Top 8 Visual Content Tips to Boost Your Branding Strategy

Last time when you were scrolling your feeds, what made you laugh out loud all alone? What content made you scroll down any further? When was the last time you went in awe seeing the talents of any sportsman or singer, sights from the remote Amazon jungle, or Hong Kong skyscrapers? Possibilities are that you might’ve experienced these within an hour time before you landed up in this article; thanks to the power of visual content. With no further delays, let’s jumpstart into knowing what are all the Visual Content Tips that make you a digital marketing king.

What are Visual Contents?

Visual contents are the images, videos, and GIFs that are used in the marketing field to reach out to more digital audiences and turn them into your customers. Researches show that visual content is retained for an extended time by people than the monotonous written content when something is communicated.

The audience grasps the information conveyed via the visual content more easily and the effectiveness incomprehensibility is very high in it. In the Digital marketing parlance, what we call the CTA (call to action) is effortlessly taken care of by visual content than its non-visual counterpart.

Why Visual Content is Key?

Every piece of content that surfaces on the websites you enter through the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) are well studied and refined to turn the visitors into your customers. As digital marketing is flooding the search engines, companies never want to be ineffective by producing some boring content, so people don’t ditch them to move to some other interesting content. This is where visual content is enthroned by everyone to win more traffic for their websites.

Let us look at some facts driven by statistics to know why visual content is very important.

• A report from a famous marketing company shows that within all the information comprehended by a person, 90% is visual and the remaining 10% is non-visual.
• Studies show that 94% of your visitors are impressed by how good your website’s visual content looks.
• Reports say that 34% of Twitter users are more likely to retweet content when it has an image in it.
• A presenter can persuade his customers better by 43% when s/he uses visual aids.

Therefore, it’s highly advisable to have the best Visual Content Tips at your disposal while planning out content for your digital marketing.

The 8 Best Visual Content Tips to Ignite Your Branding: –

1. Efficient Use of Visual Content to Create Brand Awareness

If you think of Nike company, what immediately pops up in your mind is their ‘tick-signed logo’, but not any shoes as an immediate flash of thought. This is because we consumers, as visual creatures had that logo of Nike fixated in our minds due to the repeated association of it with the brand products advertised in many mediums. This is how powerful the visual content is.

Another power of visual representation is the way how companies represent the taglines of their brand with beautiful visuals like images and videos. This makes the customers efficiently connect with the company’s brand directly as those visual aids strongly bind the unique tagline of the company to the emotions of the people.

For example, let us consider KFC, a global fast-food chain business, whose restaurants are dedicated to preparing delicious chicken dishes. This company has a unique brand tagline, which is “Finger-Lickin’ Good”. This very tagline when coupled with the right image or video brings us a mouth-watering sensation.

This can be seen in the ads of KFC, where they ably use visuals like people taking a pleasureful roll of their fingers after tasting the juicy and crunchy KFC chicken pieces. This strategy is the key one among the Visual Content Tips that you need.

Read here the Best SEO Hacks to Grow Brand Awareness

2. Infographics: A Way for Effective Communication

Next in the row of Visual Content Tips comes the infographics. Alberto Cairo, in his book, ‘The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization’, apprised about the significance of infographics such that:

“The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.”

Here are a few statistical data that show you how effective the infographics are: –

• 74% of the digital marketers use infographics for effective communication on Social Media platforms.
• 54% of the companies who were queried for their products and services used infographics.
• 84% of the marketers owe the success of their ad-to-business conversion rates to infographics.

Posts with infographics communicate the product or service-based information necessary for marketing better than text-based posts. When you can display the strengths of your business effectively, chances are high that you outperform your competitors who are comparatively big but use boring text-based marketing strategies.

The Types of Infographics:

• Timelines– Rather than piling up long sentences interspersed with dates, you can use beautiful timelines to represent several events that happened over several months or years.
• Data Visualization– Content rich in data can be well represented by a diverse range of infographics in the form of pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs, scatter plots, histograms, etc.
• Anatomic– Explaining the anatomy can be done at its best by pictorial representation through labeling but not by crazy long paragraphs that make readers feel disdained. For ex., explaining the parts of a car, a washing machine, or an industrial setup.
• Flowcharts– They play a significant role in representing concept maps and processes that are related to one another in a complex fashion
• Comparisons– Infographics are best utilized to compare two different things for your audience. Chances are high that they turn out to be your potential customers after seeing the comparison of your products with that of your competitor.

