Here is the final design for the XFC 24 event poster with the new main event between Scott Holtzman and John Mahlow.  Please let us know what you think.
We appreciate all feedback!

The XFC - Xtreme Fighting Championships set their sites on June 14th, 2013 in Tampa, FL for another action packed televised professional MMA Event!  Several of the top local and national superstars show the fans and the XFC all they’ve got in undercard battles you won’t want to miss.
Tickets on sale now (Click Here) | Doors open at 6:30pm, Fights start at 7:00pm, LIVE on AXStv at 9pm.

FIGHT CARD
MAIN EVENT – LIGHTWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP
John Mahlow vs Scott Holtzman
Co-Main Event
Rickey Rainey vs Reggie Pena
Kevin Forant vs Eric Reynolds
Dave Courchaine vs Luis Santos
Kelly Warren vs Cortney Casey
Jason Hicks vs Shah Bobonis
Undercard
Chad Livingston vs John Cofer (TV Swingbout)
Nick Smith vs Ladarious Jackson
Robert Gonzalez vs Gabe Maldonado
Jason Gladey vs Gilbert Burgos
Billy Quarantillo vs Theo Idleburg

1) Grabs Attention: A well-designed shoe or computer will not only grab attention because of its features, but also because of its looks. In a shoe store, the first thing that determines whether a person will try a shoe or not is its design. If it looks ugly, it will stay on the shelf unless the customer has come in, specifically, with that model or price-range in mind. So make sure your products look good to grab the eye of your potential customers. This is also what makes them stand out against the run-of-the-mill competition.

2) Creates Recall: When you buy anything, like hair shampoo, you might think that it is the product inside the bottle that matters. Fact is, the product matters only once the customer has bought the bottle and tried it on. To get them to pick your product, your packaging (in this case the bottle), needs to make them want to pick it. There are thousands of products lined up on store-shelves and if you don’t take the effort to create an experience from the moment someone receives a box to the time they start using the product, they won’t have anything to remember you by.

3) Builds your Image: British Petroleum created a surge by changing their logo colours to Green and Yellow. While their logo remained the same, the message was simple – “We care about the environment.” Whether the company goes on to do something about it or not is something different. The fact is, in the eyes of the target audience, this shift in design leads to a shift in perception.

4) Increases Sales: As people start looking at your company and brand differently, they start appreciating it more. If two companies create the same quality of product (equal in every aspect), it is a guarantee that almost every single customer will pick the one they remember the most. Design helps them remember and, therefore, the next time they go to a store, they will pick out what they remember. Make your brand more memorable with some innovative thinking that touches your customers and watch them line-up outside.

5) Improves Market Standings: This is a direct off-shoot from a rise in sales figures. If you start selling more products, chances are that you are outshining your competition. That means, you are toppling them in the popularity charts as well as in the charts that matter the most – the financial charts.

6) A Strategic Investment: As the world is being driven by more visual content, standing out in the crowd is getting harder. Using good design to create your own space, before anything covers your presence, is a great way to set things up for the future.

7) Creates Goodwill: As companies are struggling to compete in the battle of price, recession and severely damaged economies, the ones that will survive are the brands that are trusted by customers. When you create a design, be it for a product, an advertisement or just a hoarding on the street, and connect with the customer, that is what they are looking for. Everyone wants to know that you are thinking about them and nothing says that better than meaningful design.

8) Improves Staff Loyalty: Designing a brand isn’t just about getting customers and increasing sales. It is also about taking care of the people on the inside. When these people sit at their workstations or desks and start their day, they need to have your best interests in their mind. From office interiors to memos to the environment that you create, everything needs to be designed with their welfare in mind. Keep them happy and you’ll guarantee a successful organization that is run by the people – happy people, i.e.

9) Reduce Time to Market: Are you forced to stay fresh in people’s mind with new launches? Are you afraid of slipping out of their sights as they go, everyday, to spend their money? Changing the brand image of your company or simply creating fresh design can stop that enforced product launch. An absolutely brand new product package can change the way people have been looking at the same old thing. No one will care that what is inside is what they have been using all along. What they care about is that there is something new about the product they love. Keep them interested and they’ll keep coming back for more of the same. So you can spend your time in developing something better for the next launch.

10) Create a Better World: We live in a world where quality is an idea that is preached more than it is practiced. By creating a better product, you’ve already breached through the barriers of being average, and moved into the superlatives. Now comes the time when you need to carry that image through all other aspects of your business. By creating good designs, you emphasise on a better planet through fresh designs and thoughts. Your ideas will be the starting point for many others, and the cycle will continue with you at the forefront.

