Anybody who has shared a meme or posted a photo to Twitter Instagram or commented or liked it because it felt relatable will know that visuals can communicate all sorts of messages, even without one word.
Ask people who read and write blogs, ebooks and newsletters to admit that imagery can transform text-centric content into something more memorable, absorbing, and enjoyable.
Visuals will make your content marketing more effective and compelling, no matter what message you are trying to convey or which social media channels they’re distributed through.
This post will discuss how visual content can be used to tell your company’s stories, increase brand recognition and recognition, increase audience engagement and ultimately drive more sales for your business.
What is the importance of visual content for social media success?
Every day, Instagram receives more than 95 million posts. Add to that the 2 million LinkedIn posts published each day, 500 million Twitter tweets per day and the 4.75 billion items shared daily by Facebook users, and you have a torrent of content pouring down on your target audience every hour of the day.
This is what you need to be able to compete with when they go online via their favorite social networks. To grab their attention and make your brand stand apart, you need to do something. A great visual content strategy is key to this.
No matter how much you love your followers, they will get bored if you only post text with no imagery. They’ll be more inclined to skim over your posts and engage with images or videos.
Visuals are great for describing products, whether you’re selling software, books, or electric cars. They also make it easy to get people to visit your website or shop and buy something.
Source: Venngage
Your audience can share your content easily with images and videos.
To increase brand awareness, you can also add branding elements such as your logo, company name, website URL, or images to infographics, images and videos that you share on social networks.
These digital marketing trends and statistics can help us to determine the value of visual content, and how it impacts consumers and businesses.
- When paired with a visual, people tend to remember only 10% of what they heard or read three days later. However, they can recall 65% of the information in the same timeframe.
- Visual processing accounts for 50% of the brain’s activity, with 70% of our sensory receptors located in the eyes. This makes visual information easier to understand and process.
- Three times more likely to get engagement are tweets that contain visual content.
- On average, 98% of LinkedIn posts with images have a higher comment rate.
The most popular types of visual content
Many content marketers face the greatest challenge of creating consistent visual content. It’s normal to run out of ideas, but it doesn’t mean you have to stay in a rut or share only static images.
You can use visual content to engage and build your audience on social media and make your posts stand out from the rest. These social media visuals are worth exploring.
- Video – Videos are sure to make an impression on your audience. Videos don’t need to be elaborate, but they should be valuable, relevant and visually appealing.
- Images – Customers don’t like boring or generic photos. You need original photos of your products, events, employees, and customers to make you stand out. You can then edit these images creatively to make them more appealing and unique.
- Screenshots –Take screenshots of product pages and other cool features with screen capture software. This will give your audience an idea of the layout and function of the product before they spend any money. This visual is useful for creating quick reviews and how-to posts on social media. You can also annotate them to highlight particular sections or parts.
- Live streaming –As reality TV shows, sports games and news reports have shown, viewers love the excitement of seeing an event unfold live. Live streaming on social media is a great way to engage your followers in real time. This format can be used for behind-the scenes content, Q&A sessions and launching new products. It also allows you to show how your services work.
- Memes and GIFs – You can keep it light, even when discussing serious or complex topics with GIFs or memes. They are often part of popular culture so they can be easily recognized and increase your chances of getting viral content on social media.
- Interactive visuals.Polls and quizzes are interactive content that you can click on to take action or influence their outcome. On Instagram Stories and Twitter, you can ask your followers to vote for one or both of your products. You can also ask them questions to find out more about their knowledge or to test it.
- Illustrations and Animations – You can create your own visuals if you don’t know where to find the right visual for you content. Illustrations and animations can add an original, creative and unique touch to your visuals. They are sure to grab people’s attention. They can be used for any content type to communicate any message. The only limitation is your imagination.
- Infographics These allow you to simplify complex information into digestible pieces. They can be used to communicate anything, from statistics to expert advice to practical tips and step-by-step directions.
- Data visualizations This content type is great for visualizing data, such as percentages, statistics, and research findings.
Use visuals in creative ways on social media
Visual content marketing involves using imagery to tell stories. There are many options for how you can do this on social media. These are proven visual content strategies that can be applied to your social media feed to achieve impressive results.
Repost UGC
It’s well-established that customers trust content created by customers far more than brand content, so now it is time to put that trust into practice for your brand.
Your customers may already be sharing videos or photos of products they love on social media. This user-generated content can be shared on the company’s channels to show appreciation and increase brand authenticity, engagement, conversion rates, and authenticity.
It is possible to create branded hashtags that you encourage customers to use when sharing their content. This will make it easier to find them, search for them, and promote them. Starbucks is an excellent example of a brand that uses customer content to promote its products to its target market by reposting it to their page and crediting the creators.
Incorporating the creativity of your users and fans in your visual content marketing will save you time and effort.
Incorporate visuals into a meme
You can make memes out of any joke, catchphrase, concept, or moment from a movie, cartoon, TV series, sports event, award ceremony or news report that relate to your brand, product or audience.
You don’t need to start from scratch when creating visual content using memes. They can be modified to fit your vision and you’re good to go.