3. Unique Style

Always stay unique in your presence on any platform with your visual content. This is one of the subtly important Visual Content Tips that you have to think about. Visual content has a variety of elements in it like appealing color choice, themes, font styles, uniqueness in images or sketches used, art style, etc.

These factors will help you stand out from your fellow competitors and give you advantageous digital shelf space. Let us consider the digital marketing strategy of a company like Starbucks within India. Their choice of elements to make up their visual content identifies their brand distinctly from the rest of their coffeehouse competitors.

Here are the distinctive styles that we see in their visual contents –

• Choosy color palette – they have a collection of uniquely undertone colors like neem green, pale blue, marron, and coffee brown
• Highlighting the CTA phrases
• Cartoons when used are maintained the same throughout with an elegant Disney-style

The same is true for food delivery businesses like Zomato. Zomato maintains a distinct style in projecting itself on any of the digital marketing platforms. They have reserved to use a tomato red-colored theme with captions in a contrasting white.

Subconsciously, people connect to the Zomato brand when seeing this trademark color combo. Their use of a google-eyed brown kid cartoon character throughout their social media posts secures them a unique branding imprint in the minds of the people.

4. Blend of Humor

There is no greater idea than bringing in a fun factor while marketing your brand. Adding value to your sales by trying out humor is the best way to easily connect with people’s hearts. People are wise enough to judge you whether you reach out to them just for your sales or are you valuing them as their potential customers.

One such instance where humor played a key role in marketing by winning the hearts of the people through the ads of chewing gum products like Center Fruit and Happydent white. Though their products never do come under basic amenities, they always have this humor trump card at their disposal to connect to their audience effortlessly.

The ad of Center Fruit wherein a vocalist and a table player engage in a hilarious dual and the Happydent white’s ad in which servants of the palace who chew gums take the role of lightbulbs, ceiling lights, and street lamps at the time of power cut by casting light from their glowing teeth are great examples of such remarkable use of humor in visual content.

In recent years, we have seen Flipkart bringing in a new trend in their ads that has considerably attracted the audience. In them, small kids enact the roles of grownups. If the very same sequences were played by adults as usual that never would have surprised people but would have bored them.

Another such sensation that went wild was the zoo-zoo ads of Vodafone. Those animated mold characters looked cute and funny and made people wait impatiently every time for those ads to surprise them. This is the power of blending humor into your visual content. Therefore, humor is the prime factor among all Visual Content Tips to consider.

Also Read: SEO Skills for Different Types of Content

5. On-site Optimization of Visual Content

There are a few points regarding visual content tips that need to be taken care of for better loading speed of your webpage. That includes uploading images to your webpage with correct dimensions so that they neatly flow along with the text content. Next, maintain an optimum pixel rate for the images so that the loading speed of your website is not hampered.

Another key factor that you need to consider while uploading images on your website is using proper alt-tags for them. As bots of search engines like google cannot view images as we do, they rely on these alt-descriptions to analyze and rank your content. These are secondary factors still they find a place among Visual Content Tips to give you that extra edge.

6. Use of Multiple Platforms

When considering all Visual Content Tips, launching your visual content campaign on multiple platforms is a significant point. The screentime of every individual is growing rapidly over years. Of the world population, 58.4% of them use social media and the average time spent by adults is 2 hours and 27 minutes as of January 2022.

This is an increase of 1.4 percent from the avg. time spent by people in 2021. On average, an adult uses 7.5 social media applications per month, and 74.8% of people above the age of 13 use them.

Number of users per social platform that can air visual contents (in millions; till Jan 2022): –

• Facebook – 2910
• YouTube – 2562
• Instagram – 1478
• TikTok – 1000
• Pinterest –  444
• Twitter –  436
• Quora –  300

This being the figure, you should be able to use these platforms to the best of your marketing ability. Statistics show that the right type of visual content like videos and images induce effective engagement. On LinkedIn, posts with images and videos bring in 2x times and 5x times more engagement respectively.

On Facebook, videos over one minute have greater engagement and very long videos (videos over 5 mins) have even greater engagement says the studies (44.8% more than long videos). Instagram and Pinterest, the platforms that are designed specifically for visual content can be best used to showcase your brand images and videos.

There are different sections in any of the chosen social media platforms like posts, reels, live streams, and stories for which your video timings should be tailored and uploaded. So, for attracting more traffic you must be posting your visual content on multiple platforms.

Recommended Read: Digital Marketing Courses in India

7. Testimonials Speak for You

If you have been in business for a while or have ideas to start one, you surely should have known the fact that building brand equity cannot be solely done by a person or a marketing campaign. Brand building involves fidelity and trust from your customers. Once you have a handful of such trusting customers, their trust must be lucratively used to induce the same in others.

