Motions - February

MOTIONS 2020

BY ISSUU

February

A Word from Michelle Zucca, Global Head of Digital Marketing Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow – let’s get ready for an early Spring! February 2, known as Groundhog’s Day in the United States & Canada, and has been celebrated since 1887. Punxsutawney Phil became an international celebrity thanks to the 1993 movie Groundhog Day. But where did this story come from?

It derives from the Pennsylvania Dutch superstition that if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks, and if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.

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Stories are an integral part of life. They are part of the foundation of traditions and celebrations across the globe. At Issuu, we help people to tell their story.

Bring us your content and we will help you tell your story in the most visuallycompelling format. You will be able to easily share pixel-perfect, platformoptimized content to Instagram, Facebook, Apple News, and more.

Create it once and distribute it everywhere.

Expand your reach and tell your story with Issuu.

IMAGE CREDIT: DESIGNDESIGN COVER IMAGE CREDITS: ROCKY MOUNTAIN BRIDE, DEBI LILLI EVENTS, FASHION JOURNAL

MASTHEAD & CONTRIBUTORS MEGAN BREUKELMAN EDITOR

WILLIAM SMIAROWSKI CONTRIBUTOR

JESSE RATNER CONTRIBUTOR

ALE RAMIREZ CONTRIBUTOR

SERINA NGUYEN CONTRIBUTOR

SPECIAL THANKS TO JOE HYRKIN JOHN STURINO MEGHAN COLE MICHELLE ZUCCA

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CONTENT CALENDAR IDEAS

IMAGE CREDITS: PURELY ELIZABETH, SB LIFE & STYLE, ESCAPISM

FEBRUARY 2020 CONTENT CALENDAR IDEAS 4

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G A L E N T I N E’S DAY Galentine’s Day is a cute and fun alternative to Valentine’s Day where you celebrate love with your closest girl friends. Often times these celebrations involve champagne, tasty treats and a lot of laughs.

USING ISSUU FOR SOCIAL Fill up your February 2020 content calendar with content from the Issuu Story Cloud. The Issuu Story Cloud is a suite of integrated digital publishing products. Tap the power of the Issuu Story Cloud to create and share content to your website, on your blog or as Instagram Stories, Stories on Facebook, Snapchat Stories and more. Using the Issuu Story Cloud to distribute your content will allow you to reach a global audience with design-forward assets and digital content. Ready to get started?

Head over to the Issuu Creator Hub to see how Issuu can best serve your brand.

TRENDING Self-care Recipes for two Gift guides Galentine’s day Chocolate Roses Date night ideas Makeup trends

H O L I DAY S I N F E B R U A RY ‘ 2 0 IN FEBRUARY, a content calendar can go in as many directions as the French have words for love (which according to my social media feed there’s at least 10). Valentine’s Day crashes into our calendar. We think about first dates, celebrity crushes, old flames, and maybe even that “one who got away.”

Chocolate Fondue Day (Feb 5) World Radio Day (Feb 13) Valentienes Day (Feb 14) President’s Day (Feb 17) Random Act of Kindness Day (Feb 17) International Polar Bear Day (Feb 27)

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What is a Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC)?

Marketing is about creating demand. Good marketing creates demand by addressing the needs of the people you want to reach.

On a tight budget? Need results fast? In 2020, the most important idea for you to master is the Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC).

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WHAT IS AN MVC? The MVC philosophy is all about getting the most value out of the least amount of time, talent, and resources. This approach emphasizes experimentation, the importance of user feedback, and an iterative design process. It borrows from the popular Minimally Viable Product (MVP) model and Eric Ries “Lean Startup”.

THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO RUN AN MVC While there’s no single method for successfully running an MVC, you can create an MVC initiative at your organization by following these three steps we affectionately call: • Interviewing friends • Getting it out there • Testing before investing

INTERVIEW YOUR FRIENDS An MVC is all about learning fast. And talking to people you already have a relationship with—current stakeholders, partners, customers, even your friends—can jump start the ideas that will fuel your campaign thinking.

You don’t need a multi-million dollar research budget to understand the market and your customers. Ask the people who know your business why they love what you offer instead of the competition. (Success is discovering at least one thing you didn’t know.)

GET IT OUT THERE Your interviews now serve as your research. Leverage what you’ve learned to create content—see our blog on catalogs and lookbooks. But do it quickly. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Remember: You want to create something that’s simply good enough to be viable. The urgency of this step is meant to push you and your team to get your creative out into the wild. Social ads are a really effective way of testing new messages in the market—and getting results, fast.

TEST BEFORE YOU INVEST The final step in the minimally viable campaign process isn’t really final. It’s meant to be a flywheel where the value of testing feeds back into another visit to your friends and the minimally viable effort it takes to get the next creative to market.

