iStock, a leading e-commerce platform providing premium content to SMBs, SMEs, creatives, and students everywhere, has launched VisualGPS Insights, an interactive tool that helps businesses make smarter decisions about their visual content. An industry first, this dynamic dashboard uses real-time iStock.com search and download data to surface global insights, easing the process of selecting imagery that resonates with consumers.

To provide customers visual guidance, VisualGPS Insights helps small businesses and freelancer creatives to choose relevant and inspiring visual concepts that are meaningful to consumers and drive real results. Early adopters, including business owners, are seeing significant gains, “I’m always looking for something to provide a solution. This would be a game-changer. If I’m running ads for a client, it’s given me another reassurance that I can look here and say, okay, let’s budget, let’s send some to India. It looks like India, let’s focus on India and the United States.” – stated Miko Smith, owner of Bluebird Consulting.

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In order to help businesses create content that resonates the VisualGPS Insights shows:

• Interest over time which charts interest in term/s over a specific period via a line graph
• Regional interest which compares relative interest in term/s around the world via a global heat map
• Industry interest which indicates the level of interest in term/s across 15 industry verticals via a bar chart
• Most popular visuals (illustrations, video, stills) downloaded on gettyimages.com or istock.com that update with global, regional, time, and industry selections

“Through quick takes on visual trends and industry data, VisualGPS Insights provides customers with a unique jumping-off point for them to make data-driven decisions when it comes to their marketing strategies, whether that is deciding if they want to follow or avoid the most popular content or find inspiration on how to market their offerings in a unique and innovative way,” said Candace Marks, Senior Director, Product Management at iStock. “Through this tool, we will provide unique access to proprietary data they will not find elsewhere to empower our clients to get in front of where their industry is headed and how it is reacting to what consumers care about.”

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To help small and medium-sized businesses find content that really stands out, iStock’s visual experts have provided some tips on how to leverage the VisualGPS Insights tool to fuel their content creation processes from concept to completion:

1.   Know when to act

Very often, small businesses do not have enough data to justify best timing to launch an offer or monitor the growth of trends among their target audiences. VisualGPS Insights provides data in easy-to-understand graphs, charts and heat maps showing industries, regions and time periods.

2.   Get a view of visuals the world cares about

If you market your product or service online, have you thought of expanding your reach outside your country or region? If the answer is yes, VisualGPS Insights can help you navigate regional nuances through an interactive map to see locations where a specific term is popular, or not, and narrow in on data from specific regions. By viewing interest by region, you can determine how to best market offerings in a unique and innovative way or make business decisions based on regional nuances shown within the insights.

3.   Make your case

Small business owners know what it means to do more with less. Leveling up the playing field with bigger competitors may mean a big investment. With little to no access to big survey services and thorough competitor market research, tools like VisualGPS Insights come in handy to understand market relevance and global trends with a powerful, enterprise-scale data tool. Not only will it help you validate your visual strategy to make confident decisions based on search results drawn from millions of iStock users, but it will also come in handy to justify your content marketing budget spend with actionable data and insights.

4.   Spark your creativity

When you are busy running a business, it’s easy to put aside activities that don’t show immediate return on investment. Without taking the time to learn the broader business landscape or coming up with ideas that make your brand stand out from the crowd, you could be missing an opportunity to boost revenue. By gaining access to VisualGPS Insights search and download results, you can spot interesting findings that complement and bolster your creative work and empower you and your team to make the best moves to transform “regular” content into revenue-boosting creative campaigns.