What is a brand? How do you ensure yours is strong (and real)? At Visage and Column Five, we find that when our partners struggle to craft a unifying brand story, it’s because they don’t entirely know who they are. It’s not surprising. It’s tough work that requires deep self-reflection about your core purpose, vision,
Archives
A well-designed infographic is a beautiful thing. Whether it’s visualizing a large amount of data or simply presenting information in a visual context, there’s no denying our brains love information design. In the hands of the right designer, an infographic can turn into a real work of art. As cofounder of Column Five, a content
Content marketing is no easy task. Whether you’re a one-person marketing department at a startup or CMO of a Fortune 500, doing it well—and within budget—is always a challenge. As a cofounder of Column Five, a visual studio that specializes in content marketing, I’m no stranger to the challenge. Luckily, over the years, I’ve found
Creating a single piece of truly good content is hard. The journey from an idea seedling to written masterpiece to getting into a true rhythm of publishing valuable brand content can be a psychological journey to Mordor. One does not simply walk into content marketing success. The purpose of this article is to uncover the
Do you remember that one time you had a meeting where everyone was prepared, knew the objective of the meeting, and truly valued one another’s unique contributions? Sure, these meetings happen—about as frequently as Halley’s Comet. Assuming that you work with good people who care, why is it so hard to create the right conditions for
There’s a lot of talk about finding your brand voice and keeping it consistent. As we highlighted in the Spaceship Earth post, there are opportunities to show the unique perspective of individuals within your brand. Anchoring your brand to a solid foundation allows individual expressions of that brand to be unique and original while staying
This is the final installment of a 3 part series I’ve put together to help you improve your team’s data literacy. You can start with “Visual Data Literacy: 3 Fundamentals for Content Marketers” and then go to the 2nd piece, “How to Get Started With Data Storytelling [6 Actionable Steps]” to get a good feel for what I’ve learned
This is the 1st of 3 posts I’ve put together to help you improve your team’s data literacy. When you’re done with this one, you can view the next post “How to Get Started With Data Storytelling [6 Actionable Steps]” to put these fundamentals to work. The last post, “How to Bring Your Data Storytelling to
Creating good branded content is really hard, even for the best of the best like LinkedIn, Kapost, and Contently. It takes time, especially when you care about quality rather than sheer volume. Yes, it’s easy to get impatient and be tempted to just get a piece of content out the door. But to remain effective,