Welcome to part 2 of our look inside visual content marketing. As we mentioned last week, visual content is very powerful and easily-palatable content. It is the future of content marketing. But you can’t just publish visual content and expect it to magically bring traffic to your site or randomly shared on your social channels. Visual content is about storytelling. Your content, and the visuals surrounding it, should have an interesting narrative but express ideas quickly. Your visuals should be complete ideas in themselves and should not need the context of the content to be understood. This makes them social media friendly and easier to share. So how exactly does someone create successful visual content?
PITCH DECKS
An effective pitch deck goes far beyond the sterile, text-heavy slides from your last board meeting. They do require some additional care in their design and are most useful for short tutorials, list posts, or storytelling. Helpful tips are to include custom illustrations and headers. Slideshare is a great way to share your deck and increase your reach.
SHORT VIDEOS
Short videos can be extremely effective. Vine and Instagram allows you to create 6-second and 15-second videos. Though it may be difficult to explain complex ideas in such a short amount of time, it can make you think about how to tell the story in a different way and force you to be creative.
MEMES and GIFs
The mere-exposure effect explains how people are more likely to recall information that is presented in a way they’re already familiar with. This is the perfect opportunity to use memes and GIFs as they use pop culture references and are usually funny or ironic.
INFOGRAPHICS
Infographics are a powerful way to convert an entire blog post into a highly shareable and interesting piece of content. Businesses who market with infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t. Infographics are not only awesome for brand awareness and social media sharing, they’re also referenced more frequently than any other pieces of content. But don’t be fooled, infographics can take a bit of time to create. Thankfully there are plenty of infographic tools (Hubspot, Piktochart and Easel.ly are wonderful options) to help speed up the process.
USER GENERATED CONTENT
User generated content is an excellent way to get your audience participating in your content creation. If you have a dedicated following, you can request content from your readers and you may be surprised at the talent and creativity they create. A common and easy way to start is by having caption contests or have users submit “featured” images.
Regardless what kind of content you use, keep it high quality. Never use pixelated, irrelevant or badly designed content. Try to keep images under 100k in size as load times are important for SEO and bounce rates. Don’t forget the bigger picture — it’s more than just text; 60% of color impression can account for a reader’s acceptance or rejection of your brand.
Visual content marketing is modern-day brand building and one of the most important ways to make your brand stand out in a sea of noisy social media. But visual content for the sake of visual content isn’t good enough. If you want your images to engage your fans, followers, and prospects, they have to be good: great topic, color consistency and effective design and proper dimensions for publishing are key… and don’t forget to maximize your ROI. Without evaluation and evolution, you waste time, resources and, most importantly, money. To put it mildly, if you spend the time creating visual content and don’t have a strategy…
How do you create good visual content for your marketing efforts?
Written by: Lauren Gilmore
Design by: Kasparas Aleknavicius
Photo Credits: Gratisography.com, Unsplash.com