Fortunately, the engine for generating testable marketing ideas start with our first MVC step: talking to people who have experience with what you (or your competition) is offering.

Advanced tip: To get even more value out of MVC efforts, you’ll want clarity on the current profitability of the channels you’re using. If you’re just starting out, don’t worry. You’ll want to baseline your estimates and projections by researching the marketing channels relevant to your business.

The key thing to remember in the MVC process is understanding when you’ve gathered enough information by testing your creative in the market—on Facebook or with Google Ads—to understand its effectiveness.

The goal here is to quickly get an understanding of your campaign inmarket—and then quickly evolve your content to better meet the needs of your prospects.

WHY MINIMALLY VIABLE CAMPAIGNS? Multichannel, multisegment marketing campaigns offer tremendous value when backed by smart strategy and steady management. But many small-to-midsize businesses and their marketers—maybe someone like you—need to prove their messaging in the market before they’re ready to commit serious marketing dollars.

The bottom line is—even if you loathe everything about marketing—you need to get the word out. You need to connect with your prospects. You’ll need to give them a reason to believe in what you’re offering. And you may need to figure out what those reasons are fast.

Let’s be real. Everyone is looking for smarter, more effective and efficient ways to market. In 2020, the MVC will not only be the most important marketing idea, it might just be the smartest one, too.

START WITH ISSUU See how Issuu can transform a single PDF into a high-quality campaign that connects on Facebook, Instagram, and across the Web.

CONTENT MARKETING

Three Essentials to Creating Community on Social Media We’re social creatures. Despite the galaxy of cultural differences across this great world, everywhere people crave community. To belong. Our most important communities—often our family and our local communities—nourish our lives in priceless, incalculable ways. The Internet has complicated things.

More than half of the world’s approximately eight billion people are online, according to a 2018 United Nations report. And we’re both more connected and seemingly more divided than ever.

Today, because of social media, people are finding communitieUNSPs in non-traditional ways.

They’re building communities based on shared interests—and those interests can include your brand.

Here are three principles to build a community on social media:

BE ACTIVE

You’re going to display your brand anywhere you can. People will also be showcasing your brand on social media to support you and hope that you notice that they’re spreading the word.

To drive engagement, you’ll need to use hashtags. Obvi. The important thing to remember is to use unique, thought-provoking hashtags. Hashtags are a key component of social media, brand awareness, and community engagement. Social media experts recommend using succinct, specific hashtags.

As a way to drive a consistent connection, you can create a calendar of offerings unique to your social channel. See how Opel, the German car maker, used Instagram Stories to run a contest that generated more than 1,800 entries.

BE A GOOD LISTENER

Your social media channels are an opportunity for customers to engage directly with your business. And your community will be the first to tell you when they love what you’re doing, and when they don’t. When something goes wrong, you’re likely to hear about it first on social media.

Here’s the thing: You must listen to your audience. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable, according to Adobe’s CMO Magazine.

Starbucks is a great example. Thanks to their “My Starbucks Idea Campaign”, the company invited customers to shape their product strategy—and, to all our benefit, resulted in cake pops and pumpkin-spiced lattes.

BE AUTHENTIC

You’re a leader in your space. Leaders lead by engaging with their community in an authentic way, in a way that shows who you really are. Read more about why authenticity is the key to social media marketing success. Being authentic is the only way to create a connection with your followers that feels familiar. You’ll earn respect for transparency. And, if you’re clear about the purpose that’s driving everything, you’ll make a real impact.

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Social Media for Realtors Today’s Real Estate Industry is heating up. And the competition amongst realtors is at an all-time high. Therefore, whether in person or online, it is crucial for real estate professionals to create a top-notch marketing strategy. Now with the Issuu Story Cloud they can. The Issuu Story Cloud is a suite of digital publishing products. Available for businesses, brands and creators of all types, they can create Issuu Stories, magazines, marketing collateral and more. With Issuu’s streamlined tools, realtors will find themselves promoting properties, closing more deals and reaching real estate clients faster in no time.

Promote Properties with Ease Whether it be a brochure, magazine, market report or newsletter, Issuu has become the Real Estate marketing tool of choice. Most importantly with Issuu’s latest tools, Real Estate professionals can expand their reach and marketing capacity. Keep reading for an in-depth look at the Issuu tools Real Estate professionals are using to reach real estate clients faster.

The Issuu Embed Shareable Full-Screen Reader allows realtors to showcase their listings in a sleek and interactive format. Now prospective buyers can get an in-depth look at properties from the comfort of their home. High-quality imagery, full-screen spreads, and mobile-optimized formats will take any realtors marketing game to the next level.

