Visual Content Strategies To Enhance Your Brand Image

Customers make the brand. They are the reason for everything that the company does. Be it launching a new site, product, technology or even devising a new strategy. As a company, can you at no time afford to lose them or even bore them. So, what to do?

As marketers, you have already tried different ways of engaging with them and are aware of the importance of using visuals by now. However, finding a creative approach to tell your story or message through visual content like photos, graphs, screenshots, banner ads, animations, doodles or videos, finding creative ways to tell their story or message is getting equally challenging is only getting trickier.

Though, last year proved the significance and benefits of this medium over textual content. To prove its magnitude further, for 2018 it is predicted that out of all communications, 84% of them will be visual. It is also estimated that video content will account for 79 percent of all internet traffic. Now, that is humongous.

The growth and projections of visuals clearly indicate that incorporating it in the marketing plan is essential. Therefore, to keep the customers captivated and excited, below are five quick tips that will add a zing and sizzle to your visual content strategy-

Add GIFs in your email marketing to boost conversion

GIFs are fun and super-effective when used in the right context. These soundless animations made from video clips or still images play in a loop and do not take time or data bandwidth for people to watch it. A good GIF increases brand recognition and can result in a high engagement that can extend beyond your existing followers. Even Twitter and Facebook have accepted this trend and added GIFs to their post editors.

In e-mail marketing, an animated GIF can help appeal to a wider audience without worrying about segmenting and using advanced email analytics. It also adds an element of delight to the otherwise static email and even draws attention to the ultimate calls-to-action.

Example: Dell experimented with a GIF-centered email marketing campaign to promote its XPS 12 Convertible Ultrabook, and saw a 103% increase in conversion, 42% increase in click rate and 109% lift in the revenue.

Not just in e-mails, GIFs are an effective tool for blogs and social media posts when brands need to explain step-by-step, how-tos or showcase a process video. Some brands also use them to share quick recipes, product demonstrations and even, exhibit a company’s culture to connect with their audience.

Hence, we say, use GIFs as they are highly effective for communicating your message quickly and succinctly.

Example: Modcloth’s email template uses animation to highlight their Spring collection and styling them with different layers.

Live Stream Now

Live-streaming is one of the hottest new ‘thing’ in digital marketing that has caught everyone’s attention. One of the biggest reasons of it getting the acceptance from brands is the real-time engagement with the audience that recorded video can’t ever match. Live streaming is now and users can engage with the content as it rolls, leading to immediate feedback. It also reaches a larger audience as word-of-mouth on social media channels can generate more interest from people. This fun and interactive content can generate lots of leads for your company. Live streaming, as a marketing tool is effective for product launches and live chats. It also helps in humanizing the brand, as it can be used to showcase ‘behind the scenes’ of a company and by even making customers a part of celebrations and milestones.

Example: Apple has over the years, successfully live-streamed its launches to reach a wider audience.

So, if you haven’t yet included live stream in your strategy, do it now! Apart from its benefits, you will be amazed to know that the search term “Facebook Live Stream” has increased in popularity more than 330% since Facebook Live’s debut in August 2015.

User Generated Content (UGC)

Brands are fiercely competing for the customer’s mindshare and keeping pace with newer ways of engagement is a constant challenge. So, to retain them, what better way than to involve them and make them a part of the brand’s storytelling. This can be simply done by encouraging the audience to share photos and experiences with the brand on the company’s social media channels. This way, the customers feel involved and connected to your company. Plus, the brand generates social proof.

Another reason of involving customers is that as per a study by Nielsen, 92% of the consumers trust peer recommendations above all forms of advertising and 81% consider a product endorsed by an ordinary user more trustworthy than one endorsed by a celebrity as per another finding by Adobe. Hence, we say make UGC an important tool for your visual content strategy as it’s the era of doing it together.

Example: Spotify, a popular music streaming tool that lets you create your own playlists and tap into music depending on your mood rolled out a successful user-generated campaign that highlighted weird and wonderful playlists created by Spotify users.

Repurpose text articles and ebooks into Content Videos

Repurposing content or recycling the same content to give it a new approach, look or format has a number of benefits for brands. The most important being it is time-saving than developing new content every time and the other being, it helps in constant engagement with the customers.

Repurposing also helps in capturing a new source of traffic as a potential customer who doesn’t enjoy reading long articles online might now get exposed to your content, if available in other visual formats and channels.

Example: This blog post on infographics design was adapted into a video. It’s embedded on the article page for readers who prefer to watch than reading and also uploaded in the YouTube and Vimeo channels to tap the video traffic.

Thus, creating a video out of the existing blogs or e-books is something that brands should consider doing. The storyline can be quickly created basis the structure and key messages and can end with the desired action that the brand would want the customer to take. In the same way, a long, detailed article too can be turned into a short and concise video that can be leveraged on YouTube and other social media channels of the company. A way to engage the customers with your videos is by making a short series of the posts and presenting it in the form of limited episodes that are linked to one another. This will keep people inquisitive on what’s next, and therefore, more chances of people completing the entire series.

Thus, to give a new look and feel to your visual strategy, repurpose the same content into interesting videos and reach out to a wider audience and increase its potential organic reach. Since it will be hosted on different pages of your website or on different platforms, the probability of it showing up in search engines as well as in social feeds increases.

Infographics can be used to create conversion

The use of infographics by brands is widespread as it is visually stimulating and highly shareable. This, therefore, makes it a great tool for communicating different brand messages. It also helps in creating an authority for your brand with its expressive and influential visual content that can further be transported into popular social media channels and published on relevant other websites with backlinks. Even a single stat shared online can create an interesting dialogue.

Thus, the use of infographics on landing pages can help brands in engaging with customers by creating conversion that is visually appealing. It also helps to grab the audience’s attention by quickly highlighting value propositions, key takeaways, and retain the engagement until the customer is ready to act upon your call-to-action. Being shareable, downloadable and representing the information visually, they are a great source to generate leads for your campaign.

Hence, by combining visual storytelling and strong data into one compelling, easy to understand content, can provide value to your audience while also attracting new customers and demonstrating business expertise.

Example: Intercom’s landing page is a great example that showcases the use of Infographics effectively. The visual tool shows how they are bridging the communication gap between customers and companies.

Conclusion

In this interesting time, where keeping the customers engaged and engrossed is a constant effort, an exciting visual strategy will give your brand an edge to sizzle and create the much-needed impact. Hence, create a style for your visual content, which becomes part of your branding repertoire so that when people see it visual content they relate it your brand.

So, keep experimenting constantly with new visual content formats to engage with your target audience.

Have you run any creative visual marketing strategies? Let us know how you fared in the comments below.

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