It is increasingly difficult to capture the public's attention on the internet. When consumers are faced with large blocks of text, even if divided into short paragraphs, they understand reading as a work process.
On the other hand, adding visuals gives rest to the eyes and context to the information. In addition to making your communication more memorable and attractive, it increases engagement and reduces bounce rate, which makes your site perform better in search engines.
Creating visual content has become the most popular way to attract online audiences. With so much content generated each day, marketers need to be creative to attract customers. Incorporating visuals into your content marketing strategy can make you stand out and make your message stick in your audience's memory.
This last factor is important because you not only want to attract readers to your content, you also need them to interact with your brand.
Set goals for your visual content
The content strategy should guide your goals with visuals. This means that your visual content must align with your overall marketing goals and act as one of the elements that will help you achieve them.
So the same questions you ask when creating your overall content strategy should guide you when planning the visuals. Have in mind:
Who is your audience for each type of visual resource;
What platforms or channels do you want her to see your content on;
What needs of your audience each resource seeks to solve;
How the visuals are aligned with your brand characteristics;
What metrics will be used to measure the performance of each channel where visual resources will be shared.
Also, avoid setting vague goals like increasing your number of followers or creating more blog content.
To more clearly plan the content you're going to create for each channel and chart a timeline, mind maps are the ideal tool. This type of visual aid helps organize ideas, brainstorm, and show how the various elements of a plan relate to one another.
Data visualization
When presented without the proper context, data can look confusing and challenging, but using data visualization techniques, it is possible to condense large amounts of information to share patterns and relationships.
That's why Data Storytelling has become a pillar of visual content marketing. Large groups of data can be interesting to those who have collected them but don't expect the audience to be interested in or understand them if you don't provide context.
Traditionally presenting numbers does not encourage audience involvement, nor does one evoke emotions. By using data visualization techniques to tell a story you can make sense of the numbers. For this, rely on illustrations, colours, icons and graphics to create visual content that gives a narrative to the data.
Infographics
One of the most popular forms of visual communication in recent years is infographics. That's because they're great for combining text, images, data, and icons to visually present information and create narratives from the data.
Furthermore, infographics are extremely versatile and can be used for diverse purposes and channels such as newsletters, blogs, social media and landing pages.
Creating an infographic nowadays has become a very simple and fast task, as there are several platforms with fully customizable templates, from the format to fonts, colours, icons and images.
Lives
The world has become more virtual since last year, and this has made lives more necessary and popular than ever. From giants to small businesses first ventured into this practice due to social isolation, and popular platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have included tools created specifically for live broadcasts.
Some ways to take advantage of this feature are:
Presenting behind-the-scenes footage;
Interviews;
product or service demonstrations;
Comments on releases;
Virtual tour;
Answers to frequently asked questions.
Besides the interactivity and the attraction of being something that is being produced and consumed at the same time, another advantage of lives is that recorded videos require more time and resources to be created. Lives, on the other hand, can only be done with a computer equipped with a camera and microphone.
Presentations
Presentations can be used for customer acquisition and turned into videos for sharing on social media and YouTube. Presentations are especially useful for B2B marketing strategies but are increasingly used successfully in the B2C sphere.
With the advent of teleworking, virtual meetings and video conferencing have become a necessity. But anyone who's been on them knows there's nothing worse than listening to someone talk for an hour.
The same happens with presentations, so before preparing and promoting a presentation, it is essential to plan the design and visual content that will be used. Visual resources such as slides, diagrams, graphs and videos are needed to visually present information and keep the audience attentive.
Videos
Educating the audience is one of the content marketing missions. That's why brands need to invest resources to create tutorials and guides, and an effective way to create this type of material is through videos.
Instead of creating text and illustrations to show how a service or product, creating videos will help your audience more easily and quickly. That's because videos can be illustrated with other visuals such as screenshots, illustrations and infographics to simplify explanations and help the audience memorize the information.
Design best practices
Visuals should follow certain design principles for you to get images that work and appeal to your current or potential customers.
When choosing templates to create graphics, diagrams, mind maps or infographics, these are some general design rules you should keep in mind:
Don't overload your visuals;
Leave white space around visual elements
Use contrast to highlight information and similar colours to group them
Use a maximum of three fonts to avoid confusing your material
Conclusion
Marketers can use visual content to increase engagement and make brands memorable in the virtual world. Use these tips and best practices to plan and create content and make your visuals have an impact to grow your audience and customer base.
As we have seen, infographics are the most versatile type of visual content, being suitable for making e-books more attractive, turning text into images for social media and newsletters, visualizing data and telling stories through them.