Visual content is an extremely effective marketing tool. The reason for this is the brain is faster at processing visuals compared to text. This type of processing also engages our long-term memory, rather than short-term, ensuring that messages are more memorable and will stay with the viewer far longer.
In addition, visuals are more appealing, they are stimulating and often take very little time to comprehend, with a satisfying payoff. This stimulation generally leads to higher engagement, as your content will pique the interest of someone who wants to learn more about your brand, and the fact that visuals offer quick engagement means that more people will stay to interact with your content rather than scrolling by.
Plan
It is important to lead with a story, rather than just focusing on the visuals. In order to tell an effective story, consumers must be able to easily identify who you are, what your brand does, and how you plan to help your customers with the problems they are trying to solve. Understand your brand’s goals, and how they relate to your marketing strategy, and your story must also be consistent and overarching across all platforms.
Identify your audience and discover what will resonate with them and the types of products or services that they need. Also be sure to have done your research, determining which format works best on each platform, as well as which platform and format your consumer-base is most likely to interact with.
Let your audience guide the selection of themes and topics by looking at your audience retention rates to determine what kind of content resonates with your audience the best. Also be sure to inform your audience of any and all information they may need in order to make an informed decision about interacting with a company from your space or industry; it’s important to have an image of transparency and honesty with your customers.
Production
Production includes a few different key aspects: the story you established in planning, your branding, your chosen format and design.
Make sure that your content stays-on brand. This can be accomplished through a consistent visual design, including brand colours, logos, text styles and messaging. Also, ensure images reflect and represent your whole audience, this can be in terms of showcasing diversity, as well as adding alt-text descriptions to make your content more accessible. Consumers will be more likely to interact with your brand if they can visualize themselves using your product or service.
In terms of format, there are a lot you can choose from. A few examples are infographics, videos, carousel posts, motion graphics, gifs, memes and e-books. You can also feature posts of customers using or wearing your product to help build an image of authenticity and reliability with potential customers.
In terms of design, visuals must be clear and easy to follow. Less is definitely more when it comes to how much text you incorporate, and how many images you use. In addition, consumers should almost instantly be able to figure out why you’ve chosen a specific image or data set to display, and how it relates to your brand. Make smart typography decisions as well, consumers should not be confused by what you’ve written, and fancy or experimental graphic design should apply to images only, not text.
Posting
Be sure to have determined what day and time your followers are most likely to interact with your content so you can ensure that the highest number of people see your posts. Use this to create a posting schedule and be consistent with your uploads.
Make sure that content has been tested in advance. Consumers will be less likely to interact with your content if it does not look high quality and doesn’t load quickly.
Payoff
Finally, measure your analytics once a piece of content has been posted. Determine your criteria for what makes a post successful and measure each post against these criteria. Criteria can include, conversions, interaction, the amount of time people spend on a page, and shares. Learn from what these analytics tell you, so that your next post can be even more successful than this one.
Lauren Schwartz | Contributing Writer
