7 Tools to Boost Your Visual Content for Your Marketing Strategy

The bad news? The majority of digital marketers would admit that they do not feel creating visual images is a strong suit for them.

The good news? Creativity can be learned, you do not have to struggle with visual marketing ever again…

If you have known for a while that you need to up your social media game by including loads more visual content, you probably have been looking for resources on how to create and effectively use images.

Visual marketing is so much more than simply finding an inspirational quote or funny meme on Google and re-posting it to your accounts.

But, you might be asking yourself, how then do you go about creating a not only attractive but shareable image? Something that people want to interact with and share with their audience?

Turns out, there is a ton of research backed reports and information on how to create visual marketing images that get shared — the ideal colors, fonts, images, and more, the problem is that it can take weeks and even moths to get through all of this information and then put it into practice for your business.

That is why we have done the work for you. We have taken our years of design knowledge, along with combing through the best scientific report and compiled this article for you.

In this article you will find out everything about leveraging design, psychology and the Internet to get more shares and engagement.

The Science Behind Visual Marketing

For their B2B Content Marketing Report, published in 2015, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reports that 70% of marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago.

If 70% of marketers are boosting their visual content strategy, are you producing visual content to stay relevant in the marketing game?

If you are not, it may be because you’re intimidated at the word ‘design’. Do not fear, we are here to help you.

In this article, we present 7 tools to support you in your goal to create more visual content this year. Ultimately, mastering this strategy will make your message stick with web searchers.

Creating original visual content is the #1 goal of online marketer’s lists for skills to learn in 2016, and it should be yours too. (Socialmediaexaminer.com)

Your Audience Responds to Visual Cues

Video and infographic responsiveness is at an all-time high. Are you using these strategies to interact with your audience?

In 2014, the use of video marketing increased by 8% (to 58%); the use of infographics increased 9% (to 52%) in digital marketing plans. (Source: demandgenreport)

As a home business owner, it is imperative that you dedicate more time and resources to creating visual content.

Here is an interesting fact: Facebook posts that contain photos or video account for 87% of increased interactions. (Source: EMarketer.com)

What does this mean? Facebook users are looking for so much more than just blatant calls to action to buy products. They want posts that share ideas, make connections through intriguing images and avoid using an abundance of text. Now is the time to switch to visual marketing if your posts have been primarily text. You can start today adding photos or images to your posts.

What Makes A Shareable Social Media Image?

Now, why should we care about people sharing our images? Good question. If you are trying to build your business and earn significant profits, you will understand that each time a person shares your images, they are helping you with marketing. They are opening up your message to their audience. This helps you achieve more with less!

Let’s look at what makes a shareable social media image:

1. Emotion: When your readers feel it, they’ll share it.

2. Relevance: Your image should fit your audience, and their audience too.

3. Colors: Use the right colors, to fit your audience’s personality and you will get maximum shares.

4. Typography: Choose fonts that look good, and pair well with each other. Choose fonts your audience can read.

5. Hashtags and Text: Using the right words, phrases and hashtags that will make your audience interact.

Let’s continue on with the article, you will learn about all 7 tools so you can take advantage of all of these elements, and put them together to create the best social images you possibly can.

The image below shows a breakdown of the most important ways marketers optimize their social media content, with images and photos leading the way.

(Source: Software Advice, Study: How Marketers Optimize Their Social Content)

While we want to focus on creating great visual content to get your audience engaged and into your sales funnel, we must note, that you need to also create detailed information to separate the lookers from the buyers.

Serious buyers will always be looking for great information to put into practice in their life. The types of in depth information that work well are webinars, case studies, and reports (or white papers). No matter what industry you are in, creating detailed information for your buyers will pair nicely with your visual content. The benefits of learning how to create visual content now, is that you are setting up a top-of-the-funnel branding message that will flow into your bottom of the funnel detailed information.

Tool # 1

Creating a Title for your Visual Image

Titles are a feature element of your visual content. You want them to stand out!

Let’s go through a couple factors that will help us choose the best titles for our visual marketing.

1. In the age of people scrolling through a social media feed at record speed, you need to have an amazing title to you visual content so that you stand out among the “noise” in their message feed.

