There’s a lot of hearsay about how perfect branding is done that makes your brand stand out. Branding is all about how effectively you present your USPs and brand essence, creating a brand recall. And visual marketing is the ideal way of getting your brand across in a way that provides more engagement and holds the interest of your prospects.
2021 is all about visual content as recent years have seen a massive shift towards everything visual, instead of text. Marketers can feel the continued importance of visual content, implicitly marked by the changes across all the major social media channels.
Catering to the Next-Gen!
Brand visuals are leveraged by most brands, big or small, to communicate with their audience in the most effective way. Indeed, when it comes to generate engagement with the target audience, visual aids are indispensable. And if you are going to create your content marketing strategy for 2021, then ensure a perfect tandem between visuals and videos.
Because as we can see, the need for both of these content forms, from the sharp boom in Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, etc. That said, the modern marketer must embrace both the content forms for a successful visual strategy that stands out in the market, and reap higher business rewards. This how visual marketing works.
Remember, to grow your audience, or increase your product sales, creating strong brand visuals is mandatory. Otherwise, catering to this ‘New Gen’ consumers becomes all the more challenging. It’s mandatory to know about the types of visual marketing hacks to impress these new-age consumers.
Impressing Target Audience with Engaging Brand Visuals!
Nowadays, consumers want to see things that are enticing and interactive. That makes it a norm for online marketers to incorporate fascinating graphics and animations within their marketing road-maps. Visual marketing is all about this. This new form of marketing majorly targets to amplify the engagement, likes and shares, and everything that’s ‘Word of Mouth‘.
So let’s discuss the tips and hacks of employing visuals in your content strategy. And most of these tips apply to the strategies for the upcoming years as well.
1. Offer Engaging User-Friendly Experience
Give your audience a better experience every time they come to your website by incorporating dynamic visuals on your homepage. You may include visual content in the inside pages too, to convey your brand message better.
Your product page must feature high rez images of your products, maybe along with your clients. Be sure to includea customer testimonial page where you must have a high quality video testimonial of your clients.
All these together increase the chance of customer engagement and the chance of lead closures. Lastly, you might include visual icons smartly within your website that might help your visitors to navigate smoothly.
While including visual content in a marketing strategy, ensure these kinds of personalized experiences. This hack comes in handy mostly for the start-ups in wooing their audience.
2. Encourage Users to Take Charge
After all, all marketers strive to influence the market with their services or products. And in order to accomplish it, let your audience take charge. Without knowing their pain points, a marketer cannot solve their issue and sell his product/service.
This proves that ultimately, it is the audience that influences the market. Based on their demands, sales happen. So, let your audience be the influencer and show them how you are different, and not just tell. This technique is one of the visual marketing best practices that an online marketer can deploy.
3. Be Visually Consistent on Social Media Channels
If you are looking for steady growth in your visual content marketing efforts, be in constant action on your social channels. Especially on those channels where your audience is the most active. Post consistently, and be relevant each time you share something about your brand. Do not deviate from your brand essence while sharing any visual.
Consult the professionals who could create bite-sized Social Media Graphicsor cool emailers for a fluid marketing campaign. And if you are a start-up with limited funds, you might want to try the free graphic design templates available on the Internet.
You may also take the help of auto-scheduling tools that allow you to schedule all your posts in one go, saving time and effort. And don’t forget to analyze the peak times your audience is the most active, and schedule strategically.
4. Ensure Mandatory Mobile-Responsiveness
54% of total website visitors are mobile-driven and more than 30% of the total sales are conducted through Smartphones- how astonishing!
Therefore, your visual content must be compatible with mobile and other similar IoT gadgets. For better marketing results, optimize your visuals to suit different screens, which will also simplify their shopping experience.
5. Keep your Brand Message Short, Personalized and Memorable
Generic marketing tropes can no longer fool modern consumers. Instead, they crave to see things personalized, memorable, compelling! Mass-produced marketing ploys have long become trite with little, to no impact whatsoever.
