sections. The thin doughnut chart is really hard to read and connect the colors to the legend. The stacked bar chart at the end is very busy and hard to read as well.

Found on Marketingprofs.com

Disney Live Action Movies: Best (And Worst)

The Disney Dollars infographic from FUN.com compares the total box office revenue for all of Disney's live action movie franchises.

Disney live action films have a long history of wonderful stories, memorable characters, and some big (and by big we mean humongous) box office wins. While the company started in 1923 in animation, quite successfully, they didn’t start making 100% live-action films until the 1950s. Just like the animated films, it didn’t take them long to create a classic (or two or three or four). Remember the frightening steam-punk fantasy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or the whimsical world of Mary Poppins, or the three-dimensional wizardry of Tron? Even those classics can’t compare to the sheer box office juggernauts of the past two decades. Disney owned the blockbuster with Pirates of the Caribbean, the remakes like Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella, and who could let the holidays go by without a viewing of The Santa Clause…. Of course, with so many films being made, there have been some box office clunkers, as well. Poor Tomorrowland…

This infographic tracks all the live action films that made the top Disney dollar, and lost plenty of Disney dollars, as well.

I understand the overall bar chart design, with bars for the total of each franchise. However, the breakdown of the movies included in each franchise doesn't the distribution of each movies contribution correctly. those are just equal rectangles that span the width of the infographic.  The individual movies should visually show their contribution proportional to the total!

I don't like the scale cheat for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Visually it misleads readers since the franchise has earned almost four times the revenue as the Narnia series.

Also, the length of the Narnia bar is just plain WRONG! Based on the data and the descending order it's supposed to be longer than the Alice in Wonderland bar.

How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions

How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions is a good doughnut-style data visualization design from Visual Capitalist.

These five tech companies are the most valuable stocks in the U.S. market, worth a collective $2.9 trillion in market capitalization. In 2016, these companies combine for $555 billion in revenue, and a $94 billion bottom line.

Each of these companies is pretty unique in how they generate revenue, though there is some overlap:

• Facebook and Alphabet each make the vast majority of their revenues from advertising (97% and 88%, respectively)
• Apple makes 63% of their revenue from the iPhone, and another 21% coming from the iPad and Mac lines
• Amazon makes 90% from its “Product” and “Media” categories, and 9% from AWS
• Microsoft is diverse: Office (28%), servers (22%), Xbox (11%), Windows (9%), ads (7%), Surface (5%), and other (18%)

The doughnuts are simple and easy to read with match brand colors and a minimal number of slices. I always prefer that pie charts and doughtnut charts consistently start at the top, but these are aligned with the callouts to the right. I also prefer the slices to be sequenced in descending order.

One potential issue is that the doughtnut charts are all the same diameter, which can visually imply that all of these companies are similar in size. I know the market capitalization, revenue and earning are shown in bars to the left, but they're much smaller. I think it would work better if the doughnut charts were actually sized to match each company's revenue number.

Sites Will Lose 1/3 of Sales If Not Mobile-Friendly During the Thanksgiving Weekend

Interesting analysis and data in the You’re Going to Lose 1/3 of Your Sales If Your Website Isn’t Mobile-friendly During the Thanksgiving Weekend infographic from Skilled.co

During the 2015 Thanksgiving Weekend, online stores made 43% more on average than in 2014. Almost 50% of traffic came from mobile devices while one third of sales was made on smartphones. This year, the mobile traffic is predicted to grow to 57% and the smartphones are going to cut even bigger portion of online sales.

The infographic does a good job of walking the reader through a sequential series of data points and predictions for the 2016 Black Friday weekend sales. Clean visuals, except for the doughnut charts that show sections in random order. Pir charts and doughnut charts should start at 12 o'clock or 0° and sequence the data in descending order in a clockwise direction.

I think the title is too long, and misleading as well. It implies that a company's sales will drop by 33% if their site isn't mobile-friendly, but based on the data they share, you can see that sales through desktop computers continues to rise as well. It might be better to say that a company may miss out on additional sales without a solid mobile purchasing experience. The prediction also ignores that sales through a company's mobile app may offset the risk of having a non-mobile-friendly website.

How Much Should You Spend on Sales & Marketing?

 

The Corporate Marketing and Sales Spend Landscape is an infographic about publicly traded companies and how much revenue they spend on sales & marketing. The general rule of thumb, based off of a 2014 Gartner Research study, is that a company should invest 10% of their revenue into marketing. However, a 2014 CMO survey, published by the American Marketing Association and Duke University, came to find that the 10% rule isn't true for all types of companies.

This infographic from Vital is a representation of those findings and shows how much each business style actually spends on marketing. 

Determining the affect of marketing on a company’s growth is not black and white. There are many factors that combine to create a successful and growing business. However, without marketing and sales a company gets very little, if any, promotion or exposure, meaning the chances of growth are slim to none. This is a well-known fact among marketers, evident in the amount of dollars successful corporations allocate towards sales and marketing every year. In 2014, Microsoft, Cisco, Quest Diagnostics, Intel, Salesforce, Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Marketo, Bottomline Technologies, Marin Software, IDEXX Laboratories, Tempur Sealy, Tableau and Twitter among many more all had marketing and sales budgets that were greater than 14% of revenue, some spending as much as 50%! All of these companies also grew year-over-year.

So, how does a company determine how much of their budget to spend on marketing? We decided to look at a handful of some of the most successful large and mid-sized companies across a range of industries to find out how much they allocate for marketing and what they get in return.

Read more at https://vtldesign.com

The order the companies are listed is confusing. There's doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind the sequence. It's not marketing spend dollars or percentage, or total revenue, or revenue growth YOY or even alphabetical.

It's not clear that the orange number shown for each company is the marketing spend dollars, not total revenue. The orange color-coordination with the doughnut chart implies that, but it should be more obvious.

I also think they meant to imply a connection between marketing spend and revenue growth, but that connection is not obvious in the infographic. The revenue growth in gray text-only looks like an afterthought.

Great source citations in the footer. They should also include a copyright statement and the URL link directly to the infographic landing page so readers can find the original full-size version.

This is also a good example of the Fair Use of trademarked logos to report comparisons between the various companies.

Found on Marketing Profs

Update on Friday, November 6, 2015 at 9:32AM by Randy

A number of the doughnut charts mistakenly don't match the values. Bad design error.

The Anatomy of the Perfect Sales Presentation

Good infographics tell stories to the audience, and you sales presentations should too. The Anatomy of the Perfect Sales Presentation from Clemence Lepers (@PPTPOP) uses an infographic story to help people learn to tell better stories with PowerPoint. Very meta isn’t it?

You’re not gonna like it, but if you’re willing to start making some solid sales presentations that’ll help you generate more business, you’ll have to print the next sentence in your brain. Nobody cares about you. I repeat, nobody cares about you.  People care about how YOU can solve their problems and deliver the outcomes they are interested in. To grab prospects attention and close more sales, you need to bring consistent, clear solutions to their problems.

Easier said than done, right?

To help you with that, I’ve created an infographic that breaks down the key elements of a highly effective sales presentation. Follow them, and you’ll be set to get your value proposition across, communicate a compelling message and convert more prospects.

There’s a structure to a story, no matter what medium is being used to tell it. Don’t just throw your data and talking points into an infographic (or a presentation). Tell a story that makes your data meaningful to the audience.