How a Senior Marketing Specialist Is Using Visme to Cut Through the Noise

What do you get when you combine valuable information, unique customer insight and engaging visual content? Pure marketing gold.

Melissa Daley knows this better than most communicators. While some in her field have limited their marketing arsenals to word processing software, Melissa is continually exploring new visual content tools that will help her promote and elucidate complex, technical concepts such as the Industrial Internet of Things.

On her most recent quest to "step up her game as a visual content producer," Melissa came across Visme and was instantly hooked. She found that even as a graphic design software for beginners, it allowed her to quickly and easily create visual content tailored to her needs, including infographic summaries of white papers, visual tweets and postcards for industry reception invitations.

We had a chance to speak with Melissa and find out more about how she uses Visme to communicate more effectively. Here is what she had to say in her own words:

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For those who are unfamiliar with the Industrial Internet of Things, tell us a little bit about your work.

Currently, I'm working as a senior marketing specialist for the Industrial Internet Consortium, an open membership organization that promotes the growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). For those who are not familiar with this, it's a network of interconnected machines and sensors that is revolutionizing industrial automation.

There are companies of all different sizes transitioning to the Industrial Internet of Things. For example, there are water delivery systems, factories, smart grids for energy, security and surveillance systems that are all starting to implement this technology.

It's a really interesting dynamic. We have members who might even be competitors in the business world, but they get together and do experiments to drive the fundamentals of the Industrial Internet. They create controlled experimentation environments called testbeds and make those ideas happen.

One that’s really big is time-sensitive networking, which can be used in fields such as health care, solar energy, intelligent urban water systems, retail analytics, security planing and farming. For example, when applied to agriculture, you can use cameras and place sensors in the ground to automatically detect which crops need to be watered or fertilized.

How do you use visual content to make technical concepts easy to understand and engaging?

Since last summer, early fall, I've been using Visme to produce visual marketing collateral for business development. For example, I've created infographics that are summaries of white papers, as well as visual tweets, postcards for industry reception invitations and internal documents, such as a global map to display where all our members are based.

As a college professor at Bay Path University and Emerson College, I also started using Visme a year and a half ago to create engaging infographics.

It is readily apparent that students are becoming more visual in how they consume content, so I've created a number of infographics related to concepts such as project management and public speaking principles. It helps increase engagement, retention and understanding of the content, both for undergraduates and graduates.

How did you find Visme and why did you choose it over other graphic design software for beginners?

About a year and a half ago, during the summer of 2016, I decided that I needed a tool to communicate more effectively, not just in marketing but also in my role as a professor. Specifically, I needed something more interesting than PowerPoint to communicate content to students.

I chose Visme over other content creation software because, for one, it is able to handle Excel files, like when I want to upload data for a chart or graph. Also, for my investigations, Visme is more robust than other graphic design software for beginners. I love its ease of use, iconography and different styles of visuals provided with the platform. You can switch it up and change any of them really quickly.

I've been an evangelist for Visme since I've started using it. I told my colleagues about Visme in another marketing role, prior to the one I'm in right now. I used it there and in a couple of other marketing roles.

Most recently, at the Industrial Internet Consortium, I shared the program with my colleagues, and I was like, 'I can teach you how to use this. It would be really fun for us to use together.' There is only one person using InDesign with any regularity, so this is a quick way to get everyone together on the same page when creating and sharing content. With a 3-person license, we're able to do things on a dime that we weren't able to do previously to drive collaboration in the content creation process.

For example, this morning I had to create a postcard invitation to hand out at a trade show we have coming up. Because there are two of us working on this project, we were able to easily communicate with each other and say, "hey, can you fix this and change that and send it to such-and-such person." With Visme, there isn't this heavy, complex interface like you have in InDesign. If you know PowerPoint, you can find your way around Visme.

Can you give us a few examples of how Visme is helping you create visual marketing content?

Besides the previous examples, I've also used Visme to create visual content for an NGO called Virtual Activism and as supporting material for the courses I teach at Emerson College in Boston.

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Also, I've used it to create my own visual cover letter infographic to highlight some key points in my resume.

What other positive business results have you seen from using the tool?

Besides stepping up my game as a visual content producer, Visme has also helped reduce the time I spend on a particular piece of content. For example, it used to take me three to four hours to create something really visually attractive and appealing in PowerPoint. Now, it only takes me an hour and a half in Visme.

What Visme features do you like the most?

I love the icon library. It's really useful, professional and whimsical at the same time. It provides a real visual difference and cuts through visual exhaust when it comes to content creation, especially in comparison to ClipArt in PowerPoint. There are some really ugly ClipArt in PowerPoint, but the icons available in Visme are visually compelling, drive engagement and get people's attention.

I also find the Media Library very useful. I can place my visual tweets in folders and organize content for future use.

Would you recommend Visme to others?

Definitely. I already have. For example, a former colleague of mine, who has also been a professional mentor to me, is having his students at a state university here in Massachusetts use Visme to create infographics for an upper level management information systems class.

Your Turn

Are you looking for an affordable graphic design software for beginners that will save you the time and resources needed to master complex design tools? Take Visme for a test drive here and let us know what you think below!