7 Ways to Spruce Up Your Visual Content Strategy

Marketing is changing — digital offers us opportunities to track and measure marketing results like never before, but why do so many businesses still struggle with content marketing?

While 75% of marketers reported ramping up their content marketing game in 2016, only 42% have a content marketing director on staff, and nearly as many say content creation is the skillset their teams miss most. On top of this, 55% of of B2B marketers said they were unaware of what successful content marketing looked like! To get inspired, we’ll look at several great ways to create engaging visual content.

Visual content still dominates

Getting creative with your visuals will differentiate your content and keep your audience engaged. Making your content visually appealing pays off for many reasons, here are just a few:

• Content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without images
• Visuals are recalled much more promptly than text or other sensory inputs – 65% for visual content versus a mere 10% for pure text
• Visually rich content makes people 42% more likely to be persuaded to take action

Now we’ve got the statistics out of the way, let’s crack on with some ways that you can spruce up your visual content.

Optimize your content with SlideShare presentations

Many companies are tapping into the appeal of slide presentations to engage with their audience. SlideShare represents a big opportunity for content marketers to expand their business’ outreach dramatically, and is perfect for presenting information that is too complex for an infographic.

But that doesn’t mean SlideShare presentations must be boring. Why Content Marketing Fails by Rand Fishkin has been viewed more than 2,580,000 times on SlideShare and contains actionable advice using humor and digestible bits of content that cover a complex topic.

SlideShares are (as the name would suggest) extremely shareable, due to their compact nature. Consider sharing them on social media feeds and blog posts.

Screenshots build credibility and humanize your brand

Screenshots offer a sneak peek into company culture and humanize your brand. You can show off your product or combine it with a testimonial for added appeal. Screenshots provide app users with verification of how a particular feature works and act as a tool to build trust. Screenshots can be included in web design, infographics or SlideShare presentations.

Infographics make big data easily digestible

Infographics are a creative way to simplify complex ideas, facilitate audience comprehension, make reports simpler, and data more visually appealing. Plus, people love to share them, which is extra exposure for you and your brand. An infographic can showcase your product, statistics related to your industry, your audience growth across various social channels, and much more.

This infographic by Designmantic compresses a vast amount of information about UI design into one, digestible and colorful image.

Check out this post on 15 Valid Reasons to Use Infographics.

White space can speak volumes

Sugarfina have got their visual strategy down to a tee. This store, created by the online shop creator Shopify, dazzles customers with its minimalism and tasteful color palette. White space is important to ensure that all eyes are on your products, and this is something that Sugarfina does very well. This is particularly great for mobile device users, to whom masses of text to scroll through is far from ideal. Take a leaf out of modern ecommerce stores and focus on a few strong visuals supported by whitespace — no one likes to read a messy blog, and it’s something Medium.com have capitalized on with a streamlined and simple UX.

What we can learn here is that sometimes less is more when it comes to visual content. It also pays to have an extremely consistent visual feel that customers recognize everywhere so that you can start to build long-term customer-brand relationships.

Let’s not forget about video content

Video content can take both B2B and B2C engagement rates to the next level. To build a relationship with your target consumers, you need to offer them quality content. This quality can be through entertainment, humor, shock or information. The more emotions you can evoke in your users, the better (within reason!). This vintage action man animation by the content creators at Rubber Republic is a fantastic example of how any brand can showcase its services to the world with a witty piece of video content. This video highlights what the brand can do for other companies.

Memes are more than just fun and games

Seriously – memes can offer real value to your consumers and give you a fantastic way to get involved in hashtags, worldwide events and trends. (Northwestern University even offers a course about the history of memes!) Creating memes can be a tongue-in-cheek way to get your brand noticed on social media feeds.

Norwegian Airlines’ ‘Brad Is Single’ ad was met with much enthusiasm following a recent celebrity break up. This was perhaps a risky tactic, but sometimes risks really do pay off with visual content. Depending on your industry, developing a sense of humor for your brand can work wonders.

If you aren’t investing a fair amount of your marketing budget on your visual content strategy then, quite frankly, you are missing out on a lot of customer engagement, and therefore revenue. From videos to memes, stay ahead of the game and make use of these top visual content tips for your brand. Still stuck? Consider signing up for the Witmer newsletter to help perfect your content strategy.

Which of these visual content ideas will you employ? Let us know in the comments.

Patrick Foster: Ecommerce entrepreneur & advisor

Patrick Foster is a freelance writer and ecommerce expert and owner of popular ecommerce blog, Ecommercetips. He loves sharing his expertise with startups and entrepreneurs to help make the most of their marketing and social strategies.