What is Visual Content Marketing?

Visual media can harness immense power when it comes to captivating audiences, and many marketers know this. As such, visual content has become an integral element of successful marketing strategies. In this article, we’re going to cover the importance of effective visual content marketing, the benefits of implementing this strategy, and a few tips on how to develop engaging visual content for your brand.

What is Visual Content Marketing?

Visual content marketing refers to the use of various visual elements for promotional or marketing purposes. It can be used to spread the word about brands, products, or services. This type of marketing involves creating and sharing visual content to engage and attract a brand’s target audience. Visual content, when used correctly, is a powerful tool in digital marketing, as it can convey information, capture attention, and evoke emotions from audiences.

According to other marketing professionals, visual marketing is growing in popularity at a significant rate. As such, roughly 37% of marketers claim that visuals are their most effective and important type of content. 

Visual content marketing is likely so effective because it’s easy for audiences to absorb. Many people are visual learners, and because of this, a piece of visual content may be able to reach them more successfully than a long-form blog post. With visuals, audiences can gather the information they need without having to dedicate as much time to the pursuit.

Strategy Types

Visual content marketing is quite dynamic, meaning that brands can employ the use of numerous visual elements to enhance their marketing success. Let’s look at a few visual formats, as well as ways that marketing teams can use them to inform and entertain audiences.

• Video Content: Creating and sharing videos to showcase products, explain new concepts, tell stories, or provide entertainment
• Visual CTAs: Taking CTAs to the next level with the use of interactive buttons, illustrations, or quick animations
• Infographics: Creating visual representations of information or data to make specific concepts easier for audiences to understand
• Memes: Utilizing humor and popular formats to attract and entertain the audience
• Photos & Graphics: Using images, graphics, and illustrations to convey messages and enhance the visual appeal of content
• GIFs: Adding short animations to a brand’s content to get the audience’s attention
• Tools & Interactive Content: Providing audiences with interactive tools they can use to gain valuable information (ex: quizzes and polls)

Visual Content Marketing Benefits

As with any marketing technique, visual content marketing can present businesses with an array of advantages. When used effectively, this strategy elevates a brand’s marketing successes in ways other methods aren’t capable of. Some of the key benefits visual content can provide include:

• SEO Boost: Search engines consider visual content when determining the relevance and quality of a webpage. Optimizing images and videos can contribute to better search engine rankings.
• Increased Brand Awareness: Consistently using visual elements, such as logos, video intros, color schemes, and design styles, contributes to brand recognition. Themed visual content helps in creating a memorable brand image.
• Storytelling Opportunities: Visuals provide an effective medium for storytelling. Through images and videos, brands can tell their story, showcase their values, and connect with their audiences. Not to mention, visuals make absorbing the story more convenient for audiences with limited time to spare.
• Content Diversity: Visual content marketing allows for a variety of content types, including images, videos, infographics, and more. The variety available helps keep content fresh and appealing to different audience preferences.
• Audience Entertainment: While reading long-form content can provide entertainment, visuals tend to do so more effectively. Images and videos can help keep viewers from becoming bored and moving on to other content. This way, brands can spread a message without demanding too much of the audience’s time.
• Better Communication: Visuals can convey complex messages and information more efficiently than text. They help simplify concepts, making it easier for the audience to understand and retain the information. Plus, when an audience understands the content, they tend to engage with it more thoroughly, including sharing that content with their friends and families.

In addition, visual content enables audiences to interact with their favorite brands more effectively than text-only content. Visual content can also encourage audiences to connect with the brand emotionally, remember the content they saw, and take action by making a purchase or signing up for a service.

Tips for Visual Content Marketing

Developing your own visual content marketing strategy requires both time and effort, but the following tips should help you get started on the right foot.

Plan Around Your Marketing Goals

Effective visual content marketing requires more than simply posting a photo or video to a brand’s website or social media channel. It’s important to ensure that the content that’s created and shared accurately reflects the brand’s marketing goals. If you’re planning to use visual content in your brand’s marketing strategy, ask yourself a few questions during the brainstorming process. For example:

• What do I want this piece of content to accomplish?
• What makes my brand unique and how do I convey that through this visual content?
• Which segment of my audience am I targeting with this content?
• What does my audience typically engage with?
• Is there a problem I’m trying to address or solve with this content?

Even after the planning phase is over and you’ve successfully published your visual content, you’ll want to constantly check in with your audience. Gathering audience insights will help you gauge the success of your current marketing goals. Keep an eye on the feedback you receive in the form of comments, subscriber numbers, shares, and the like so that you can cater future content to your audience’s preferences. This way, you’ll be more likely to achieve the marketing goals you’ve set for your brand.

Remain Consistent with Your Brand

When creating visual content, consistency is key in terms of content design. You want audiences to connect your visual content with your brand as soon as they see it. As such, it’s important to follow a consistent style guide that matches content that you’ve already created. When creating visual content, keep the following elements in mind:

• Logo Use: sizing, positioning, and which content should include your brand’s logo
• Images: the image style you prefer and the type of images your brand requires (such as themes and overall content)
• Banners/Icons: when and where to use each of your banners and icons
• Color Schemes: which colors your brand uses and how to incorporate them into pieces of visual content
• Text: font types, font sizes, spacing, and the like
• Tone: the voice your brand uses when addressing audiences (ex: formal, casual, etc.)

It’s also essential to keep your industry in mind when creating visual content. Follow a consistent content pattern that matches your brand’s mission, vision, and goals. For example, if you’re an automotive company, stick to producing automotive content rather than veering off into unrelated territory.

Optimize Your Content for Different Platforms

Each website or social media platform has its own image and video specifications, so you’ll need to optimize your visuals accordingly. It’s also wise to be aware of the fact that practically any piece of content will perform differently depending on the platform it’s on. Some visual pieces will perform incredibly on Facebook, yet they’ll underperform on YouTube. Some content will excel on one social media platform and go relatively unnoticed on another. 

Because of this, you’ll need to research each platform you use so that you can modify your content to fit the format. This may take some trial and error on your end, but keep an eye on the way each piece of visual content performs. With the observations you make, you’ll be able to customize your content so that it fits the platform you’re planning to publish with.

When you tailor your brand’s visual content for specific platforms, you stand to achieve better visibility and engagement from your audience.

Learn from Previous Content

Fortunately, creating a solid visual content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be left up to guesswork. Each piece of content you create can provide you with valuable insights you can use to measure your success. Keep an eye on relevant marketing metrics to discover how your content performs. Implementing analytics into your marketing strategy can show you which pieces your audience engages with most so that you can create more for them to love. 

You’ve heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and it couldn’t be more true in terms of content marketing. By effectively utilizing visual content, you can take your brand’s reach and audience engagement to the next level. 

If you’re struggling with various elements of your marketing approach, we invite you to reach out to Content Cucumber. Our experienced marketing team has what it takes to accelerate your marketing efforts and help you grow your audience. Schedule a demo with us today.