Plain to Appealing

Plain to Appealing

Visuals are essential because it gives your audience the first impression of your brand, you use it to grab their attention. People are able to process images and videos much faster than text because it does not require intelligence or knowledge. 

Why are visuals important? Well, it’s the first thing anyone notices. Let’s say that there are two events coming up and you receive the flyers for each. One flyer only had the necessary informational text (time, date, location) and only one photo of the location. However, the other flyer had beautiful high-quality images of what you can expect from the event and has the all the informational text placed strategically in nice-looking fonts. It’s obvious which event you would rather attend.

‘UMU’ pudding shop in Jeju Island, South Korea, has a growing number of followers which has surpassed more than 25k on Instagram and is very popular amongst the locals with many mainland citizens going to the Island just for a cup of pudding. I’m using them as a reference because there aren’t many pudding shops that I know or heard of that are this popular. The reason I would say they are popular is because of their consistent brand design, a cute but simple logo, and the beach side fantasy they give to the audience. Even if their customers have not tasted their pudding yet, the customers already have a good impression of the brand.

Photos via @jeju.umu on Instagram

Another good example of utilising visual content is by Headspace, a meditation app. Each visual content is accompanied by quirky cartoons in the same style, this makes their brand identifiable and the consistent art style is recognisable as part of their brand by audiences. 

You can tell if a brand’s visual content is bad when you don’t understand the message they are trying to portray through their visual content, or their visual styles are not consistent enough for you to recognise their brand. 

When GAP rebranded their logo, people were confused as why they needed to change their already good logo to opt for a new but cheap looking logo. It completely changed the audience’s impression of their brand; it was considered a disaster and a lesson to other brands.

To learn more about utilising visual content, read below “How to Use Visual Content for Better Brand Engagement” by writer Jared Atchison.

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How to Use Visual Content for Better Brand Engagement

Are you looking for a way to drive more traffic to your website and increase engagement? If so, you could benefit from adding more visual content to your marketing strategy. 

There’s a lot to consider when you first start creating images and videos for your brand. You have to think about where you’ll post your content, how you’ll brainstorm new topics, and what message you’re sending to your users, just to name a few things.

We are going to help get you started by sharing several tips you can use to create engaging visual content.

Let’s get started!

Why Use Visual Content?

We’ve all heard the phrase that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of marketing, visuals can say much more. The human brain processes images 60,000x faster than text, making images and videos the best way to get and keep the attention of your audience.

It’s worth noting that people tend to remember 65% of visuals even three days after seeing the content. So if your goal is to spread brand awareness and get more people interested in your business, visual content is the way to go.

The truth is, most of your users will still read your written posts. But visuals add a brand new element to everything you publish. In some cases, like on Instagram, the entire experience is based on pictures and videos.

Now that we know why visual content is useful, we will show you how to get more value from this marketing strategy.

Create a Brand Kit for Consistency

Before you start creating new content, you should site down and build your brand kit. Essentially, brand kits are a guide that all of your teams follow when creating content for your website. The common themes covered are color palettes, fonts, brand voice, and general design decisions.

Here’s a simple example to show you the power of a brand kit.

We bet that even if we didn’t tell you, you would recognize this image as a McDonald’s advertisement. Why? Because they use consistent branding in all of their visual content. You see the red, yellow, and white color palette, an image of their popular fish sandwich, and the famous golden arches in the corner, and you know the company behind the picture.

You can achieve these results for your brand if you work to build a consistent image throughout your content. Sit down with your marketing team and come up with a design that can be used across social media, email, and your website.

Use Images and Videos to Add Value

The visual content you add to your social media, website, and email marketing campaign should always add value to your written work. We know blogs that feature images tend to get 94% more views, which shows that as you add more visuals to your website, you’ll likely see more traffic.

If you want to keep people engaged with your brand, make sure that your visual work adds value to post. Let’s say you have a website that offers new business owners advice on creating their first website.

Your text content might get plenty of engagement, but there will undoubtedly be a percentage of your audience that would prefer a video tutorial. Adding a video guide at the end will help those customers follow through and get more value from your product. As a bonus, you’ll keep existing visitors on your page longer, which can lead to more interactions.

When creating a video or image for your brand, think about the value it brings to your readers. Ask yourself if what you’re creating is designed to educate, entertain, or help the people browsing your website or looking at your brand on social media. Marketing teams that can include valuable elements in their visual content will see more engagement and traffic.

Repurpose Your Best Blog Posts

A stunning 54% of consumers report wanting more video content. Due to this demand, marketers are now finding creative ways to turn their best blog posts into visual content.

There’s a good chance that you already have plenty of great written content on your website. Have you considered repurposing this content and turning it into a highly engaging image or video? If not, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to win over more new visitors and build brand engagement.

You can repurpose your content in many different ways. Believe it or not, almost 60% of marketers report that they repurpose their content 2-5 times. Creating visually appealing content involves taking the important parts of your blog post and turning it into something with a little more flair.

For example, if you have a statistic article that you want to share on Instagram, you could turn your article into an infographic. You can see in this example that it’s easy to turn a long-form post into an easily digestible piece of visual content.

Make Social Sharing Easy

Finally, don’t forget to make your posts shareable. Visual posts from businesses are more likely to get shared, which leads to more people finding out about your business. We know this works because 81% of people on Instagram say they use it to research companies.

In other words, if you want to see more brand interactions, you have to make sure your content is accessible. If you want people to share your content from your website, include a killer call-to-action that rewards readers for sharing on social media.

You could include social share buttons that make it easy for users to share your visual content on the platform of their choice in just a couple of clicks. Combine both of these tactics with high-quality content, and you have a recipe for explosive growth.

Conclusion

As your brand grows, there’s a good chance that you’ll add more visual content to your marketing strategy. Businesses are starting to use all of the tools at their disposal and creating exciting and compelling images and videos.

The key to creating content that gets engagement is to focus on your target audience, and specifically, how each post will help your users. Spend time researching the pain points of the people who frequent your website and create content that ultimately helps them reach their goals. If you succeed, you’ll soon see more engagement as people start getting invested in your products and services because of the value you bring to the table.

Article link: https://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/how-to-use-visual-content-for-better-brand-engagement-02339008