Explore expert insights on visual content marketing. Learn from brands like Adobe to create visuals to skyrocket engagement and achieve marketing goals
Visual content marketing means using photos and videos to convey information about your brand. Visually appealing content makes words easier to understand and remember. It’s because our human brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. People remember 65% of what they see, compared to ten percent of what they hear.
Pictures and videos add up to the kind of content that gets people to like your posts and buy things from you. That’s why marketers have been using pictures and videos to market stuff and share content, whether they work for a small new company or a really big one.
This article will teach you how to use pictures and videos to share information in the right way.
Companies now use visuals in advertising to get people’s attention and sell things. Research tells us that pictures are looked at 94% more than just words. It also indicates that when people click on pictures on Google, they also visit the websites that have those pictures. Pictures catch our attention quickly, are easy to understand, and help us remember things better. That’s why businesses that want to communicate something to people use pictures and videos to do it.
Related: How Content Marketing Is Changing The Game
Visually appealing content gets you new customers by building trust and connections with them, resulting in more sales and loyalty in the long run. That’s the reason why picture tweets get 35% more retweets and videos get 28% more. Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram also give more priority to visual content creation, such as videos, reels, carousels, etc. This highlights that people prefer watching visual context rather than just text-based.
You can use eye-catching visuals to show your brand and connect with your audience when you’re in the awareness stage. You can do that by creating colorful infographics, short animations, concise e-books, product manuals or attractive reports that share interesting facts or highlight exciting news about your business. This way you’ll grab people’s attention and encourage them to learn more about what you offer.
When you use pictures to tell a story for your brand, the pictures should help tell a clear story that your audience can follow. Each picture may not tell the whole story, but your audience should still be able to follow the main story.
Robert Rose, who is the chief strategy advisor at CMI, emphasizes this point in his detailed Marketing Makers lesson. He recommends planning your visuals strategically to effectively convey and connect the story across all your platforms.
This is about the Calm app. You might have seen Calm app ads on Instagram (attached below for your understanding) or their daily affirmations and meditations. The company uses blue and peaceful scenes to show they want to help people feel better.
Although visual content creation helps your marketing strategy, you must have a clear plan. You don’t only want to post photos and videos and hope for the best. What you gotta do is have specific goals for your visual content. For that, you need to find out who your target audience is and what unique aspects your brand possesses that you would highlight visually. You must do that early on to make sure your visual content clicks with your target audience.
Instead of guessing who’s your target audience, use the data and information you have about your audience to make creative choices. Video maker Andrew Davis advises making longer videos when planning visual content marketing. According to him, it gives better results than short quick tips. You can do that by analyzing how long people watch your videos, how your subscribers react, and the comments they leave. you can get valuable feedback to improve your visual content creation strategy.
Use data-driven insights to tailor your content to what your audience likes. Also keep track of your audience retention rates, subscriber responses, and viewer comments. It will help you improve how you tell stories visually. When you match your content with what your audience is interested in, you make your visual storytelling have a bigger impact on your marketing strategy.
Check: 7 Proven Reasons Why Digital Video Is Important
Michelle Ngome is the founder of the African-American Marketing Association. She suggests that photos must represent various groups of people. And that’s true. Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty features people from all walks of life in their images. This inclusivity has contributed to Rihana’s brand’s rapid growth, making $1 billion in its initial two years.
When you show different kinds of people in everything, you reach all kinds of people, and that’s good for your marketing. GLAAD, Getty Images, and Ceros are some brands that work together to ensure that they don’t make anyone feel left out in their photos and stories. They aim to help people understand each other better and make everyone feel like they belong.
You might have experienced that when films and movies show dogs in a good way, people care more about animals. People become more likely to support animal welfare. A study also revealed that the way animals are represented on the screen can influence how people think about taking care of animals.
If you want to get more people interested in your visual, you need to make your pictures and videos look user-generated. AI won’t help create creative content that could give you long-term success. User-generated videos and photos make your target audience feel like they’re really there and they relate to your content more. It helps build a stronger bond with your target audience.
A recent article in Teen Vogue says that Abercrombie & Fitch asked people on TikTok to help make their brand cooler. A lot of young people posted videos about Abercrombie & Fitch, which helped the company become more popular.
@andy_lobosReply to @gunnawut surprisingly there is no logos on this just a good blank hoodie #fyp #abercrombie♬ original sound – leddini
When lots of people on TikTok talk about Abercrombie’s clothes, they sell out online very fast. For example, a video about Abercrombie hoodies without logos got over 1 million views.
