What is Visual Content Marketing?
An image speaks louder than words, that being said, a visual content illustrates much better what is your content about.
Visual content marketing is all about using rich images in order to convey valuable information in an engaging visual format. Its purpose is to attract your reader towards the offers available on your website. Visual marketing generally comes in the form of images with educational or inspiring text. In professional terms, this is called Infographics.
Moreover, infographics and digital signature branded images are widely considered in visual content marketing for promoting written, audio or video contents. Visual content is a powerful medium of spreading your messages using social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Visual contents have the ability to grab the attention of your potential customers in a much more effective way.
Social media content trends are rising to a new level and influencing businesses to utilize their social media profiles. As it is difficult to predict customers’ behavior, the competition tends to become more intense. Hence, you are always engaged in a battle with your competitors.
So, visuals can have enough contributions to the success of your content marketing and social media campaigns. Images, videos, and infographics are more effective for stimulating traffic, clicks, and conversion rate. We are going to discuss in this article, seven strategies that will guide you regarding the visual content marketing.
7 Tips to Use in Visual Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s see how can you make your posts more appealing to your target audience. Delve deeper into visual content marketing and boost your business’ productivity.
1. Include images that are easy to Comprehend
Stock photos are crucial for visual content marketing. But they are not suitable for all purposes. As they appear to be artificial and lack the personal touch, use them for specific purposes. Try to use impressive photos and images to make your content more appealing to your prospects.
So, use images to add value to your content and convey your message in a simplified way. Similarly, a short or funny meme, documentary video, an emotional photo along with a quote can tell your story to the target readers.
2. Use a Variety of Images and Formats
Add facts, statistics, graphs, and illustrations to support your content visually. Illustrate your products with the help of images in the appropriate context of your posts. Besides this, you can add tutorials and summarize the important facts in a compelling infographic. To support your content, maintain a visual summary or graphic checklist of your post.
Infographics are powerful than text-based posts in engaging the target audience. So, add infographics to assemble the information visualization in an understandable format. Infographics help users to outline data-driven articles, reports, industry facts, case studies, and much more.
Thereby, resort to infographics if you are running a small business and have a limited budget. Timelines, data visualizations, anatomic, processes, comparative, and lists are widely used infographics.
3. Where can I create free Visual Content (infographics)?
Below are some best free and paid sites you can use to create stunning Infographics / Data Visualisation for your Brand.
- Canva – Visit website
- Piktochart – Visit website
- Visme – Visit website
- Venngage – Visit website
- Snappa – Visit website
- DesignBold – Visit website
- Visually – Visit website
- Freepik (my fav) – Visit website
4. Understand the Copyright Laws
You might be unaware of the fact that every visual is protected by copyrights. It is an offense even if you share the copyrighted images unknowingly or inadvertently. Hence, always cross-check the copyright before using an image to avoid legal troubles.
You hold the copyright on the images you have created. Similarly, someone else holds the copyright on the images available from other sources. As a result, you need a license or written permission in order to use their images. Additionally, there are free images you can use giving them credit to the original designer.
5. Optimize the Images & Videos for SEO
Advancements in search engine systems provide an improved understanding of images for much more reliable results. Hence, the visual search has increased more than 20% for the addition of images. Consequently, use keywords to optimize your images and videos that search engines would love.
According to studies, visual search results account for nearly 10 percent of the total traffic to a website. Ensure that your focus keywords are included in the image description for reflecting the actual content. Note that the so-called ALT tag (alt=”your long keyword”) is an essential attribute for the indexing of images. This means the ALT attribute along with your keywords can impart a better description of your images.
6. Add Social Media Buttons to the Visuals
If your posts carry social media buttons, then it would be easier for your blog and website visitors to share your images on social media. It is especially advantageous for other shareable images and graphics. When your images are shared on social media, the visibility of your content increases.
More sharing options are available when you create multiple images for your content. Know the best image sizes that apply to individual networks and thereby avoid distorted images on your social media accounts.
7. Use Link Post and Image Post Format for Sharing your Content
Only your featured post picture is shared when you share your content on social media channels. You can use visuals for resharing your contents as image posts over a long period. Moreover, you can combine image and link posts for creating variations in your social media updates. Your blog thereby remains active for several years.
Develop a social media cross-promotional plan for sharing your posts with featured images. Share your post at periodical intervals on your business pages on social media. Don’t forget to share your blog post with relevant communities on your social media channels.
Increase your opportunities by sharing your post multiple times on your social media accounts. Before proceeding, ensure that you have customized your messages for each of your target groups separately. If you are using multiple images, then share them at different times of the day.
You can help your contents by re-sharing your posts with visual anchors and comments. Use focus images or infographics for sharing images in special interest communities. Select the best times for each network and share your posts accordingly to extend the lifetime of your posts.
To Conclude…
Visual content marketing can draw more organic traffic to your sites. In my opinion, ad various sizes and formats to have a wider audience for your content. Optimize the visuals to make your contents SEO friendly as well. If you follow the seven tips I have discussed in this article, then you are surely going to get better results in lesser time. So, use these tips for using visual content marketing and outshine your competitors in no time.