Whether you are looking at making a difference or simply making a profit, you need to realise that running a business is a long-term commitment. If you’ve taken the leap on all other fronts, then you’d better start looking at design as an investment for the future. After all, who doesn’t like to believe in love at first sight?

When people think about graphic design, they normally think about a desktop program that allows them to create images and publish them on their website, business cards, invitations, or in a variety of other places. However, this is not true graphic design, and in fact – in order to produce professional graphic designs, this requires the skill of a graphic artist. The process is much different than using some type of desktop application because it requires a graphic designer that can create a unique experience when it comes to color, print, typography and the overall visual experience. Here you will discover the importance of graphic design, and how you can benefit when it comes to hiring this type of service.

Why Graphic Design
Creating a visual impact when it comes to advertisement or designing a website will require the skill of someone that understands how to put colors and images together that are not only eye-catching, but pleasing as well. This will not only be important from the standpoint of the visitor or person that is looking at a design or image that has been displayed on your behalf, but this is also important for you as a business owner because this is a critical element when it comes to the unique marketing aspects of your business.

The reason for this is – the designs, graphics, and colors you display, over time, will become associated with you or your business. In this respect, it will be important to choose a graphic designer that can establish designs that will convey the message you’re trying to get across to your potential audience. So, as you can see, graphic design plays a huge part when it comes to you, your business, or your marketing strategies. With that being said, this leads to the next point that will be just as important, and that is choosing a graphic designer and Successfully Working with your Graphic Designer.

Choosing a Graphic Designer
There are a wide variety of graphic designers available for those trying to get some graphics completed for a specific project or website design. However, it will be important to realize that every type of graphic designer will not be the same. You will discover that there are some that will specialize in certain types of design while others will work in specific areas that have to do with graphics. For instance, when looking for a graphic designer you’ll need to consider website design, company logo, photographic images, business cards, flyers, brochures, product packaging, and even your business stationary.

All of the items listed above will need to be considered, and it will be up to you to choose a graphic artist that will be able to handle the specific areas where you have important requirements. So, with the information provided above you can see why it’s important to choose a graphic designer that has superior knowledge in any specific area. Now, these are only a few areas where the skills and knowledge of a graphic artist will play a huge part; however, you can see that being a graphic designer is much more than using a simple desktop application.

Pretty pictures are the best. But you know who likes them even more than your readers, leads, and customers?
Marketers.

Well they should, anyway, because marketers who are embracing visual content are seeing huge returns in terms of, well, more readers, leads, and customers. Oh, also revenue. Not a bad setup.

Whether you're already a champion of visual content and just want a little affirmation, or you're interested in dipping your toes into the burgeoning visual content space, these 19 statistics should help you make the case for doing just that.

1) 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco)

2) 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text. (Source: Zabisco)

3) 46.1% of people say a website's design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of the company. (Source: Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab)

4) Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don't. (Source: AnsonAlex)

5) Posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts. (Source: SEOmoz)

6) Visual content drives engagement. In fact, just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content -- photos and videos -- saw a 65% increase in engagement. (Source: Simply Measured)

7) On Facebook, photos perform best for likes, comments, and shares as compared to text, video, and links. (Source: Dan Zarrella)

8) 37% of Pinterest account holders log in a few times every week; 28% said they log in a few times a month; 15% log in once daily; 10% log in numerous times a day. (Source: PriceGrabber)

9) 98% of people surveyed with a Pinterest account said they also have a Facebook and/or Twitter account (Source: PriceGrabber)

10) Pinterest generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. (Source: Shareaholic)

11) Pinterest drives sales directly from its website -- of people with Pinterest accounts, 21% have purchased an item after seeing it on Pinterest. (Source: PriceGrabber)

12) 85% of the US internet audience watches videos online. The 25-34 age group watches the most online videos, and adult males spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than females. (Sources: comScore and Nielsen)

13) Over 60 hours of videos are uploaded each minute on YouTube.com. (Source: YouTube)

14) 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute. (Source: YouTube)

15) Viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

16) Mobile video viewing increased 35% from 2010 to 2011. (Source: Nielsen)

17) 25 million smartphone users stream 4 hours of mobile video per month. 75% of smartphone users watch videos on their phones, 26% of whom use video at least once a day. (Sources: Ooyala and Ipsos)

18) Mobile video subscription is expected to hit $16 billion in revenue by 2014, with over 500 million subscribers. (Source: Ooyala)

19) Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. (Source: Internet Retailer)

Have you had success using visual content? Share the ways you're integrating visual content into your marketing strategy in the comments!
As always, CONTACT US anytime.