2. As a visual content producer, not only will your image have a split second to grab the attention of your audience, but you title (or main text objective in the image) must grab their attention as well.

3. If your audience finds the image to be pause worthy, you must make sure that the title of your content makes them stay even longer. If you fall short in any aspect, they will not click on your call to action and will simply keep scrolling to the next thing.

4. Your back end offer will be the ultimate information that solves their problem, but if you fail to be clear in your visual title that you provide answers to their commonly asked questions, so that your audience is can see the best results.

Let’s take a look at where titles appear and how to set your visual images apart from the competition.

Choosing a visual image with a strong title is critical because it will be visible in a number of different places. Similarly, every time you make a piece of textual content, you must be aware that the different versions of it will show up as “Title” only. This is very much visual marketing, since this is the only chance we have to grab our audience’s fast paced attention. Here are 2 examples from recent articles that we wrote and how they visually show up across social media:

Twitter:

Facebook:

Tool #2

Color: The Psychology of Colors in Visual Marketing

For decades there has been a debate about color and how it relates to persuading your audience to buy.

One of the greatest success stories we have in today’s color marketing is the brand Starbuck’s. They use the color green as their primary visual marketing color.

From the chart below we see that customer’s associate the color green with wealth, and relaxation.

Would you agree or disagree that a certain mega (high end) coffee shop got their marketing right? They encourage people to stop in and relax with a $5-$8 cup of coffee. Only 15 years ago coffee was simply an inexpensive drink to enjoy with breakfast.

Now, this company’s visual marketing strategy encourages customers to spend a relaxing time enjoying an expensive beverage. Many people would tell you they cannot start their morning without a trip to this coffee house! Pretty ingenious, no?

Color studies have shown that different colors have powerful impacts on the customers purchasing decisions and behavior. Marketers for mega companies have been using it for generations. Now that you recognize the power behind color, you need to start making conscious color choices for your visual marketing.

According to a B2B study, 85% of customer’s claim that the color of an ad was what made them purchase.

It must be noted, that color alone does not hyper induce someone to purchase or not purchase. Color cannot make someone act involuntarily, but the main take away from this visual marketing tool, is that when done correctly, color choices will greatly influence how a person feels about your products and branding. And whether or not they stick around to get more information about your products.

So how can you use this for your visual marketing strategy?

When you begin putting all the visual marketing tools together, it is a wise idea to start with very specifc color themes and work from there to choose the just sharing the right text (on images) or shapes or photos on your social media pages.

Choose the right colors that will make your niche audience feel a certain way about your marketing images. Refer back to the chart above to choose what feel you want your message to have.

The right color themes will vary depending on your niche audience’s age, demographics, social media channel, and message.

How do colors affect purchases?

There are many factors that influence what consumers buy, however, a large amount of their decisions are dictated by visual cues, the most persuasive of these, being color. As you move forward with your visual marketing agenda, it is vital that your color choices support the overall theme of your message. Continue to refer back to the chart below to double check that the color you are choosing for your next visual image, supports the message (and ultimately the call to action that you want your customers to act on).

(Source: marden928.wordpress.com)

Tool #3

Choosing the Right Font

It’s easy to think that your font is a simple design choice.

But the truth is that it’s the body language of your image. It says a lot to your reader without you even realizing it.

Not sure what I mean? Take a look at this image:

(Source: blog.crazyegg.com)

Effective marketers have long understood that the different fonts they choose to tell their message will dictate how long how long someone will read an article for.

In the above tools we talked about the importance of your visual content being inviting and shareable. Did you know that the font choice you make will positively or negatively impact the number of shares (attention) that it receives? How? Let’s take a look…

Different fonts create different emotions.

· Font’s will encourage readers to complete your desired action

· Drive decision making

· Encourage them to share with their audience

What is the take away? Consider the message you’re putting out and the emotions that you want your audience to feel from it.

3 Step Guide to Selecting Your Ideal Font

The beauty of fonts is that they subliminally support or detract from your message.

When you move on to creating your visual images, you want to make sure that you think beyond the words that you have written. A good example here is a quote. Your goal is to select a font that matches the meaning behind the message. The aim here is to think beyond the words you’ve written. While this sound complicated, it really isn’t.