Among the effective ways in making your loyal customers the torchbearers for you is by getting their testimonials to speak for your brand’s success. These testimonials in the form of visual content like images and videos of your loyal customers are an effective way of marketing your brand.

‘HealthifyMe’ and ‘Cult. fit’, who are the forerunners in the health and fitness industry in India, use visual testimonials so effectively to leverage their business. The customers who have lost a great deal of weight and become fit give their testimonials showing their before and after transformation pictures with a few positive and affirming words about the training and dieting regimes prescribed by the companies.

These kinds of image and video testimonials can be added to the homepage of your company’s webpage. The visual content in the form of images and video testimonials when posted on several of your social media platforms will speak themselves all about your brand’s achievement. Do give a big bite to this chief aspect of all Visual Content Tips.

You may also be interested to know what is Video Marketing.

8. Go by the Trend

If you are active on social media, you would have been well aware of a recent sensation by the name, ‘Doge’ hitting all netizens. If yes, you got the idea of how different trend-setting sensations hit the internet and pull a huge crowd of people. This digital phenomenon was cleverly used by different companies for their marketing tactics.

Companies like Twitch, Newegg, GameStop, AMC Theaters, etc., have lucratively made use of the ‘Doge trend’ to upsurge their marketing. The Doge trend was so much a buzz in the town that many cryptocurrencies were started by its name. Another big example of how a company uses these trend-setting tornados to work for them in the marketing process is Amul Milk.

Whenever trendy things like the release of any pan-India film, Indian athletes winning medals in the Olympics, Oscar awards, or other headliners hit the media floor, Amul excellently uses them in their unique cartoon marketing strategy. In this way, you will have to plan out how to make any talk-of-the-town topic work for your brand by making creative visual content out of them.

Also Read: Brand Marketing

Best Tools to Enhance Your Visual Content

We have seen the best Visual Content Tips that can help you increase your branding and hold a considerable market space on digital platforms. Now let us look into some of the great tools that will help you design your visual contents and format them neatly. Using these tools, you will produce standard visual content to market your brand. Let us see what are those tools.

Canva

A graphic designer app based in Australia, Canva serves to be the best designing platform for both professionals and non-professionals. It is a simple drag-and-drop formatting tool that is used by a large number of people for designing social media posts, brochures, posters, presentations, infographics, etc. Its basic version is free for all and its pro version is provided for a yearly subscription. It gives open access to over a million photos, designs, fonts, themes, etc.

Snappa

Snappa is a user-friendly cloud-based designer app preferred by even non-professional designers to create visual content for their social media platforms, ads, email marketing, and blog posts. It offers several pre-designed templates and items than can be tailored to the needful dimensions. It offers 3 free posts for each month to design, download, and share.

cBeFunky

BeFunky is an all-in-one desktop and mobile phone editor where editing of pictures, graphic designing, photo collaging, and other related works are done seamlessly. This is a creative platform in which editing is made easy for non-professionals to create the best visual content.

Skitch

Skitch is an application used for screenshotting and image annotation which has a   neat and simple user interface with handy and minimalistic features. It was introduced as a standalone app initially but was bought by Evernote and merged with its note-taking application.

FAQs

1. What are the different types of visual content?

A:   There are three types of visual content based on its ownership. They are,

• Owned
• Earned
• Paid

2. Are copyrighted images preferred in visual content marketing?

A: Yes. Your blog or website users always build trust in you for your authenticity. So, it’s always preferable to use stock images and visual content with copyrights, rather than using royalty-free content.

3. What are the professions based on visual content creation?

A: There is a whole gamut of professional skills like photoshop, video editing, and animation required in the field of visual content production. A sizeable number of professionals are being employed every year as designers, editors, animators, and so on in this growing environment of digital marketing.

4. What is the preferred video content length?

A: Different social media platforms demand different preferred lengths for video content.

For eg.

• Facebook – 1 min.
• Twitter      – 45 sec.
• Instagram – 30 sec.
• YouTube   – 2 mins.

Conclusion

These are the best Visual Content Tips that you can look forward to integrating into your digital marketing strategy. To put it simply, normal text content’s comprehension is a twofold process whereas the visual content reaches the mind of the audience quickly and is more appealing. Therefore, making the best use of the Visual Content Tips to pitch up your brand marketing is paramount. Content is king and we can say that visual content is the crown decorating it.