eBook How to Automate Workflows to Create Social and Digital Content at Scale

How to automate workflows to create social and digital content at scale

EBOOK

Shutterstock Custom • How to automate workflows to create social and digital content at scale

Table T able of contents Introduction

3

Mobile is driving the change in behavior

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You can’t build your brand with generic content

6

What’s the real problem? Creation or operations?

7

You need the right process to scale

11

A new way to create content at scale

12

Automated content creation at scale

14

How Quiznos and Shutterstock Custom share toasty photos on social media

15

About Shutterstock Custom

17

2 All trademarks depicted are the property of their respective owners. No affiliation with or endorsement of Shutterstock Custom is hereby implied.


Introduction Content demands have risen exponentially exponentially,, driven primarily by advancements in consumer technology. technology. Access to content is easier than ever before, which is fueling demands for new and interesting content. Brand marketers are responsible for creating the types of content that resonate with people. Much of today’s consumption occurs across social and digital channels. These channels provide provide a seamless connection connection between marketers who create content and people who consume content.

However, there are millions of pieces of content promoted on those channels. As a brand marketer, you’re competing against your core competitors, other brands in the marketplace, and also the thousands of individuals who share or promote content from their own channels. As a result, it’s increasingly difficult for you as a brand marketer to successfully diversify your unique style and identity from the thousands of other providers of content. Demands for content are on the rise while the amount of available space for your promotions is becoming becoming smaller. smaller. You You need to create create enough content content that promotes your unique brand identity to inform people of who you are and what value you can provide. To do that, you need To need a process that will help help you create custom custom on-brand content at scale.



Mobile is driving the change in behavior changed d industries. Mobile is not just a technology, it’s a behavior. Mobile has change It’s changed how we interact with content. It’s changed how marketers communicate and connect with their target audiences. The biggest biggest difference between between mobile and older mediums mediums is the frequency that that consumers are able to interact with content. Over 90% of people use apps while consuming content on mobile and the majority of that consumption occurs within half a dozen of the most popular social apps.



Streams of content appear within each of these apps. Interesting and relevant information is pushed to people within social news feeds, which allows people instantaneous access to new content. This behavior is a departure from content consumption habits conducted through previous mediums. In traditional instances, people were required to manually search for new content that informed purchase decisions. Mobile removes that manual search and automatically populates channels with thought provoking content that appeals to the individual consumer. Marketers must quickly adapt to these changes in consumption habits. Mobile’s ability to provide access to new content at any given time means people are constantly fed posts and promotions from brands of all size and scope. To remain relevant and top of mind with target customers, marketers need to create more content for consistent promotions and ongoing presences across social and digital channels. The types of content content that best resonate resonate with people on mobile and social networks are visuals. Visual content captures people’s attention as they rapidly scroll through their busy social news feeds. Visuals have the ability to stand out and diversify brands from other promoters pushing content into those news feeds.



You can’t build your brand with generic content Here’s the thing. Since social news feeds are jam packed with an overwhelming amount of content, it’s very easy for people to conglomerate numerous numerous promotions into one seemingly endless blur. If your visuals resemble, or worse mirror, the types of content promoted by hundreds or thousands of other brands, you will get lost in that conglomerate. People won’t identify your brand or the unique value you bring to the table if your content looks exactly like material used in other promotions.

Custom content is critical You need to create custom visuals unique to your brand identity and you need to do so at scale. The challenge is that creating unique content with frequency is a time consuming process, and requires a lot of resources in terms of operations and capital to truly scale. Many marketing teams lack the ability to implement these types of processes. In some instances, brands promote generic content assuming that social and digital promotions of any design will have more impact than no promotions at all. This is a misguided approach approach to using content content across each each of these channels channels and will fail to generat generate e the effect you expect from your efforts.



What’s the real problem? Creation or operations? After having thousands of conversations and working with hundreds of enterprise marketers, one common denominator is the fact that resources available for marketers are not changing changing.. In a world where access to content is easier than ever and demands for that content rapidly on the rise, this limitation poses a huge problem for many brand marketers. Many teams are used to working with traditional creative models for such mediums as print or TV. But how do those creative models adapt to mobile? What about Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat Snapchat?? What about digital channels? Social and digital channels are more interconnected interconnected than traditional mediums. You need to create that content that opens the door to a two-way dialogue between brand and consumer. That means you need to create visuals that are uniquely customized to your brand, and you need A LOT of that content. This is where many many enterprise marketers marketers fail. They recognize recognize that they they require new kinds of content but attempt to create those assets using traditional humandriven models that are incapable of scale.



