On the wild world wide web full of pixels and posts, visual content reigns supreme. To increase engagement and stand out among competitors, brands must ensure their visual assets capture the hearts and minds of target audiences.
Creating high-quality visual content requires marketers to invest a lot of time and energy into creating and developing captivating infographics, gifs, memes, and videos for a brand. Knowing the basics of visual content can help anyone – from content creators to graphic design teams or digital marketers – curate, create and share the eye-catching visual content that your audiences are craving.
Let’s explore visual content marketing, types of visual content, and how it helps brands reach and engage with their target audience.
Understanding Visual Content Creation
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, making it a powerful tool for conveying information efficiently and an essential part of effective marketing campaigns. Visual content encompasses a myriad of elements. Here are a few common examples that help brands communicate messages, evoke emotions, and enhance user experiences:
Types of Visual Content
- Photographs: They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A photo can often tell a story to your target audience from the moment they see it. Photos can add necessary context, provide a pop of color, or change the tone of your content. Sometimes, a photo can convey an entire message on its own.
- Infographics: These are visual representations of data and information that are meant to be highly shareable online, often via social media platforms. Infographics convey complex ideas in a visually appealing and digestible manner, and are an excellent choice for illustrating statistics, trends, and concepts.
- GIFs and Memes: These bite-sized, entertaining visual snippets add an element of humor or quip, and contribute to brand awareness and identity.
- Video Content: From tutorials to testimonials, creating and posting engaging videos on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube can significantly boost conversion rates, retaining the audience’s attention longer than static content.
- Interactive Content: Integrating things like polls or surveys, voice-overs, and interactive PDFs are unique ways to engage an audience and promote digital interaction with visual content.
- Graphs and Charts: Visual representations of data in the form of graphs and charts enhance the credibility of your content and provide a quick overview of complex information.
- Animations: Adding motion to your visual content not only makes it more eye-catching, but also increases its shareability. Animated content is effective in conveying intricate details while maintaining the viewer’s interest.
- Screenshots and Templates: Providing step-by-step guides through screenshots and templates aids in user understanding. These visuals simplify processes and encourage user-generated content, fostering a sense of community around your brand.
Visual Content for Social Media
Social media platforms are fertile grounds for sharing visual content. Incorporating engaging visuals into social media posts is crucial for achieving marketing goals and improving brand awareness. Using design tools like PhotoShelter, Canva or Photoshop can help create shareable and visually appealing content. It’s important to incorporate relevant hashtags, alt text, and various types of content, to further enhance viewership, social media rankings and visibility.
The Role of Visual Content in Marketing
Eye-catching visual content is a key player in any content marketing strategy. Engaging visual elements on landing pages, in emails, and across various marketing campaigns contribute to higher retention rates and increased conversion rates. Visuals create a lasting impression on the audience, aiding in building brand identity and influencing purchasing decisions.
However, creating and leveraging visual content in your marketing strategy isn’t always straightforward – it requires organizational processes and workflows that ensure visual content is high-quality and appears before the correct audiences.
For instance, the British Army’s content marketing team leverages PhotoShelter’s DAM system to effectively manage their workflows to capture and share content to sports fans in real time. Click here to read more about this best-in-class example of visual content creation and management.
Optimizing Visual Content for SEO
Enhancing a brand’s online presence heavily relies on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Businesses can boost their SEO rankings by fine-tuning various aspects of visual content, such as file names, alt text, and captions. This optimization guarantees effective indexing and ranking by search engines, resulting in a noticeable surge in organic traffic.
Harnessing the Power of User-Generated Content
Encouraging users to generate content, such as testimonials, social posts and behind the scenes videos, fosters a sense of community and authenticity around the brand. User-generated content is highly shareable and can be incorporated into various marketing tools to strengthen the brand’s connection with its audience.
Incorporating Visual Content into Your Marketing Strategy
Visual content is a multifaceted tool. When created and placed strategically, it can significantly contribute to a brand’s success in the digital landscape. But first, take a look at common mistakes marketers make with visual content, and take the time to perfect your approach to content marketing.
PhotoShelter can help you find the right content quickly with our AI image search to look through your entire library to find the right image. Beyond that, PhotoShelter AI can help you streamline your workflow, maximize your ROI on your assets, transcribe your videos, and more.
Want to learn more about how PhotoShelter can help you or your business curate, create, plan and share top-of-the-line visual content to help you meet your digital marketing and business goals? Learn more about PhotoShelter for Brands here, and contact us to schedule a free demo today.