(Source: www.labelvalueblog.com)

3 Steps:

1. Decide on your emotion: Are you a fun loving brand? Or do you want to be taken more seriously, like an institution? You can be artsy and easy going or you can be serious and stoic. But mixing the two together rarely results in a unified message.

2. Choose 3 variation: Decide on 3 font you feel fit your brand’s message. Design your visual image 3 times using a different font each time. Walk away from the project and come back later. When you have ‘fresh’ eyes you will be able to immediately see what font best suites your message.

3. Nothing is worse than a font you cannot read: You have been a victim yourself right? You see a visual marketing attempt, but you simply cannot read the words because the font was a wrong choice. Just because you feel a font is ‘pretty’ does not mean the audience can easily digest it. And as we learned in the past 2 tools, if your audience does not digest it fast, they move on.

Tool #4

Images: Choosing Appropriate Images

A study performed by Trend Reports found that 65- 85% of people say they are visual learners. Visual learners prefer to look and study as opposed to read and comprehend.

What these means for us as visual marketers is that we need to optimize our social media images to accommodate the majority of our audience members.

A great benefit to taking the time to accommodate visual learners is that you will stand head and shoulders above your industry competitors who are mostly using text.

When you are choosing images to tie in with your colors, titles, and fonts, you must keep relevancy in mind. Does the image you’re choosing fit the audience you’re choosing it for?

When we talk about 65%-85% of your audience being visual learners, these means that you are processing the information on their social media feeds using the part of the brain associated with vision. This part of the brain processes information 60,000x faster than the part of the brain that processes written information.

To further elaborate, these audience members are rapidly looking at your image and subconsciously deciding if what they are seeing, matches up with what they like, believe, prefer etc. They use the part of the brain that tells them to stop and investigate further, or to keep moving because it is not the right fit.

When you choose images, ask yourself these 3 questions, “Does this image fit my”:

· Brand

· Audience Niche

· Important News Feed Update

When you have successfully hit the image on target, you will be able to efficiently transition them from the social media image over to the call to action. Either a share, visit site, comment, like, etc. Then you’re going to drive your audience away from the image — and the share button — and right onto the next post in their feed.

Yes, you may get audience members to pause for a while on bizarre and out of the ordinary images, but if it does not make sense to them to do something about it, then they will not stay and ultimately they will not complete your call to action. Which is the whole purpose of effective visual marketing!

With each and every single image you create moving forward you must ask yourself:

“Does this make sense for my audience to act it?”

If you are not sure what is going to get the best interaction from your niche audience, the next best step is to head over to your favorite social media site and start looking at what the leader’s in your industry post. What does their visual marketing strategy look like?

When you find posts that are garnering a ton of shares, comments, likes, re-posts, or any other type of interaction, then you will have found a winning combination for yourself.

Capture the Audience’s Attention

Most people are completely consumed in this information age. In fact, when we talk to the majority of people around us, we hear that all this data has become overwhelming.

This is why the majority of people on social media skim and scan at rapid speed. The key to visual marketing, is that when done correctly, it will take skimmers and scanners, and cause them to look at your post while avoiding ones that have only text.

Most visitors have lost the patience to read through consuming social media posts, they want images that grab their precious attention. Great news for you because now you are steps closer to mastering visual marketing and encouraging your audience to explore your content in greater detail.

Tool #5

Filters: Use Filters to Get More Likes

How do I apply filters to my photo?

Once you’ve taken a photo or selected one from your phone or tablet, you can edit it by applying filters:

1. Tap the filter you’d like to apply.

2. Tap the filter again if you want to adjust filter strength up or down using the slider. Tap the check to save your change.

3. Tap Next to add a caption and location and to share your photo.

Instagram now gives more than a dozen filters and endless ways to customize your photos, you have gone from just picking one because it makes your picture look better, to wanting to choose one based on cold hard scientific research that proves it will make your image perform better. The whole reason we are studying visual marketing right!?

Thankfully, we are here to help. Let’s look at some examples:

Not only do filters make your photos feel more refined, studies show that filters and editing will result in more views, comments, and shares.

While we used to use filters because they made us look better, now we are starting to understand that different filters will enhance certain types of content. Using this section of our visual marketing guide will help you know which one to use, what effect it will generate, and how it improves your photos.

