by Lee Dussinger
That’s why contributors love Opal ☝️
Opal provides two distinct value points for marketing doers. One, Opal is a visual marketing platform through which to visualize content and the context around it. Two, Opal offers several exclusive features that enable marketers to be more efficient in their daily workflow, accomplished through cutting busywork.
If you’re looking to understand what Opal can do for the marketing doers who create content and execute strategies – that’s what we’re highlighting here…
Firstly, we’re going to dig into what the elements of our visual marketing platform look like – and how they make a difference for marketers. In addition, we’re highlighting the labor-saving features that enable users to make more impact in less time – by automating certain tasks. Lastly, we’re explaining how the Opal platform connects the entire organization together – and why that matters.
Exploring Our Visual Content Marketing Platform
In the marketing field, minute differences on an asset can make a dramatic difference in the outcome of an entire campaign. Naturally, detailed and visually-dependent work calls for a true visual content marketing platform. Delivering a visual experience from their marketing platform is a major way that Opal serves the independent contributors in any marketing organization.
Strictly speaking, a visual marketing platform isn’t necessary to execute strategies. However, when guiding those strategies to tell the best stories in the market and maximize impact, a platform that lets you see everything is essential. Having that view gives your marketing plans more punch – which is why it’s such a crucial feature for contributors in Opal.
While our entire platform has a strong aesthetic sense, the visual calendar and the content views are what make a visual content marketing platform.
The Calendar
For nearly all marketing or comms organizations, a go-to-market calendar is an absolute necessity. This central space showcases what’s being published during a set date and time. This goes a long way towards ensuring that everyone understands how the brand is going to market. By infusing that calendar with a visual component, you make it even more impactful.
The calendar of a visual platform – like Opal – can pull a preview of the content scheduled for each day. By pairing a visual with a moment on a calendar, it provides clarity into what the initiative entails – even at a glance. This makes understanding a complex and densely-populated calendar much easier.
See more of our visual marketing calendar right here.
True-to-Life Content Previews
Potentially even more important than the calendar, realistic content previews are the core of the visual content marketing platform. For the marketing team members who make, edit, or approve content, this feature is the biggest difference-maker.
The Opal platform offers true-to-life content mockups that look just like many of the most popular content channels. This means when creating something new – or reviewing someone’s work – you’re seeing that work exactly how your audience will.
While seeing a single piece of content that way is powerful, we elevate the visual content platform with another exclusive benefit. In Opal, you can compare numerous different content pieces (for different channels) in one view. This enables you to truly compare your message as it differs across platforms. More than anything, this empowers content creators to do even better work and to drive more impact. On the other side of the coin, reviews delivered in a visual marketing platform like this can be delivered directly on the content, making them more relevant and more actionable.
The outcome here is better content that everyone on the team feels better about.
Tools to Cut Busywork
Another way in which the Opal team delivers for marketing doers is by enabling them to do more. Specifically, Opal enables contributors to simply have more time by providing tools that make busywork tasks easier – or eliminate them altogether. These are the time-saving features that make a tangible difference in the way that team members work every day.
Auto-Build Presentations
An Opal-exclusive feature, Presentations automate one of the most common (and most maligned) tasks in marketing: creating content decks. Opal Presentations enable a user to turn pieces of content into professional-looking decks in literally seconds. With a look and functionality like a Keynote or Google Slides deck, these Opal Presentation decks are most often used for content reviews – or campaign post-mortems.
For our customers, the Presentations feature can replace hours of tedious, mindless work creating decks – with more of the work that makes a difference.
Workflows
For a multi-stage marketing project that involves multiple people and teams, communication eats up a lot of time. Rather than having to individually shoulder tap the individual doers and approvers, Opal workflows make that process automatic. Once again, this efficiency driver eliminates a necessary but tedious action, giving everyone some time back.
Not only do the automated custom workflows eliminate a busywork task, but they also ensure that no step is ever missed by accident. There’s no question that workflows also provide value to managers as well, but the marketing doers benefit the most from having a solution for this.
Templates
Another solution that matters to contributors, templates both save time and serve to crystalize proven strategies.
Saving the campaign structure, content shells, channels, timing, who did what, and every other detail means you have an iron-clad blueprint for a successful campaign. The next time you need to run this play, you can automate the setup phase with a single click.
However, you can also ensure that the structure and details that served you well this time last forever. So even if there is team turnover, the critical knowledge of how to run the plays aren’t lost with them.
By having this functionality built into the visual content marketing platform, your templates can be built out with content into a true blueprint – rather than just being a nondescript outline.
AI (For Ideation, Writing, Editing & Translation)
While human intellect and creativity are the essential ingredient in marketing, artificial intelligence has a role to play. AI can serve as an assistant or co-pilot to augment the inimitable human mind. For the marketing doers who choose to use Opal AI, it primarily serves them as an efficiency driver.
Here’s a summary of what Opal AI can do:
- Generate limitless marketing ideas almost instantly
- Write original copy based on a brief or pre-existing content
- Modify content to explore a new approach, theme, or style
- Translate copy into 50+ languages and dialects
There’s no question that free AI tools are everywhere in 2024. For Opal customers, Opal AI is different for two reasons. Firstly, it is marketing-specific, having been trained on effective marketing copy style, popular content types, and much more. Secondly, it is more convenient than opening up ChatGPT since it’s embedded where the work happens.
Alignment Across the Organization
While Opal provides unique value as a visual content marketing platform and a tool to drive efficiency, it offers another benefit that matters to EVERY layer of the org.
We’re talking about alignment. Opal connects big-picture strategies to the tactical initiatives that bring them to life. Solving the marketing alignment challenge makes a difference to every layer in the marketing organization, from executives to middle managers and contributors.
For the specialists doing the actual work, misalignment means they lack visibility into the why behind their on-the-ground tactics. Certainly, this undermines the connection they feel to their initiatives, but even more importantly, lacking that strategic context will weaken their output.
Basically, better marketing alignment will allow the doers to answer these essential questions:
- What’s the priority?
- Why are we doing this?
- Who is this for?
As is the case with everything Opal, we render the alignment between big-picture business initiatives and the tactical work visually.
Discover the Opal Platform
Opal is the marketing platform that brands like Target, Starbucks, GM, and countless others use to visualize their marketing.
The best way to experience a visual platform like Opal is a live demo. Our product expert can guide you through everything that the platform offers to every layer of the marketing organization.