Facts about Instagram. What you should already know in 2017.

Posted On January 27, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Social Media /

When a brand contacts an advertising agency to start doing some work on social media, they almost always want to have a presence on Facebook and Instagram. Then, they’ll analyze if being on Snapchat is worth it or not. But Instagram is definitely on the scene, for sure. That’s because brands know it’s kind of a big deal due to its super high engagement rate. Of course, that level of engagement is only reserved for brands that actually know what they are doing. Aren’t sure you are one of them? Here’s a little piece of advice for you to crack it down.

Hacks to crack Instagram in 2017

Always keep in mind your brand identity and concept. As in any other social media platform, your brand spirit should be your bible. Based on your communication strategy, decide what concepts are you going to spread this month, and then work on your creativity and your pictures.

Instagram is not for crappy pictures. Bad ones won’t even stand a chance, they’ll be ignored. Work on your composition, on the structure, and on your color palette. Try innovative formats like triptychs.

Hashtags should be relevant. There are people who use tons of hashtags with no meaning or common sense at all. You can try several hashtags to see which of them are suggested by Instagram for achieving a higher reach.

As we said before, crappy pictures are not allowed if you want to succeed. So quality matters a lot. Trying to make your pictures more appealing by using filters or frames is easy if you use apps like Afterlight, that provides you with more options than Instagram.

Posts should be regular. It’s not going to be effective if you post just once in a while, or when you feel inspired enough. You should work on your calendar to cover at least 3 times a week.

Get out of your box. Forget about the old advertising way, when you just showed your products and models using them. Content should be relevant and likely to be shared by your followers. Quotes, drawings, videos, and gifs are more than welcome.

Follow your followers. If you want your followers to be engaged, you should be engaged too. Follow some of your followers, perform searches, like, comment and share what’s matching your brand identity and your followers’ interests.

Of course, inspiration and focused creativity are a must to Instagram. When you have a lack of those, just browse a little bit through your favorite brands and competitors, to open your mind and take note of some great successful ideas.

The different levels of online communication. Creating your own maze at a new Westworld.

Posted On January 24, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, Social Media, Strategy /

Robert Ford creates this strange fictional world when people can do anything at all, with no judgments, and no law. Finding who we really are is the objective. And Westworld allows people to solve their maze in life. This also happens in the real world. It happens to you, to us, to everybody. We are all looking to find our path. But what happens when we live more in the online world than in the real one? At Lis7o, we think everybody starts walking through their online maze too. So creating different online mazes for different targets must be the key to making content relevant and engaging nowadays, right?

When the mysterious man dressed in black wants to find the maze, he tries to go deeper in the Westworld game. Well, in our world we don’t really have to because we are already swimming in the game. The game is all around us. It’s like a matrix, but a real one. And we are all blinded, searching the internet and the networks for our true meaning.

Just a few are searching for their way out, but they continue to fall in the same matrix all over again. Our lives pass by day after day navigating on social media, collecting likes, and giving away all of our personal data and our private moments, and so on. So, why won’t brands take advantage of it?

The new communications paraphernalia opens a lot of opportunities for creating mazes in different channels. A Facebook maze, an Instagram maze, a Snapchat maze, and so on. And of course, they should all be interconnected. Social media is substituting real life, so the digital experience should be that real. We need to become the masters of the game, we have to play our role of creative directors of this Westworld, like Anthony Hopkins’ character does.

So what does all of this mean? How do we become the masters of this game? There are at least two levels in online communications. If you just publish content but you don’t have a real strategy you’re playing on the first level. If you assign a more profound meaning to online communications, creating a “real life experience” for your clients, then you’ve solved your own maze.

You’ll have an army of content managers, online strategists, and marketers available to fight, but you’ll have to keep them up to date and trending, or the story will be old and nonsense and nobody will want to play with your brand anymore. They’ll just choose another story, another maze.

Create appealing and compelling stories that engage your customers like if they were in real life, get real life insights and work on them until you’ve turned them into an online experience. Sometimes, like Dolores, we’ll have some blanks, but nevermind, on the next day, we’ll continue to play again the same game, with a happy smile on our faces.

As William once said: “this world is exactly like the one outside. A game, one to be fought, taken, won.”

5 keys to success with content marketing: the power of a good story.

Posted On January 20, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, SEO, Social Media, Strategy /

Surely you’d prefer to follow a story, rather than the same classic advertising email marketing or “call now” ad. At least, we do. That’s the main reason why content continuum is the key to acquiring some marketplace advantages. And what if that content is generated just by a regular user like you? The power of a good story is so much stronger than any other traditional content. Great content with which the reader can connect is even better than the generic one generated by brands. If you can achieve that, you’re all set up.

Compelling stories told by great brands serve both readers and marketing departments. If you read about content marketing you’ll find out that the 5 keys to success are the following ones.