Here’s a quote from a 2014 article that Marc Schaefer of {Grow} wrote about the economics of the content creation model: model : “Let’s fast forward one more time to 2014 and look at the two factors that impact the economics of content marketing — the amount of content available and the amount of content consumed (supply and demand). Of course the volume of free content is exploding at a ridiculous rate. Depending on what study you read, the amount of available web-based content (the supply) is doubling every 9 to 24 months. Unimaginable, really. However, our ability to consume that content (the demand) is finite. However, There are only so many hours in a day and even if we consume content while we eat, work and drive, there is a theoretical and inviolable limit to consumption, which we are now approaching. This intersection of finite content consumption and rising content availability will create a tremor I call The Content Shock. In a situation where content supply is exponentially exploding while content demand is flat, we would predict that individuals, companies, and brands would have to “pay” consumers more and more just to get them to see s ee the same amount of content.”

Mark Schaefer {Grow}



E M U L O V

n i o p t o a d h c t e b y n i v e d r s u r i o v a e h b e r u m s e c h n e n t t e o n t e c g n n C o i i t p e r s a d o t e M a r k e

TIME

Gap between what consumers expect from marketing content and how brands deliver content experiences Marketers lack the volume and variety of imagery needed to cut through the noise and gain consumer attention, and their current process can’t deliver on expectations

Schaefer points out in his article that we’re in a state of content shock, and that marketers are struggling to keep up. Some of the key takeaways from his article summarize why traditional content creation models are no longer viable for today’s brand marketer. ɬ

Deep pockets will win every time. Whoever has the highest content

marketing budget will be able to use traditional content creation models to get the volume and variety they need to cut through the noise. It will be very ver y expensive, though. though. ɬ

The entry barriers become impossibly impossibly high. If you can overwhelm

the market with content (assuming you have budget), it raises the content barrier for competitors. ɬ

The cost-benefits cost-benefits flip. In 2009, you might have paid your

audience $500 a week to keep their attention. Next year, you might spend $3,000 per week. And with barriers getting higher and higher, that number will increase exponentially unless you change your creation model.



You need lots of content to capture people’s attention, but your creative model is not scalable if you’re forced to pay a greater amount of money to achieve your objective. objective. This is why human capital creation models can’t scale. Your Your process becomes more expensive as you increase the amount of human capital into your creative model. The more you have to spend to capture people’s attention reduces the amount of return you receive for your efforts.

Think about it this way. way. Do you want to pay $2,000 every time you want to publish an image that will be viewed for no more than 5 seconds? This is why you need need a more automated automated solution to streamline streamline your creative workflow.



You need the right process to scale A strong brand identity is your foundation to create consistently on-brand content for social and digital promotions. Your brand identity outlines visual brand guidelines that are then translated into technical requirements for shooting visual content customized to your brand. Calibrating your brand identity into guidelines for creating content has traditionally been a timely process with many moving parts. This is why leading content marketing experts say that operations, budget, volume, quality & speed are some of the biggest content marketing challenges currently faced by brands brands.. Brand marketers have a lot of work on their plates, and heavily rely on both internal and external resources to complete their workflows. But they’re constrained by two things: time and money. If teams keep the entire creative process in-house, there are strict time limitations that restrict the ability to scale. Outsourcing to an agency is a very expensive process, and your ability to scale is typically based on how much of your budget is available for creative development. This is why traditional, traditional, human human capital content content creation models aren’t scalable scalable for social and digital channels.

To increase the number To number of creative creative resources available available for production, some brand marketers look to the freelance marketplace to scale. But this strategy carries a significant amount of friction. ɬ

Vet

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Secure rights

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Ensure quality

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Negotiate

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Process payments

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Communicate

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Deliver assets

Check legal compliance

And so on. So what is a brand marketer to do? Look at a technology solution.



