Every business is different, so every company wants to see a different outcome from their digital marketing campaigns.
It’s very important to draw up a list of aims at the start of your campaign to keep your company on track and to ensure that you reach those goals. Whether you want to increase your engagement on social media, bring in more traffic to your website or increase your conversions, visual marketing can help you to achieve those aims.
So, what exactly is visual marketing? Visual marketing refers to how a brand uses visual pieces, such as images, videos and infographics, to engage with their customers. According to Hubspot, 90% of information that enters the brain is purely visual, so successful marketers have used visual marketing to attract customers to their brands over recent years and they have seen remarkable results.
This article will highlight the importance of visual marketing and how images and video can help you to achieve the aims you laid out at the start of your campaign.
Images
Using good images can increase conversions and sales on your website. Content marketing is a great way to introduce your target audience to your services. However, few people will read your blogs and engage with your brand if your content is just heavy text.
By breaking the text up with good quality, engaging images, potential customers are much more likely to read your blog posts and become aware of your products and services.
In addition to this, it‘s a great idea to use good imagery on your product pages, because people are likely to understand more about the product they’re interested in and purchase it.
Moreover, it’s important to use images across all social media channels. Followers and potential customers are much more likely to engage with you if you post good images, as opposed to just plain text. According to Hubspot, Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without, showing how important it is to use good pictures on social media.
Some social media channels, like Instagram, only use images on their platform. With over 500 million active users, Instagram is a true success story that shows just how engaging images can be.
Videos
Video is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing. Cisco, for example, predicts that online traffic from videos will account for 80% of all online traffic by the year 2019. Although high quality written content is still highly important, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram live, and vlogging have all changed the way digital marketers approach video.
Onsite branded videos are more engaging for customers than text, and they introduce website visitors to your brand in a more exciting way.
Many companies are also using video on their product pages. Short videos of products, especially if the product is complex, can help to tell the visitor more about it and let them make an informed choice, helping to increase sales. Four times as many customers prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.
Social media has really become the home of video. The majority of the best-performing content across all social media channels is visual, and video is attracting a huge amount of shares, engagement and referrals. Facebook users spend three times more time watching live videos than traditional videos.
Live video has also transformed the way video is used by companies on social media. Company events, product launches, staff activities, sneak peeks about future services and much more can all be streamed live on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. By filming live videos, followers can get to know your brand more and engage with you in real time.
Written and Visual Content
Content that combines both images and text can also be a powerful tool. If your industry is quite niche, you are likely to have a lot of useful knowledge that your customers would love to tap into. In cases like this, whitepapers and infographics can be highly successful.
Infographics are an ideal way of presenting statistics, facts and knowledge in an exciting way. As opposed to bland text, infographics help to convey a lot of knowledge in an insightful way that is easily shared across social media. Infographics are liked and shared three times more than other any other type of content.
In addition to infographics, downloadable whitepapers and guides also blend written and visual content in an informative way. If your brand works with property developers, for example, creating guides that are useful for buy-to-let investors would be an ideal strategy that would give your company a highly knowledgeable, trustworthy and strong identity.
The advantage of producing downloadable resources for your site is the opportunity to gain leads. By adding data capture to a download button, you can collect email addresses to target with your email campaigns later on.
A Final Note…
Different visual marketing tactics can help brands to achieve specific aims, but there a couple of tips that everyone should follow to make sure their visual marketing is a success:
- Focus on your branding. Your social media, your websites and your entire online presence should be uniform and it should comply with your branding. This means that your followers and website visitors know who you are as soon as they land on our page.
- Fonts are just as important as your images and videos. If somebody lands on a web page that’s full of small, hard-to-read text, it’s highly likely that they’ll leave right away, even if your images are spot on. Make sure it’s easy for your website users to read the text; this way they’ll be able to engage with your brand and make a purchase easily.
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