Visual content marketing helps you create fresh, unique content and increases engagement with your audience. It is also an excellent way for a content marketer to add personality to their content.
Ultimately, customers find brands with personalities relatable, memorable, and easy to engage with. Investing in visual content marketing builds trust in your brand over time. And clients who trust you can become lifelong clients.
What Is Visual Content Marketing?
Visual content marketing strategically uses image-focused content to promote your company’s core product or service. For example, you can use infographics, videos, photos, and memes to educate or entertain your audience. In time, this creative use of content helps you build engagement and trust among your audience members, who eventually become paying customers.
Why Is Visual Content Marketing Such a Huge Deal?
Let’s be honest for a second. Would you be excited to read a blog post that contained only paragraphs and paragraphs of information? Or a white paper composed of only pages and pages of text? No, you wouldn’t. So, why would you expect your target audience to hang onto every word of that 3,000-word blog post?
Since we are drowning in more and more information these days, our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The average person’s attention span was 8 seconds the last time they checked.
As a digital marketer, these findings present a unique challenge because you need to find ways of communicating to make the most of those 8 seconds. While sharing information about your brand is essential, you need to talk to your audience in a way that will not only capture their attention but also retain it.
Visual content can help you capture the attention of your target audience. People stop to look at visual content 94% more than they stop to look at text-only content. Specifically, Tweets with images lead to 150% more shares than those without. Similarly, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without.
In summary, visual content marketing is good news. You need to develop high-quality visual content to capture attention and increase engagement.
How to Use Visual Content to Grow Your Brand
There are many articles about the different types of visual content you can use as a content marketer. We’ve even talked about some of these types of content marketing before. We don’t want to keep singing the same song.
Instead, let’s talk about how you can creatively use your visual content to develop your brand’s personality and connect with potential clients.
1) Repurpose Your Content
If you need inspiration for your visual content, look no further than the text-based content you’ve produced. Blog posts are usually an excellent place to start. Once you’ve written a blog post, converting the information into visual content is easy.
For example, you can take the points you’ve covered in a blog post and put them in a video or infographic. Your editorial calendar is an excellent place to list how to repurpose an original blog post.
Similarly, you can transform long-form content like a white paper or eBook into a series of video tutorials.
The point is that you don’t have to create all your visual content from scratch. Giving your evergreen content a makeover will help you to keep producing fresh, exciting content even when you’re running low on inspiration.
2) Use Non-traditional Types of Content
Infographics and videos are a lot of fun, but they’re also ubiquitous pieces of content. To stand out from your competition, you should also try to use non-traditional forms of visual content.
It might seem scary to do something unconventional. Be that as it may, if you’re a bit adventurous, you can create viral content simply due to its uniqueness.
What non-traditional types of content can you experiment with?
a) Memes / GIFs
Many content creators shy away from using memes or GIFs because they worry their content will look unprofessional. On the contrary, memes and GIFs can help you seem more down-to-earth and relatable when used well. Over time, this fosters trust among your audience.
Think about this for a moment. Your target audience uses memes and GIFs to communicate on social media. Since this content is relatable, using memes and GIFs will help you build a connection with both potential and current clients.
b) Interactive Content
As we’ve already said, we’re bombarded with content from brands clamoring for our attention daily. For this reason, another good way to stand out is to create interactive content. Interactive content creates a unique and memorable experience for your target audience.
Interactive content encourages your audience to actively engage with it instead of passively consuming it. For example, you could build interactive quizzes, landing pages, websites, and videos. This content invites people to click along and be part of the story from beginning to end.
Interactive content generates higher levels of engagement than static content. Therefore, it is one of your brand’s most potent storytelling tools.
Read Also: Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Brand?
c) Visual CTAs
A good call to action invites your audience members to engage with you further. While most calls to action are text-based, making them more visual can capture someone’s eye.
For example, you could use an infographic or a button as your call to action. Or you could go one step further and design a video or GIF call to action.
d) Visual Emails
If you want to boost your email marketing, you can use eye-catching visual content. An excellent place to start is by designing a professional header that reflects your brand. Additionally, you could include other elements like photos, videos, and infographics.
Most people sign up for your email marketing to hear from you. However, they will only consistently open these emails if you make it worth their while. Take time to design fun and engaging emails, and you will have an excellent open rate and high engagement with your emails.
e) Quotes / Questions
Quotes that reflect your brand values are a good source of inspiration for visual content. Similarly, questions—whether for or from your audience—can help you create beautiful visuals.
Both quotes and questions can generate conversations addressing the topic you’ve raised. In other words, they are an excellent way to get your audience talking. Next time you want to spark a conversation on Twitter or Facebook, try sharing an image with a quote or a question.
3) Apply Consistent Branding Across Platforms
Whether creating content for your company or a client, building a solid and consistent brand identity is essential.
You can achieve this brand identity using the same voice across different platforms. Whether you write a blog post or publish a social media post, your content should sound like you.
If you’re funny in your blog posts, you should carry the same humor to your social media platforms. If you’re suddenly serious and no-nonsense on your social media, your audience will get confused about who you are and what you stand for. Use a consistent brand voice so that your audience can confidently say they know who your brand is and why you matter to them.
Secondly, you should consistently use branded visual elements to create visual recognition. These elements include text placement, font use, brand colors, and logo.
If you can use your visual content the same way every time, you will build a strong brand identity that your target audience can easily recognize. This is a big deal because if your brand stands out, you will remain at the top of your mind among potential and current clients.
4) Align All Your Visual Elements
When designing visual content, aligning images and text is essential because this helps you look professional. Polished and professional visuals contribute to your social proof and make it look like you know what you’re talking about.
Producing professional visual content will attract an audience that trusts you to solve their problems.
5) Be Authentic
Indeed, you can always recycle and share visual content from other brands. Nevertheless, designing authentic content will help you connect better with your audience.
Instead of using stock photos, consider taking pictures of your products and your work family.
Showcasing original photos of your products will help your audience trust you more.
Likewise, giving people a sneak peek of your team at work will humanize your brand. This ultimately creates a genuine connection with your audience, who will feel like they know the faces behind your brand name.
6) Use Alt Tags
If you use images in your content, you should include alt tags to optimize them for SEO.
By using alt tags, you’re boosting your content in two ways. Firstly, you’re helping Google to understand what your images contain. Secondly, you’re helping low-vision or blind people understand your images’ context.
As you can see, visual content marketing is worthwhile for boosting engagement with your brand and eventually boosting sales of your products or services. When in doubt, remember that 60% of consumers reach out to a brand when a visual shows up in local search results.