Online content marketing is one of the most important business strategies in the modern world. With more and more people tuning into online spaces, and an ever-increasing average daily screen time, how you put your business across in the digital realm is absolutely essential to its success. A rising star of online content marketing, that in the era of social media has swiftly become one of the single most crucial things you should be thinking about, is visual content marketing.
It’s common knowledge that there’s an unfathomably vast ocean of content on the internet, so making your output stand out among the crowd is vital; visual marketing is one of the most effective and reliable ways you can do that. In this guide, I’ll be going through a range of different considerations, approaches, and techniques that you should be aware of when thinking about how to visually market your business in the digital world.
Visual Marketing Is More Than Just Photos…
Though they are an important part of it, visual marketing goes far beyond adding photos and graphics, and it and it has some crucial differences with video marketing. When executed well, these can be used to draw viewers’ attention to particular assets and elements, provide them with easily digestible information that’s straightforward but not simplistic, and ensure they come back time and time again to interact with your content and help your revenue.
…But Photos Are Still Essential
Images in blog posts have been found to increase engagement by up to 94%, and image-based posts account for 3/4ths of the content posted on Facebook with an 87% engagement rate, vs just 4% engagement for other types. With figures that significant, it’s clear how important it is to include imagery, graphics, photos, and other visually engaging assets within your content.
It can even be a good idea to pad out your writing-based content with simpler posts comprised entirely of visual content, such as GIFs and memes, infographics, or short videos, as these will help boost your engagement, giving your content more weight in social media algorithms and keeping your brand in your audience’s mind through regular engagement and diverse content types.
Larry Maupin, a marketing writer at Draft Beyond, says “If you offer a good package – research, content, SEO, formatting, and visuals, for example, you will have a much easier time getting clients.”
A Powerful Headline is a Perfect Start
The main aim of visual marketing is to present your content in a way that’s immediately engaging, and there are few ways better than beginning with a compelling headline. How gripping your title is will directly affect the response of the customer, and is a big factor in whether they will stick around or click back off what you have to offer. Optimize your title for SEO – research keywords and decide which one you are going to rank for.
Try to keep your headline short and sweet, explaining what your piece covers in as few words as possible. Make use of buzzwords like “free,” “instantly,” “new,” and other similarly attention-grabbing words, as studies have shown that these can help increase conversions.
It’s a good idea to draft out a handful of different versions and then run them through an analysis tool such as CoSchedule or Advanced Marketing Tool. These will look at a range of variables within each headline and tell you how successful each is likely to be, as well as highlighting different stats about their viability such as word/character count, common/uncommon word ratio, tone balance, and sentiment. They’ll also offer advice on ways to improve each and make your headline more captivating.
Keep Your Content Native To The Platform
While they share many functions and purposes, different social media platforms are geared to wildly different formats, as demonstrated by Twitter’s character limit, Facebook’s tendency toward long-form posts, and Instagram’s image-focused feed. Matching your marketing to the outlet it’s designed for is essential, so you should be aware of the norms and conventions of the platforms you intend to use.
Though naturally, a platform like Instagram favors a very visual, graphics-based type of content, you can make use of visual marketing on the more text-oriented platforms too with the use of emojis, GIFs, video clips, and more. Don’t be afraid to break up your text and utilize different fonts or formats where applicable, because doing so can help draw the eye to your content over other items on the screen.
Be Consistent in Your Identity
Every piece you publish on any of your platforms is a representation of your brand, and comprises a part of its identity. You want this identity to be consistent and stable, so that people can be clear on what you have to offer.
To do this, you should ensure that regardless of what content is being published, it’s delivered in a harmonious manner with relation to your previously published content and your brand image, as this will help maintain your brand’s identity and give the audience a feeling of both the personality and authenticity of your business.
Use A Range of Visuals
Visuals can be utilized in a wide variety of ways, and it’s a good idea to try to take advantage of all of them at different points. If you’re explaining in depth content such as statistics or data, you will likely find it extremely useful to split up your text with infographics such as charts and graphs.
By contrast, if you’re providing a walk-through or guide, you may want to include demonstrative photos or screenshots to help limit ambiguity and make it easier and clearer for the reader to understand.
“It’s important to think about the purpose of your piece when considering what graphics to include, and not to clutter it up with too many different items. Instead, try to use images to create a smooth flow and divide your work up into relevant sections. If you are mostly using the active voice with an occasional passive sentence your writing is stronger and better” says Shawna Clark, a business writer at Research papers UK and Writinity.
