Esther
Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. My name's Esther.
Melanie
My name's Melanie.
Esther
And today, we're talking about graphics, we've already talked recently about graphic design and branding and your logo, but today we're talking more specifically about graphics and images that you might use across your website and social media.
Melanie
Yeah, it's a visual aid to get people to have a look at what you're putting up, what you're talking about, what you're promoting is essentially an eye into your shop window, something that will attract people's attention as scrolling through their phone or having a look on their laptop. And you can't do that if you don't have a particular shop window that you can do that if you've got something up on social media.
Esther
Absolutely. But what is important is that you use the correct graphic with what you're talking about. There's nothing worse than reading going through your feed, scrolling down through your wall, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or wherever you are, and somebody is talking about a skirt and there's a picture of a dog, where do you get that from?
Melanie
Well, I reckon personally changing up things slightly, not quite so drastically as that could actually be quite a noble thing to do. I mean, there are shops out there. There's a food shop that I follow they do fast food and they have pictures of fish and chips and sausage and chips and that sort of stuff, and then every now and then they put up a picture of a chicken and say before, and we all know that it's just going to be OK, is still on-brand, it's still interesting, but it makes us stop going, hello.
Esther
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the turkeys come out at Christmas and tell you to eat more chicken, eat more beef and eat more of other animals, you know, and turkeys tell you to be awesome on my butchers window. They tell me to eat chicken instead of turkeys. See if the turkey can't be in a Christmas. Yeah, but it is important to have images that go with what you're talking about. OK, so here at the Monday morning marketing podcast, we have talked about lots of different topics at this point and we use images that go with them. OK, so when we talked about websites, we put up pictures with websites where we talked about graphic design, we put up pictures about design. When we talk about anything, we put up images that relate to the topic. Which makes sense. I mean, a picture paints a thousand words. Absolutely, absolutely, and these days, it's not just pictures that you can use effectively on social media and on your website, but also GIFs, videos, blogs, things like that, everything that moves and that draws your attention is good for your brand as well, now one of the things that we notice with a lot of companies is that they don't get the sizing right when it comes to their images. So as we know, there are all these different platforms, so we know that there are Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and your blog and your website and your email marketing, and they all require images, what we don't realize sometimes is that they all require different sizes of images.
Melanie
If you don't size these images correctly, then sometimes a large image, perhaps using up on your website goes on to Twitter, let's say it's a face, for example, and then when you put the picture up, although it will go up on Twitter or that will show in the preview, is maybe somebody's mouth or noes, which obviously doesn't paint a thousand words in one picture when they're scrolling through, and so it's really essential that, you know, not only where you're putting your content up at the right time, but you're putting it up in the right way, otherwise it won't attract the correct attention. So how do we do this?
Esther
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, there are a few places that we can use to do things like this. Obviously, if you have a larger business and you have the funds than there are graphic designers that can design up all different sizes for your headers, your profile pictures, your publications, your blog posts, your everywhere that you need, the image they can have all these images done up for you if you're a one-man-band or you don't have the budget, there are other places such as Canva, which is good and free and for a lot of things to use to be able to put things up on your social media and your website.
Melanie
Now, graphics don't need to be terribly technical either, remember, it doesn't have to be like a flowchart, it can just be a suitable image that speaks volumes, whether it be a vision of what you actually sell your product, your own image and demonstrate authenticity, or you can go to pay for free and locations where you can get professional-looking images. Now, I know a lot of people prefer to use businesses like iStock because they're expensive, there's less chance of these images being used by lots of other people, and, you know, I will be honest with you that just as good quality, some of the free ones I like and they're not as widely used, but when you're on lean company terms like a solar panel might be or a small business is difficult to afford them because they can range from sort of 30 feet up to two, three hundred euro, which is quite a lot of money for a small business, so I would normally look at places like Canva which have free images or cost one euro, which is insanely cheap, or go to Pixels on Splash places like that. What about you?
Esther
Yeah, there's also places like Pixabay, free pics that are also free, there are loads, there are lots and lots of web sites like having free royalty-free as well, images, that's it's important that you don't use images directly from Google that could be and could have their royalties and you might get a large fine for using those. And we at IPA group, we pay for storage blocks, which is a paid for platform with thousands of images. And like Melanie says, they're not as widely used as other places.
Melanie
Like Pixels that is widely used in fairness.
Esther
Yeah, yeah. Pixels is widely used, and if you're going to be using those images for your SEO, for your blog posts, for example, the act will affect your SEO that it has been used in lots and lots of other places. So when it comes to that, make sure that your alt tags and your your metadata is changed and the correct name for your blog post is added to that image. And we'll discuss SEO in detail at a different time. But there are also when it comes to sizing of your images, it's important to get the sizes right for doing your ads across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, when you go on, it will say, you know, this picture will look like this if you put it on to Facebook, and when you are on Facebook and you're doing an ad, it can also be promoted onto Facebook stories, which is a different shape and a different size and a whole different dimension, and also onto Instagram stories and also to Instagram post and all these different places, and it gives you the chance there are a lot of the times to modify the image, but it doesn't always look right, so if you have the chance to modify the image yourself, using something like Canva and remember, we don't get paid by any of these companies. Now, we are not affiliated with any anyone at all, we talk about what we know, we talk about what we use, what we are used to using and places like that on Canva, for example, they give you the different sizes for the different locations that you're going to be using that so they give you a blog post size, proper templates that you can use and reuse in different places.
Melanie
But there's also a custom dimension section as well, so let's say you want to put an image that you've created on your blog post, because, as I said, it's not really good to use by default somebody else's, then you can actually shape that in the custom dimensions section and every single website, every soul will tell you somewhere what size to minimize and maximize to, and, you know, this is a fantastic facility, but you don't have to go for the free version either, you can also go for the professional version, which gives you a wider range of fonts on the wide range of colours you can order and brand colours, so we're just putting these suggestions out there because graphics is such an important and essential part of the visuals to your business, and if you don't get that right, you know, it really will hurt your company.
Esther
Yeah, it really well, and we're here to talk about things to improve your company and to improve your vision online, if you have any topics that you would like us to talk about, please do get in touch on our website, the mondaymorningmarketing.com, and find us and follow us on social media as well.
Melanie
Thanks for listening today. And we'll speak to you next week bye.
Esther
Bye.