Visual content is an important part of creating engagement across social channels. It stands out from all the text promotion companies typically do, helps tell a story, and gives event attendees all the information they need in a short amount of time. Visual content for events can be a valuable tactic before, during, and afterwards, becoming a cornerstone of your event marketing strategy.
Creating a custom graphic for every webinar and event that we promote on social channels increases the EdgeRank of our posts on Facebook because our followers tend to engage with images over text only posts. We have seen a huge uptick in registration by using this tactic, particularly in a promoted post.  Take a look at a visual image we used on Facebook for our Keynote at Marketo Summit.

Visual Note-taking: Hiring a graphic facilitator to capture visual recordings from an event is a fun and innovative way to keep your audience engaged and interested in your content. Having a talented artist on hand sketching notes in real time creates a memorable record. Here are three benefits from using a graphic facilitator to illustrate online and offline events:

• Extends conversations and builds buzz
• Enables better understanding of key takeaways
• Get attendees to look up from their personal devices

We use this visual notetaking for a lot of our events, including keynote sessions at Dreamforce and Marketo Summit. People love to come up afterwards and take photos that they then post to Instagram and Twitter.

Infographics: Creating an infographic about your event or series of events is a fantastic way to get someone excited about attending. Not only is it a fun and unique visual take on events, but it also provides your audience with important logistical information in a way that is easy to understand. You can even create one infographic depicting all of the events you will participate in during a given year. And because infographics are super shareable, they will give you a social lift. Take a look at some of the infographics we created for Dreamforce:

Cover Photos and Backgrounds: Leveraging cover photos on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter is a great way to get your event message across visually when followers come to your page. Cover photos and background images give you free real estate to engage with your followers in a primary location. Take a look at our Google+ cover photo for an upcoming Marketing Happy Hour. It really pops when you visit our Google+ page.

What other visual tactics do you use to promote events? To learn more about all things events, download our Definitive Guide to Event Marketing.

We, as designers and as MMA fans, are always interested in hearing your opinions on all things design-related.  Pictured above are the event poster designs put forth by the UFC for UFCs 160, 161 & 162.
Let us know what you think of the poster designs.
I personally feel that these three posters go from best to worst in terms of design. The UFC 160 poster is an excellent fight poster design, while the others look far less inspiring (in my opinion).

Remember the kindergarten exercise, show and tell?
Well, based on its more mobile-friendly News Feed redesign, it appears Facebook will now be more show than tell. Or, to be more precise, it will be burying the tell in billions of pictures. The shift to a personal newspaper-style format with larger and more prominent photo displays is a response to photo-driven behavior that has rapidly changed the social media landscape. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that 50% of all posts are now pictures, double the amount from just a year ago.

It’s a shift that makes sense considering our brains are wired to favor pictures over words. A recent HubSpot study of 1,500 B2B and B2C company Facebook Pages determined that photo posts generate 53% more Likes and 104% more comments than average posts. In addition, photo posts receive 84% more link clicks than plain text status updates or links with thumbnail pics.

So if it’s true that Facebook is becoming (a bigger version of) Tumblr or Pinterest and text posts are dying, what happens after the funeral?

How Will the Social Web Monetize Visual Content?

To date, the internet has been monetized primarily by text-based ads. In fact, an entire industry has developed around keyword optimization for ad buyers. Words drive SEO. Words drive Google and Facebook ads. Words drive the economy of the web.

If consumer-generated photos are the new currency, is the entire concept of indexing words to serve up relevant content and advertisements going to become extinct?

As we move toward a visual-centric content universe, the machines that monetize the internet need to keep up with the times. In the new Facebook News Feed, the best advertising will not look like traditional ads on the surface; they'll look like your friends’ photos. But it will be your friends’ photos which voluntarily celebrate their favorite brands that will become most valuable to advertisers.

Unfortunately for marketers, this authentic consumer content is rarely tagged with brand names unless it's in response to a contest or social media campaign offering prizes, discounts, or other incentives. People naturally tag the names of people and places they care about -- not products.

Photo Monetization: A Theory What’s needed is more image intelligence -- a way to systematically scan and detect the presence of brand logos, packaging, and products lurking inside the billions of consumer photos streaming into the internet each week. (According to Facebook, this social network alone gets more than 300 million photo uploads daily.)

A smart computer vision system applied to those photos could extract the relevant meta data and essentially turn your friends’ pictures into "buyable" ad units. You click on the photo and are presented with targeted sales offers.

At any given moment on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, you can find photos of your family or friends exercising. Every 5K race, treadmill trot, or yoga pose continues to be documented for posterity. You probably don’t care what brand of sneakers they are wearing. But advertisers do. A smart computer vision system could detect whether they are sweating in Nikes, Reeboks, or New Balances -- and where they are working out.