You need to keep in check that your brand is maintaining a consistent appearance. The color scheme and filters you use for your pictures and videos must always align. You can check famous brand’s Instagram photos to see how they keep consistency. Take Planters, for instance. It uses a unique color pattern and mascot in its social media visual content. It maintained this consistency long before it became famous back in 2021 when it didn’t have the Super Bowl ad.
Similarly, when you create content, you want people to feel this consistency. Moreover, you want to make sure your visual content is of high quality, as you don’t want your efforts to be wasted if the images are distorted or misunderstood. So, to avoid native platform tools incorrectly selecting or cropping images for your brand, you can use Open Graph tags for more control over how your content looks.
Open Graph Tags example:
<meta property="og:title" content="Expert Insights: 9 Creative Brands; Visual Content Tips with Examples - First Growth Agency Blog" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Explore expert insights on visual content marketing. Learn from brands like Adobe to create visuals to skyrocket engagement and achieve marketing goals" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://firstgrowthagency.com/blog/?p=329" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="First Growth Agency Blog" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
Include your logo in original images and label them with relevant keywords, categories, hashtags, and metadata. This approach helps your fans find and interact with your content easily, even when you accidentally share them in strange contexts.
Read: Content Creation Tips: All You Need To Know
When you create visuals for a conversation, make a specific environment through them. For that, you must know your audience’s preferences. You can get that through data and insights to create visuals that resonate with your audience and work in unexpected places.
For instance, The NYC Public Library’s long-form literature content was not appealing Instagram users at first. But when the library’s content team successfully transformed text-heavy content into visually appealing and bite-sized segments, it worked out. It successfully engaged the audience and helped the brand earn a special place among the library’s collection of great works.
As a result, the library created Insta Novels, which became five famous novels. If you see that, it has each story featuring the complete text, illustrations, and an animated introduction. It also allowed the readers to pause on each frame and the novels attracted more than 300,000 views and 140,000 followers.
Visuals are emotional. Recall how Oreo’s video about fathers struck a chord with its audience. The magazine All Animals by the Humane Society used photos to create a feeling of empathy and connection in its audiences’ heart. They simply made animals look into the camera and build a powerful bond between their audience and the stories they were telling.
To explain the importance of casual photos and visual content, a famous photographer named Pete Souza talked at Content Marketing World 2021. He said that he likes taking real pictures of important people, like presidents, because these pictures can show us what those people are really like. He also tells stories about the pictures he takes to show why they are important.
Photos help you feel emotions deep inside. They can present important moments in a person’s life or show what famous people are really like in life behind the camera. As a result, making stories with these kinds of photos helps people understand each other and care more about what they see.
Whether you’re tweaking stock images or creating drawings, good design is essential. Now that there are templates to help you, like Adobe’s creative content templates you can make a wide range of posts depending on the project’s needs.
Adobe has tools and templates to make posts that can help businesses keep their customers happy. It also teaches people about basic design to help them make better visuals, as the tools are a bit technical. The bottom line is when you make posts to market your products or services and think about who you are teaching stuff or selling stuff to.
Understand this entire thing and tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. Some things like leaving space on the page, using likable colors and fonts, and making sure the pictures load fast help your audience like your stuff more.
If you can’t afford photography, you can use stock images tailored to your needs. Once you purchase stock photos, you can add your personal touch to them to make them more aligned with your brand. It will help your visual content stand out and influence your audience more than generic stock photos.
When companies tweak stock photos, they attract more people. Deloitte did that by collaborating with Quartz. It created custom images for a paper, which increased website traffic and paper downloads.
It also did a project demonstrating the importance of using drawings instead of stock photos for marketing. It was found that although drawings cost more, they can make a lot of money in return.
Pictures make people look at your stuff 94% more than just words. That’s why it’s good to use pictures to tell a story. To do it best, you should match your picture story with your other plans, know what your fans like, and include all kinds of people. Utilize user-generated visual content to make your tailored marketing stuff. Keep your brand the same everywhere for good marketing. Tell stories with pictures to make friends with your audience. Use interesting templates to get more people to see your brand. If you face diffculty, you just contact us to do that for you.
Hi, I'm Aaqil Abdul Rehman, one of the key individuals behind the success of First Growth Agency. With a spirited blend of marketing savvy and a dash of technical genius, I've dedicated myself to catapulting brands into the spotlight where they belong.
- Aaqil
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