Visual content marketing refers to all of the tools at your disposal which fall under the visual category. There are all sorts of visual media that you might be using, or that you might realize you ought to be using, anything from infographics to animated video content. The range from which you can choose is increasingly unlimited, as technology in all sectors continues to advance, allowing you more and more freedom to explore options in your visual marketing attempts. Using visuals in your content marketing is an excellent way to really capture your audience and remain current within a field which is constantly striving to find new ways to capture audiences and promote their company’s services or products. With all of that being said, let us take a look at six tips for getting your content marketing game up to the level that you want it.
Visualized Text
The first thing to point out is that all text is visualized in a sense. You have to see it to read it, so it’s already a visual. Visualized text, however, is a form of visual content that focuses or enhances the visual aspects to text and makes a short piece of text the central part of the visual content. This technique can also be referred to as using a quote card. Take a phrase, a company motto or something you really want your audience to connect with and visualize it as a drawing, with bold emphatic fonts and plenty of visual interest. It engrains the image and subsequently the phrase in the audience’s minds.
Cinemagraphs
Cinemagraphs are a relatively new addition to the visual content marketing sphere. Actually, they’re quite simple, and it’s not all that unlikely that you’ve seen some yourself. A cinemagraph is essentially a GIF, something I’m sure you are familiar with, which has isolated one part of the image to move leaving the rest as a still. “Cinemagraphs are still extremely striking in the way that they impact the viewer. In part this is down to their novelty, in part it is due to their uncanniness, the combination of the fluidity of the moving area and the unnatural stillness in the rest of the image”, writes Steven James, marketer at WriteMyx and NextCoursework.
Data Visualization
Having statistics which demonstrate to audiences how specifically amazing your company is can be a really useful way to persuade audiences to make that purchase that you’re looking for. The downside is that statistics are extremely boring to read. The way around this problem is to use data visualization to show your statistics rather than to tell them. This can be anything, from colourful, engaging graphs to complex innovative ways of displaying a data set. Either way, it gets your stats across quickly and excitingly.
Include Original Art
This is a really underexplored option for visual content marketing and an area in which you can really make something special. Hiring an artist to depict figures or a scene with their own unique and singular vision is a really compelling marketing tool. “Original art, even if all you’ve done is written a brief and hired an artist, shows a great deal of care and investment in whatever it is you are marketing. Your audience appreciate the care and skill that has gone into it and it also shakes any feeling of a corporate shrouding over your advertising”, says Lana Sprig, project manager at BritStudent and Australia2Write.
Force A Response
A lot of marketing simply gets people to look at some material and then leaves them to get on with the rest of their lives. If the impression made was impactful enough, then you’re in with a shot to achieve what you want. More effective than this though, is to give your audience some reason to act in direct response to the marketing. This doesn’t need to be a purchase, it just needs to be some action, some sign that you’ve made an impact on them. In visual content, this could mean marketing with a poll that they respond to, a little minigame or just a plain old, well-worded call to action. Whatever it is, get them responding!
Don’t Use Stock Imagery
Just like how an artist’s original work has all those benefits, stock photos are the absolute death of most visual marketing campaigns. They’re clean, yes, but they’re also bland, uninteresting and so, so corporate looking. They practically slap you in the face with the fact that this is a marketing campaign by someone who doesn’t really care about the quality and, in some intrinsic sense, the end result. It’s also lazy. If you want to have a photo of smiling employees, then pick up a camera and take one.
Conclusion
Overall, the key with visual content marketing is to keep it fresh and organic, not letting yourself fall into tired tropes or boring blurbs. You want to make the people encountering the marketing feel like you’ve poured effort into it since effort is always appreciated by those on the receiving end.