Think About Every Aspect of Your Online Presentation
How effective your online marketing is at turning views into clicks into purchases is dependent on a lot more than just the actual posts you make. There are specialized services you can make use of that will help you maximize your interact and engagement in every way, and one of the leading content marketing services available is JotUrl.
JotUrl offers a powerful all-in-one suite that helps users take advantage of a wide range of strategies to upgrade, streamline, and expand their online presence. There are a huge number of ways you can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how you market your business online, whether it’s implementing visual QR codes and branded links to increase user confidence and trust, making use of targeted marketing and calls-to-action, or improving your understanding of your target and real audiences by improving the quality and quantity of analytics you get back from your links. All of these strategies will improve your click-through rate (CTR) and increase the versatility of your marketing, strengthen the connection with your customers, and help you make more informed choices when it comes to your finances and budget allocation.
In years gone by, you would have had to plan and manage every different facet of your digital output individually, keeping track of a fragmented digital web of links and assets, but with JotUrl, you can do away with the convoluted micromanagement, organizing the vast swathes of your online content marketing within a single interface.
With a range of plans to suit any size requirement or budget, the JotUrl service allows you to revolutionize your digital presence, providing tools such as fully customizable URLs you can reuse over and over; all-in-one social media landing pages to turn followers into customers; deep linking to track customers across desktops, mobiles, and in-app; cross-platform ad retargeting; in-depth feedback through an analytics dashboard and Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs); and much, much more.
Try out such writing tolls as Monospace Writer Beta, a great, bare-bones app for writing that doesn’t do anything to Distract you, and the Ulysseys App, which has a clean interface and layout, customization options and more features. Combine these with other clever tools, and you’ll easily take your conversions to the next level.
Keep Your Viewers Immersed
Many people switch off mentally the second they feel like they’re being advertised to. Try to ensure your posts fit seamlessly into the user experience and feel in line with the sort of content they’re likely to be viewing anyway, rather than standing out as an ad. This also ties into fitting your content to the site it’s posted on, as each platform will have different trends and tendencies; you have to know what you’re trying to fit in with before you can start thinking about how to do so.
CrowdSource User-Generated Visual Content
Your audience need not simply be onlookers to your brand, they can be a part of its visual identity too. Encourage customers to share your brand’s visual content, as this will give you an ongoing stream of low-cost fresh media, as well as making your brand feel more personable and human to new and peripheral viewers.
A great way to persuade people to generate user-created visuals for you is through giveaways and showcases. If your brand creates physical products, e.g. clothing or accessories, you could run a regular highlight of the best user-submitted photos of your merchandise. The more you do this, the more you’ll receive by way of customer-generated content, so it feeds back into itself and is relatively easy to maintain, gaining you content and interactions every step of the way.
This can be an especially effective marketing tactic on platforms like Instagram or TikTok that have been very specifically designed around visual content, and you can take advantage of functions like Instagram’s “stories,” where users make live posts that stay up for just 24-hours but are typically seen by many more of their followers than regular posts.
Tell A Story
If you can wrap a viewer into a story and make them feel invested in what you have to say, you will vastly increase the odds of converting them. Try to take advantage of trends and add a human touch to your business by engaging the viewers of your content in a light narrative that they can respond to emotionally. So make the writing simple yet powerful, regular words have more impact.
Use Videos As Well As Photos
It can be easy to assume that a photo is sufficiently visual to boost a post, and with the added challenges that naturally come with creating video content, you may have shied away from videos. However, there are some serious payoffs to using more video content, and in one study, a staggering 80% of internet users polled recalled watching a video ad on a site they’d visited in the past 30 days. The same study also found that 75% of executives interviewed said that they watched work-related videos on business websites at least once a week.
On top of this, TikTok has recently become one of the biggest social networks, and its content is entirely video-based, so if you aren’t making video content, you are missing out on one of the biggest audiences available. As well as being extremely popular, TikTok is a trend-setter and due to the viral nature of content creation on there, it has made overnight superstars out of many performers, brands, and artists. If your brand can get a piece of its marketing to catch on, even if it doesn’t become a global sensation, it’ll still certainly bring a welcome boost to your brand and its recognizability.
Conclusion
How you present your product and business visually is every bit as important as what you put out in text, and there are a wide range of ways you can make your brand more eye-catching, engaging, and recognizable. It’s ever more difficult to stand out among the immense amount of content constantly put out on every platform, but if you follow the advice laid out in this guide, you’ll be on the right track to stepping into the digital spotlight.
Jenny Divine works at Lab report writing service and Lucky assignments Manchester as a marketing specialist and blog content creator, as well as being an editor for Gum essays. She enjoys both reading and writing about the many different aspects of marketing.