Thus, in today’s highly competitive landscape, a brand must seem human and accessible to attract the right people at the right time. Likewise, brand visuals must give an exclusive insight into your brand and what it stands for. Let your visual content create a much-needed intimacy with your prospects, so that they feel a sense of confidence in your brand.
Try micro-narrative content forms like, mini-Infographics, short Animated Videos, GIFs, or loop animations. Take personalization to the next level with a video series and a bunch of micro-content relevant to your core community.
6. Practice UGC Marketing
If you are looking for a comparatively less time-consuming, cost-effective, yet, impactful brand content solution– try User Generated Content, aka, UGC. User-generated content are provided mainly by prospects, visitors, existing clientele, etc. This is another of the several visual marketing techniques that can be utilized to grow your audience.
These kinds of content forms have rapidly become popular amongst social media users. By encouraging customers to share Instagram stories of your product, post a picture standing in front of your office, by conducting contests- brands can take advantage of these creative visual content created by their customers.
7. Keep Things Minimal and Sleek!
Anything minimal and simple, is preferred by the new generation audience. It is often considered that the sign of a true artist lies in the ability to convey complex concepts in simpler ways. And that cannot be more true for brands!
If a brand can explain critical ideas in an unembellished manner, it is considered versatile and unique. So, give your audience something sleek and meaningful, create a winning visual marketing strategy, and see your marketing effort skyrocket.
8. Provide a Visually Appealing Customer Journey
If you want your visual commerce to take off, support your lead throughout his/her consumer journey with relevant visuals. This guidance will prove in the long run while closing the lead.
Mainly there are 3 stages in which a customer journey can be broken down:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Well, across all the 3 touch-points, you have to have some sort of visual content to guide them. Maybe Infographics, or eBooks, Whitepapers, PPTs, Brochures, Explainer Videos, Product Demos – whatever mix of digital assets you could incorporate into your sales strategy, you can further usher them through your sales funnel.
9. Incorporate Cinematic Narratives and Techniques in your Brand Storytelling
Cinematic storytelling can be so immersive, that the audience tends to forget their consciousness and gets involved in the context.
As we know that visual storytelling is the only medium that attracts modern-age consumers, we need to incorporate a cinematic angle in every content we produce. This is especially true for brand video content, where we could see various angles, narration, POVs, lightings, camera directions, etc.
With this kind of creative technique, convey what’s important in your brand and how it stands out. Marketing strategists must be aware of these kinds of visual marketing facts that augment audience engagement.
10. Leverage Shoppable Brand Content
Why do Snapchat, Vine, Pinterest, Instagram work so well with the Millennials and Gen Z? What is the sorcery behind these social channels shooting up over the years?
Well, everything is visual on those social platforms. They play with various forms of brand visual content and also encourage their users to do the same. These visual commerce platforms share more and more shoppable posts that smoothen the user’s path to purchase.
Brands attract more and more leads with shoppable galleries, where images of their products, along with the specs and prices are given, that enables easy buying from the post directly, reducing cart abandonment.
Sometimes, brands can also turn user-generated social media posts into shoppable content. Bridge the gap between product discovery and final purchase decision with this quirky visual hack!
Final Thoughts!
So you see, visual content not just helps you in conveying complex data in the most effective fashion. But also greatly ensure definite brand recall. The more they remember you, the more they recall your brand, the higher is the chance of them coming back to you. As per the stats, marketing through visuals is proven to increase the audience’s response up to 40%.
Because an Infographic helps them to understand a critical a piece ofinformation in the most simple way and holds their attention for long. That way, you can highlight the best part of your product/service, as well as your USPs.
However, while you kick off your start-up or plan out your visual marketing strategy, it’s pretty normal to feel overwhelmed. One might feel a little lost as to where to start. You could want to reach out to a team of professionals who can help you in visual marketing and design, that engage your audience and boost conversion.
Start integrating dynamic and visually appealing content into your marketing strategy, and feel the difference soon enough. Godspeed!