The 5 keys to content marketing success

Relevant and useful content, easy to share and deploy across social channels, email marketing, blogs, etc. Your strategy should be 360°, a holistic way is required.
Customer-centric personalized content. Personalization will make your audience feel they’re being valued by your brand, and to get an experience that will not equal any other content at all, ever. At least if you do it well!
User-generated content. We talked about this previously. If you see a friend of yours, or a friend of a friend, or even someone to whom you will likely feel identified, you’ll be more impacted than with any other content.
Effective trending publishing techniques. That means you have to consider what’s positioning better for each channel in which you’re sharing your content. For instance, videos and streaming perform better on Facebook and Instagram. Same happens with a gif format. New innovative formats are also welcome, like triptychs on Instagram (content that is divided between three pictures and posted individually, getting as a result just one complex image).
Content should be continuous. We talked about a continuum because you have to build a relationship with your clients. If you stop talking to them, they’ll forget about you, or worse, they’ll feel betrayed.

A good content strategy will also help you in many other aspects, like performing better on SEO, in order to gain more traffic and better position on Google or to reach more new prospects. We’ve seen statistics that talk about content generation as the most successful strategy to improve SEO (57% of the brands that took the survey).
The goal is engaging your consumers so badly that they’ll be looking forward to hearing from your brand, not as much as from their friends, but at least more than from your competitors. It’s all about taking care of the digital experience they’ll get, that finally will be far more important than the product itself, or even its price.

2017 UX trends. What’s the scenario for this new year?

Posted On January 19, 2017 By l7copro In Strategy, Web Design /

AI, VR, and Chatbots will be the next trending technologies this year. We’ve been digging dipper to find out how they are going to impact on UX designs, so here’s a list of what we’ve found out.

2017 UX Design Trends

1 – Design for mobile. Mobile will still be trending, so every interface is going to be designed with mobile devices in mind. This is no news, but what will be new in 2017 is thatthe old web interfaces will be evolving into mobile, because no one wants their users to learn different interfaces for each device they use.

2 – Conversational UX. With the rise of chatbots and messengers, design will be oriented to learn new stuff for their needs. Based on a study run by Statista, we use 5 apps per day in average, and at least one of them is a messenger app. As there are endless opportunities and new ways of interaction with users, this kind of artificial intelligence will become the norm. This is a designer’s new field to explore and innovate with.

3 – Users ID and conventional passwords will be extinguished. We don’t know for sure if this year, but they’ll start abating. Taking advantage of geolocalization, voice recognition, biometrics and many other technologies, authentication will become easier and faster.

4 – VR has a great potential. Not only in gaming and traveling fields, but also in many others like the medicine industry. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are on the trend for 2017, with a big impact on visual design and interaction.

5 – Autonomous vehicles. Most people will feel safer if they have to cross the street while there are autonomous vehicles, instead of human drivers. It seems even drivers will want their cars to have autonomy. So, we’ll start to see some brand new autonomous designs this year.

6 – Beyond screens. Designing for speech (in the case of conversational UX), or designing for any other new technology without screens, is a challenge. We’ll start going beyond visual, so what we should have into account, is that no matter the channel, we are designing for people. As Golden Krishna says “The best interface is no interface”.

There’ll be plenty of progress going on in 2017 so if you don’t want to miss out on anything, there’s something you should definitely do (besides following Lis7o) – attend tech conferences! If that’s your thing, then we’ve found an article by Fabricio Teixeira, that names some of them. Here’s a list of the ones that already scheduled for this year:

Interaction 17, February 3–8, New York, NY, United States ✈
World Information Architecture Day 2017, February 18, 65 locations ✈
Convey UX 2017, February 28 — March 2, Seattle, United States ✈
UX Australia, Design Research 2017, March 9, Sydney, Australia ✈
iA An Event Apart:
- April 3–5, Seattle, United States ✈
- May 15–17, Boston, United States ✈
- July 10–12, Washington DC, United States ✈
- August 28–30, Chicago, United States ✈
- October 30–November 1, San Francisco, United States ✈
- December 11–13, Denver, United States ✈Summit 2017, March 22–26, Vancouver, Canada ✈
UX Immersion: Interactions, May 1–3, Portland, OR, United States ✈
UXLX: User Experience Lisbon 2017, May 23–26, Lisbon, Portugal ✈
UX London 2017, May 24–25, London, United Kingdom ✈
UX Scotland 2017, June 7–9, Edinburgh, Scotland ✈
UX Strat 2017, June 15–16, Amsterdam, Netherlands ✈
Design & Content 2017, July 17–19, Vancouver, Canada ✈
UX Week 2017, August 29 — September 01, San Francisco, CA, United States ✈
Interact 2017, September 25–29, Mumbai, India ✈
EuroIA 2017, September 28–30, Stockholm, Sweden ✈
Interaction South America 2017, November, Florianópolis, Brazil ✈

2017 will be the year where will see new features and solutions for enterprise users and consumers of the mobile experience. It’s up to you to be on the trend and to plan your strategy to take advantage of this clues on the following twelve months.