(Source: www.notdressedaslamb.com)

So what can you choose if you want to work with filters off of Instagram?

These 2 options allow you to enhance your images without going through the Instagram.

1. The Wix Image Editor

If you use Wix, you can also use their image editor to make the pictures flawlessly beautiful.

Wix’s built-in image editor allows you to enhance your images while working on your site. Wix’s image editor easily rivals Instagram in ease and options.

(Source: www.wix.com)

2. Online Photo Editing Tools

Looking online you will notice that there is a plethora of image editors. Using these tools allow you complete control over your final image feel and look.

Some of the online editing tools are:

· Befunky

· Canva

· Ribbet

These are super reliable photo editors all available online and for the most part, with no or minimum cost.

Tool #6

Graphics: Infographics and Quotes Included…

1. How to Use Quotes (the creative way) for Visual Marketing

Where do you fall on the social media time-line? Do you remember the days of using social media to make friendships with people around the world and build relationships (actually using it to be social)…

Or are you the newer generation who love quote graphics and cat videos, and not so funny meme’s of babies with grouchy faces?

There is nothing wrong with whatever group of thought you fall into on your personal time. But there is something missing if you are trying to build your business using social media and all you care about is posting the ‘new school’ thought of meme’s, cat videos, and personal ‘rants’.

As newly formed visual marketers you cannot afford to miss your goal 100% of the time when you post to social media. If your images are not supporting your branding message then you are actually failing in business.

Sure you can build up likes, and shares and comments on your latest baby meme, but ask yourself, “Does this make my audience want my product”?

So let’s look at a graphics example and how to make them resonate with our business branding message and hit our visual marketing goal:

· You have spent the better part of an hour on Canva.com creating an image. It is quirky, it is pithy, it is sarcastic and you think really witty!

· You post to social media expecting an outpouring of comments and questions regarding your personal business, but the quote had nothing to do with your home business. Therefore, you hear nothing, not a single follow up question. Sure maybe a ‘like’ or two. But not a single sale. So what went wrong?

The question you should be asking yourself is: Did my effort and time investment fit in my sales strategy?

If you are not creating quotes that support a larger marketing target on the back end (remember our goal is to always get people to take our call to action!) We should be very, very careful of creating and posting visual content without knowing EXACTLY why you’re doing it and how every single post fits in your sales strategy.

2. Infographics: Explain Complex Topics by Using Infographics

Do you remember Tool # 4 about choosing the right image? And how we discussed your audience is made up of 65% — 85% visual learners?

This is the exact reason why infographics are so popular. And so highly effective!

You might be dealing with an industry that has complex topics (or even boring topics!) so when you try and explain them in text form to your highly visual audience, it is not received well.

However, spend your time instead, wisely creating an infographic that delivers your complex message through a graphic and you have made it easy for your audience to understand.

Successful parts of infographics are the ‘visual pathways’ they lead our audience down. The end of the infographic serves as a brilliant stopping point that leads directly to your invitation to learn more, or any other call to action.

This compelling call to action is huge when you’re dissecting complex subjects because it gives the reader somewhere else to go, preferably your own website.

Your infographic goal: Create a visual pathway to lead the reader to your call to action.

Here is another example. Take a look at the ‘distribution map’ infographic below.

The topic is not very interesting. It is comparing the United States physical productivity landscape to other developed countries.

We can see that even though the United States is a global leader, we have a strong displacement of activity from the west and east coasts compared to the middle of the country.

Pretty boring topic right? (Unless you are an economist, and in that case, I am sorry!)

However, the infographic itself is visually stunning even though it uses a muted color palette of red, beige, and white. The gradation of light to dark is an effective way to display productivity brackets, with darker indicating a greater abundance. What’s also standout here is the way the statistics are organized, in 3-D form. Looking from a distance, the eye is drawn to this unique arrangement because of its rise and fall.

Your infographic goal: Use color gradation to illustrate abstract statistics.

Conclusion:

Visual marketing tools are a must-have if you want to get through to your target audience, or to grow your brand awareness. As you move through your tools to creating ever more impressive and attention grabbing images, you will want to implement the different elements of your visual marketing strategy.

Always remember to examine your results in-depth so that you make the correct conclusions and the right modifications!