My Biggest Takeaway From Authority Intensive 2014

I attended an incredible conference (Authority Intensive 2014)  last week produced by the wonderful folks from Copyblogger and as promised it was jam packed with immediately actionable insights.

Too many to enumerate in this one post, but to give you a taste my biggest takeaway it was from Jason Millers presentation. Without knowing Jason I have been using his content as an example of a excellent execution of content marketing. Little did I know that Jason is in charge of content marketing at Linkedin and can take credit for most (if not all) of Marketo’s content marketing efforts. Marketo does an amazing job with content marketing, you should really visit their site and dig around.

The biggest takeaway from Jason’s Speech is, “Visuals Are The New Headlines!”

It used to be that people decided whether to read your content based on the headline. Now, people will make a decision about reading your content based on your first visual. The stats I’ve heard are that 80% of the people will read your headline and only 20% will read the rest of your content. Making a lasting impression with a great visual will win the day…every time.

This was in fact a recurring theme from several speakers at the conference. Investing in great design, making amazing first impressions, and not overlooking any details is key to successful content marketing.

I can speak from experience that my blog posts get much more engagement when they include images.

My wife can confirm that most people make recipes in cook books that have pictures.

We all know that images are worth more than words, but in todays day and age you really need to learn how to deliver on the images and everything else will fall into place.

If there is one key takeaway worth repeating, it is… “Visuals Are The New Headlines!”

Make your content visually appealing and you won half the battle.

If you want a stat to help reinforce this theory… I once heard that 70% of internet traffic is people viewing pictures. This drove much of facebook’s growth in the early days, by making profile pics publicly viewable.

It is no longer good enough to create great content. Now you need to package it beautifully if you want to break through the clutter and noise and really stand out.