Similarly, at any time, you can also crash your co-worker’s nephew’s birthday party. You probably don’t care if the kiddies are eating Breyer’s, Ben & Jerry’s, or Turkey Hill ice cream. But, again, advertisers do. And the right image intelligence tools could also reveal which soda they are washing all that cake down with. Using super-resolution image magnification, you might also see if the grown-ups are sipping Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks in the background.

Even further, facial recognition technology can be used to detect emotions based on happy, sad, or indifferent expressions. It’s a small leap to measuring visual brand sentiment -- extracting moods and feelings about products from uncaptioned photos.

Problems With Photo Monetization Will consumers welcome their personal photos being leveraged as advertising? Some will have privacy concerns. But many others will surely embrace the opportunity, motivated by rewards in brand loyalty programs or perhaps through outright revenue sharing for the most prolific creators of brand-themed content.

Before the News Feed makeover, Facebook attracted a lot of buzz over its Graph Search feature, the solution for more niche targeting of Facebook's more than one billion users. Graph Search lets you connect with people based on extremely detailed criteria, such as “Friends Who Live in Italy Who Like Justin Bieber and Oreo cookies.” It taps into an enormous wealth of data, but it also has limitations for identifying what is in photos. As with all Facebook ads and promoted posts, Graph Search relies completely on text. If a photo is not tagged with what you’re looking for, it won’t show up in any search.

Underscoring its massive shift to visual content, Facebook also announced it is soon rolling out 15-second video ads that automatically start playing in your News Feed. The jury’s out if there will be a consumer backlash at these mini TV commercials, as they are way more obtrusive than silent photos.

As Mark Twain might say, the reports of the death of text-based SEO are greatly exaggerated. But while visual self-expression continues to explode, social networks are still struggling to monetize this photo-sharing behavior at scale. Huge opportunities exist for applying image intelligence tools to their current advertising services. There’s no need for millions of untagged brand photos to remain “invisible” any longer.

In what easily could (and perhaps, should) have been a Knockout of the Night garnering performance, Anthony Njokuani finished-off Roger Bowling with a vicious left hook KO in Round 2 of their lightweight clash at UFC on Fox 7 last night.

We here at MMA Fight Banners & Design, along with Knockout Representation and CSC Memorabilia, are making Anthony's fight banner available to MMA collectors and fans. The banner will be hand-signed by Anthony and come with photo proof of the signing.

This is a great opportunity to add a piece of MMA history to your MMA collection!
Contact CSC Memorabilia HERE with your offers and inquiries.

Some upcoming UFC fight banners we will be working on are for Anthony Njokuani at UFC on Fox 7 and Jim Miller at UFC 159.

Njokuani will face Roger Bowling on April 30th in San Jose, CA. Miller will be fighting again in New Jersey at UFC 159 when he meets Pat Healy in a highly-anticipated match-up.

As always, if you have any suggestions or input of any kind as to the designs for the banners, we are open to it, so please comment below. Thanks!

Content marketing may be all the rage, but the visual components of your content are more important than ever. If you look around at the most trafficked social media platforms, it doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that visual platforms are growing in a major way. Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube make it easy for companies to connect with their consumers in highly visual ways. The popularity of these platforms has even pushed Facebook to change its user interface once more to make it more image-heavy. In fact, it’s been noted that posts that include an album or picture receive 120-180% more engagement from fans than a text-based post.

Visual marketing may seem like the newest fad, but it’s more a progression of how we consume content. Think about the platforms on which you’re engaged and ask yourself: do text-only updates suddenly seem dated? In my view, the answer is yes.

Why visual content is important

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But there are many reasons to identify and create visual assets for your marketing program:

• As the mobile space becomes an increasingly important marketing channel, creative visual content is a must. Visual content is quick and easy to digest – not to mention create – in the on-the-go mobile space.
• Sourcing visual content gives brands the opportunity to collaborate with fans and followers. In fact, a strategic visual marketing initiative can turn brand evangelists into brand operatives.
• Visuals can tell a story that goes far beyond what can be communicated via text. They let your followers see the behind-the-scenes aspects of your organization and help them feel more connected to your brand.
• The proliferation of smartphones makes creating and sharing visual content beyond easy. Just think, every minute 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube and 40 million photos are posted to Instagram every day.
  
  

Now that we understand why visual marketing is important and why it’s here to stay—how can you go about implementing it as part of your marketing strategy?  Stay tuned…that’s coming up in part II.

How have you incorporated visual mediums into your marketing program?