Running great visual content alongside your written content when marketing your business is now considered essential. The explosion of platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, alongside the continued success of YouTube, is making it necessary for companies to get a handle on their visual as well as written content.
What is visual content?
Visual media can be as simple as a stock image, a photo, a short reel, a full-on video or clip that can add value and be a powerful way to communicate with clients, using the storytelling power of the image or video to reinforce your message. Of course, there can be some spoken or written words in some visual media, but the pictures and their story should contain the key message.
What are the benefits?
Longer form written content can benefit from careful placement of striking visual images. You can evoke different emotions using words and images together that appeal to a broad and diverse audience. However, visual content such as videos, video clips and branded images are visual content that can reach a demographic you might not have previously considered as potential customers. So it pays to reach out with a strong brand in using a variety of media across different platforms. Adding subtitling to your videos can add a professional touch that elevates your business branding but also makes content more accessible.
Keep on top of the ever-changing creative platforms and visual trends
Understanding the creative trends and nuances of the various platforms and marketing opportunities is essential when creating your marketing strategy to ensure that you maximise platform potential. Your visual content should complement and draw interested parties and consumers to your website, written content and company in a way that follows naturally.
Acting in haste because you fear inactivity can often damage your brand by veering way off your recognisable brand in terms of colour and tone. An effective content marketing strategy will support both a visual and written content plan that prevents an uncoordinated approach and panic posts. Our tips will help you keep focussed and help you make the most of great visual content opportunities.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What do you want your visual content to accomplish?
You need a compelling rationale to create visual storytelling that looks great, translates into marketing results, raises awareness or sales, and earns its keep.
- What does your market want?
Knowing the kind of content experience that interests your niche is the start to delivering great content.
- What does your audience need?
Show your audience how they need your product or service and how your company is there to help.
- What makes your brand unique?
How can we sell it effectively in a visually consistent way that supports our overall marketing efforts?
- How will you measure success?
- Which search terms should you use to get the image noticed?
Your strategy must effectively link your company to all the words and images you use so that people recognise your brand, gain trust in your consistent messages and know how you help them and how they can use your products or services. It has to be more than simply posting a photo or video and waiting for the sales and offers to come in. That as a strategy alone is likely to fail, and you won’t have the time or resources to continually be trying to create the next viral sensation.
Use your fans
Nothing is more likely to help with online marketing success than using the fans you already have to help your organic reach. After all, if you have their attention, they will often have snaps and selfie videos that you can share and incorporate creatively into your content. Consider using specialist influencers, remember the all-important hashtags, and ensure that your sharing options are set up correctly to help the potential for organic growth.
Review each platform
Whilst it is good to have a similar message across each platform, you must be sure that you tailor content in the best way for each platform. Your conversation style and context must fit the forum, and your links and sharing options must be checked. Text-heavy content may work for your website with just a few white spaces and images, but when it comes to Instagram, you need to adapt the words to bitesize visuals, and for TikTok, format it in such a way that the message is not lost in the speed the platform moves. Using the pause function on fast-moving Instagram frames can give readers more time to take on board what they see.
Seek emotion
Many of today's audiences are strongly influenced by what they see. You can create a more instant reaction and result using powerful images more quickly than the written and spoken word. Use images that evoke the emotions you want, images and videos that can tell a story without the need for explanations and ensure that they are part of your overall strategy. You can use an emotive image or short video clip to lead to a wordier article that offers the interested viewer more detail.
Online DIY design tools
A small budget should not hold you back, but it may mean you have to spend more time getting to grips with the ever-growing DIY online and social media tools available, often free to help you create compelling images and videos. One of our favourites is Canva which has multiple templates and tools that will enable you to maximise the potential of every image, be it a stock image or one of your own.
Keep your branding colours a strong focus and ensure that font choice is clear and uncluttered and does not distract from the meaning or impact of the images.
By now, it should be pretty clear that creating great visual content is something to work on alongside your written content and that the two go hand in hand to move your business forward. Now we’ve shared some tips and tricks, why not harness the power of visual content to drive your business forward?
Ditto Digital was founded in 2009 and provides a range of digital marketing services including Content Marketing, SEO, PPC and Conversion Rate Optimisation. The company implements pro-active campaigns based on in-depth data analysis, best-practice processes and solid IT and web expertise. Their mission is to enable businesses to find new audiences nationally and internationally in the digital landscape.