Embedded Video With the embedded video feature, now realtors can add personality to their promotional materials. Whether it be a welcome message from the realtor, for instance, or a full-length video of the property, a simple embed will add an engaging touch to your content.

Social Story Sharing Create once, share everywhere with the Issuu Story Cloud’s social sharing abilities. Now with Issuu, the process to convert static stories is streamlined into a mobile and visual story sharing

experience. Above all, Issuu Stories makes it simple to convert your content into new formats for sharing on your website, or as mobile Stories on social.

With Visual Stories realtors can now create unique and immersive Visual Stories to share to their social networks. With the Free Instagram Story Templates, Inspire or Voice Template, audiences will be able to view social content that combines slick imagery, focused text and even video. To make things even easier, Issuu has introduced the Adobe InDesign plug-in. A free-to-use extension that takes story sharing to new heights.

Add Web Links With the Issuu Story Cloud web links feature, potential clients can easily be directed from the digital brochures on Issuu to web listings. Therefore making it quick and simple to connect agents and clients for viewings and to receive real estate offers.

Issuu Analytics The secret to reaching a specific audience, both within real estate and in general, is utilizing in-depth analytics. With the Issuu Analytics feature, powerful page-level statistics are provided. Most importantly, realtors can easily see when their audience is most engaged, which pages perform best, and how their ads are driving performance. In real-time, real estate agents can see what listing is being looked at most, and which their listing strategies are the best performing.

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Six Ways to Repurpose PDF Content Recycling and repurposing your content is where it’s at in 2020. There’s not enough time to create the amount of content that the modern digital audience expects of creators. That’s why we’ve come up with these 6 ways to repurpose your PDF content. Now you can convert your content in multiple styles so you can reach your across platforms and devices.

VISUAL STORIES

Convert your PDF content into Visual Stories for social media. Create beautiful designforward assets straight from your PDF content using Issuu Visual Stories. Preview your PDF content directly from InDesign with the Issuu InDesign plugin. Visual Stories are an engaging way to reach your audience. With moving images and slides, having Visual Stories as a part of your marketing strategy creates a great multimedia experience.

ARTICLE STORIES

Turn your PDF content into something readers can access no matter the device. By converting your content to Article Stories, you’re turning your PDF into a mobileoptimized, scrollable piece of content. This gives your content the potential to reach beyond just a desktop screen. Allow your audience to tune in regardless of which device they’re on by using Issuu Article Stories.

ISSUU GIFS

Create an engaging GIF for social using Issuu’s GIF tool. Stop scrollers in their tracks by creating bright and engaging GIFs of your PDF content. The Issuu GIF maker is a customizable tool that you can adjust. Change the colors of your GIF to really pop in people’s feeds. Choose the pages of your PDF to show in the GIF to make sure your readers have a good preview of what they’re going to be seeing within the PDF!

INFOGRAPHICS

Convert the valuable content in your publication into infographics. Infographics can be very engaging on social media. These can also be used for additional marketing purposes.

Create email funnels with infographics of your PDF content to build your email list. Use infographics as shareable content on social media to engage your audience and expand your reach. Easily create these with your PDFs as you already have the information all there – you just need to design it!

VIDEOS

Turn the information in your PDF into video content. Video is a super engaging format that often gets people to stop in their tracks. Turn the content in different sections of your PDF into videos that are quick and easy to digest. You can also create longer-form video content using the whole content of the PDF.

WEBINARS

Turn the content in your PDF into a script for a webinar. Webinars are an awesome way to attract and engage both new and existing audiences. You can use webinars to promote your current initiative in an organic and authentic-feeling way. Webinars are also a great space to make sales on a product or course. Teaching people something and giving them valuable information builds trust with your audience.

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USING THE ISSUU ADOBE INDESIGN EXTENSION 1.

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Open Document in InDesign Under Window -> Extensions, select Issuu - Create a Story, Or Under File -> Issuu - Create a Story Select your Story Style (Issuu Styles are templates that reflect your brand needs).

Voice Story Style: Fast paced. Strong quotes are the hero. Make use of image takeovers and dynamic text animations to create a strong impact.

Inspire Story Style: Get ready to inspire with big images and visual breathing space. Tell your story, where Editorial meets Interactive for an engaging experience.

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Click PREVIEW to preview your Story Style and Click SELECT THIS STYLE Select Pages and Images that you want to appear in your Visual Story and Click PREVIEW TIP: Include at least SIX High Quality Images in your Visual Story.

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Provide Story Title, Publication Title and Publisher Name to your Visual Story and Click EDIT AND SHARE To Edit, Review and Share your Visual Story, you need to have an Issuu Account where you can also Save your Visual Stories Once you login to your Issuu account, you will see below screen where you can Review, Edit and Share Visual Story

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