A new way to create content at scale

There’s been a strong strong movement by brand brand marketers towards technological technological vendors that can help execute creative content plans at scale. Point Nine Capital, a VC firm focused on Saas and marketplaces, says marketers are searching for technological technologic al solutions that combine the benefits of both SaaS and marketplaces. marketplaces. “A SaaS enabled marketplace is a business which combines the characteristics of both models: ɬ

A marketplace component that that connects two or more parties to conclude a transaction and thus can generate and benefit from real network effects.

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A SaaS (Software as a Service) Service) component that offers software features to to one or more of the parties. This SaaS component needs to be usable as a standalone software.”



(Source: Chiefmartec.com Chiefmartec.com)) Here is a list of the current technological technological vendors that describe themselves as providers of marketing technology solutions. You can see that these types of business models are wildly popular. SaaS-enabled SaaS-enabled marketplaces optimize workflows to help marketers create content at scale. They also give enterprise marketers a better suite of services to use in their creative processes. However, However, many vendors are still lacking a core component in the content supply chain: managed services.



Automated content creation at scale Creating content using technology technology platforms is the best way to scale productivity without sacrificing anything in terms of quality. But you need to select the right platform that will provide real solutions in terms of streamlined workflows and accelerated accelerate d creative output while maintaining the quality expected by your brand. Shutterstock Custom is used by F500 companies to save time on content creation and better manage the turnaround time from ideation to 1 assets. Brands use Shutterstock Custom to calibrate their visual brand identities and develop structured content briefs that can be shared with creative talent anywhere in the world. The platform uses data matching algorithms to connect your brand with specialists whose creative skills best align with your custom brand guidelines.

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Cost-effective

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Faster, agile creation

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Global scale

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Executional simplicity

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Consistently on-brand & quality

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Full rights management

Shutterstock Custom is an agile and cost-effectiv cost-effective e solution to create consistently on-brand content for your marketing campaigns.



How Quiznos and Shutterstock Custom share toasty photos on social media Quiznos is a fast-food restaurant brand best known for making tasty toasty subs. Targeting Ta rgeting a strong core demographic demographic of millennials millennials it makes sense for Quiznos Quiznos to focus a majority of their marketing efforts on digital and social media. Quiznos has a strong presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. They support their Toasty Toasty TV and Toasty Toasty On Tour Tour programs using using social media, and require lots of content to run their social media campaigns.



When it came to social media photos, Quiznos wanted a good mix of product shots, lifestyle shots, and influencer content. Traditionally they scheduled expensive photo shoots with photographe photographers, rs, and provided visual requirements for sandwiches and lifestyle-type shots. They spent several days creating bulk content all at once to fill in enough of the content calendar for upcoming months. The process was expensive expensive and not scalable scalable for Quiznos. Upon learning of Shutterstock Custom, the marketing team attended an educational webinar on how to create content for Instagram. They concluded that Shutterstock Custom Custom had a good understanding of imagery imagery for social and digital channels with a good repertoire of brands, and decided to explore Shutterstock Shutterstock Custom as a solution. One of the biggest benefits that came from implementing Shutterstock Custom was the efficiency it brought to the content creation process at Quiznos. Planning imagery for content calendars became much easier. easier. It freed up a lot of time since the marketing team wasn’t required to be out on shoots. The platform took care of it!

“Shutterstock Custom helped us save time, making content creation “Shutterstock as efficient as possible while scaling quantity and quality. I’d highly recommend them.”

Kristen Melick Social Media Manager, Quiznos



About Shutterstock Custom At Shutterstock Custom, we’re revolutionizing the global exchange of creativity for hundreds of leading brands. Powered by our technology, technology, we connect you with creatives to drive faster, more efficient content creation. Creating consistently consistently on-brand visual content is a complex and time-consuming task. But great content is at the core of your brand, and it’s important that you get it right. Your content brings your brand identity to life. The traditional ways ways of creating creating content are slow slow and cumbersome, and they’re not scalable. Vetting creative talent, negotiating, securing rights, processing payments, ensuring quality – the list goes on... So how do you make it easy to create great content for your brand? How do you scale content creation? Unlike any other solution, Shutterstock Custom automates the creative workflows that give you the agility, cost efficiency, and on-brand consistency you need to scale visual content creation at your company.

To learn more about how To how marketers use Shutterstock Shutterstock Custom to create consistently on-brand visual content

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eBook How to Automate Workflows to Create Social and Digital Content at Scale

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