Visual marketing is a major trend online that’s only growing more and more popular.
Marketers who use visual content get more customer engagement, more leads, and more followers, which naturally result in higher earnings.
What Is Visual Content?
When you think of visual content, you probably imagine images. While images are important, visual content includes many other formats such as:
- Brand logos
- Design elements
- Quotes accompanied by images
- Charts and graphs
- Infographics (a visual representation of data or information that presents complex ideas in a simple way)
- Videos
- Memes (a usually humorous image accompanied by text that conveys an idea or message and spreads throughout the Internet virally)
- Word art
- Cartoons
Why Images Are Essential
As the saying goes, a picture says a thousand words. The human brain processes visual information much faster than text. Images communicate ideas in a more immediate way. In a second, a visual can be understood, while text takes time to be read and processed.
Images have the ability to tell a story, which makes them especially effective in marketing . Stories naturally resonate with people and can help to create a strong bond between you and your followers. These stories are especially effective when they make use of humor.
Images are absolutely essential for branding. Your avatar, icon or brand logo is instantly recognizable to your audience. The colors and design features you use for your website and marketing materials instantly communicate your message. Just consider the Apple logo or McDonalds’ golden arches.
Finally, visual content is great for social media. Social media posts with visual content get 120% to 180% more engagement than text-only posts. Facebook has even changed its profile format to the Timeline to make it more visually oriented. There are also hundreds of popular social media sites, such as Pinterest or Instagram, made exclusively for images.
Visual Content Ideas
One obstacle that keeps more marketers from going visual is a lack of ideas. What should you create? Anything that engages, entertains, or informs your audience makes excellent visual content.
One idea is to take information you’d normally present in a text article and turn it into an infographic. Take something complex that you’d like to teach your audience and turn it into a graphic that they can glance at and understand easily.
Visuals can be added to regular content, too. Adding images to press releases to make them more appealing has become a recent trend in marketing. You can add videos or memes to your blog posts to give your readers another way to consume and quickly understand the concepts you’re trying to convey.
You can also ask your audience to generate your content for you. Visual content can be crowdsourced. Ask your audience to take pictures related to your products or that feature your products. They then send the pictures to you and you post them on your site.
Creating Visuals Is Easy
Many marketers are kept from using visuals because they feel that their design skills aren’t up to par. You may think that you’re not a great photographer, and this keeps you from incorporating photos in your marketing campaigns. But visual content creation tools make it easy for anyone to create wonderful, professional-grade images with little or no skill whatsoever. And sometimes, when the images aren’t as professional they actually resonate more with your audience since it makes you more of a “real person”.
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