Many brands are using popular memes to increase their social interaction, including Netflix. Netflix is well-known for making memes from its content or referencing it on other memes.
Make an Instagram carousel
If you are skilled in using Instagram carousels, they can be a real treasure trove. Instead of sharing one image, you can share as many slides as you like, including videos, GIFs, photos, and whatever else is needed to convey your message.
The World Health Organization uses carousels to educate and inform their followers about childhood cancers in this Instagram post. WHO shares many colorful, illustrated images that provide vital information on the subject, rather than posting photos of children in distress with depressing statistics, WHO instead captures the attention with a series of bright, colorful images.
You’ll find yourself scrolling endlessly through the carousel, because you already have an interest in it. It’s up to you to find out what happens next and where the story ends.
Create a visual story
Visuals can be amazing, but when they are used to tell a compelling tale, they become even more powerful, meaningful, and authentic.
Consider the message you are trying to convey, the goals you hope to achieve through sharing it, as well as the emotions you want your audience to feel when they view it. This viral video by the New York Times, about Simone Biles (the most decorated gymnast of all time), will inspire you.
You can see her doing her moves, from her early days to her most recent stunts. There are also a few commentary bits in the video. It kept me riveted every second. Each flip, twist, and movement was a source of amazement and complete admiration that kept me watching until the end. It was so amazing that I watched about a dozen more videos before I signed off.
Tips for visual marketing
You must be deliberate about your strategy and actions in order to grow your audience, increase traffic, build trust, land more leads and drive them through their customer journey.
These are great tips and practices that will help you create visually appealing content for your social media pages.
1. Create a brand identity
You want users to be able to identify your brand when they see your posts on social media. This can be achieved by using your brand’s aesthetics (fonts, colors and style), and making sure they are consistent throughout your visual content.
To ensure seamless aesthetics across all visual assets, you can also create brand guidelines for your team members.
Shopify’s Instagram account shows that nearly all of their posts include variations and gradients on the brand’s lime green color. Amazon’s orange trademark color is everywhere on their social media pages. Coca-cola’s account has the same color, but you won’t be able to scroll past it for more than a second.
These brands understand the importance of aligning social media visuals with brand personality and aesthetics. You will immediately recognize the identity of their content as soon as you see it.
2. You can use a variety formats
Visual content has many uses. You don’t need to stick to one format.
For example, today, you can share photos of the products you want to promote or screenshots/screencasts of tutorials to teach your followers how to do something. Tomorrow you will be able to use illustrations to show processes or provide context for your posts.
Next week you will be able to turn interesting facts, procedures, and statistics into infographics, videos, animations, or infographics. You can create a visual checklist or summary to accompany your article to share on social media.
Use dynamic visuals on social media to keep your audience interested and engaged.
3. Optimize visuals to optimize search engines
Search queries no longer have to be limited to text. Searches for images and videos are on the rise year after year. Search engines are constantly improving to better understand what elements make up an image, so that they provide more precise results.
You need to consider the larger picture when sharing visual content via social media. SEO is a great way to do this. You need to ensure that your photos, videos, and other images are optimized using keywords, descriptions, hashtags, and keywords that make the content, meaning, context, and context obvious.
This will make it easier to search engines such as Google interpret them and present them in the relevant search results.
4. Copyright laws: Watermark visuals
Your posts will be retweeted and reposted on social media as long as you share great content. To ensure that everyone who views your visual content on social media channels other than your company’s own is aware of where it originated, you should add a watermark (such as your logo) to one corner of your visual content.
A logo maker can be used to create branded logos for your visuals. You don’t have to use the same logo on every piece of artwork. You can choose a monotone version if the color is too overwhelming.
You should be aware of copyrights when you share visuals that are not yours. Even if you do it innocently, infringing upon someone else’s rights can get you in serious trouble. Avoid this by only using visuals you have created or owned the copyright to. Also, make sure to credit the owner, obtain a license or get written permission to use visuals from someone else.
5. Select complementary captions
Visual content is great, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to include compelling captions. A caption can give context to your visuals, and help you avoid making the most common design mistake — too much text.
Text too much can make visuals less appealing and less powerful. You can save any additional information that you think your followers may need to understand the image or video.
Captions can also be used to add relevant hashtags to your posts in order to increase their visibility and reach.
6. Embrace diversity
There are many people from different backgrounds, regardless of what product or service you sell. You are likely to have people of different backgrounds use your product or service so it is a good idea for your marketing materials to reflect and celebrate diversity.
Make sure you show as much representation as you can in your visuals to avoid alienating your customers and followers.
Take note of your market demographics reports and social media audience analytics. Then, use the insights to create visuals that are beautiful and wonderfully varied.
Engage your social media followers
Visual content is key to attracting people’s attention. It shows off your company’s personality and makes your content more interesting. This will help you achieve your social marketing goals. Visual assets should be an integral part your marketing strategy.
You’ll have greater success if you create visuals that are memorable and stand out from the rest.
Scoop.it Blog published the post Visual Content Marketing on Social Media.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://onlinemarketingagencies.net/?p=4486
Leave a Reply