Few Best Practices for Visual Marketing On Social Media
When it comes to visual marketing, today’s social media generation love visual content, whether it is infographics, funny memes, pictures, banners, videos, GIF Images or graphics generally engage an audience better than text.
Research has shown that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than words. Nothing speaks better to an audience than when graphics and images are used. Quotes such as “seeing is believing” and “an image speaks a thousand words” drive home the point faster than the use of just text.
How to Utilize Visual Marketing Effectively
In recent years, many businesses, have joined the visual marketing train, so, there is a lot of visual content out there. But how do you stand out from the crowd? What should you be doing to ensure that your post gets clicked, shared, retweeted or reposted more than your competitors’?
There are many ways a company can engage their audiences, and this includes using some of the best visual marketing practices outlined below. Most importantly, keep in mind that you do not need advanced photography or design skills to create amazing visuals for social media. What matters is the story you are trying to paint. There are tools such as Canva that can help you create eye-catching visuals even if you are a newbie at creating images.
So, if you want to get your social media followers’ attention, engage them, and connect with them emotionally on social media, you must employ the following best visual marketing practices.
Create A Strategy
If you want to win the social media game, you need an effective strategy. Every social media platform is unique and designed for a particular audience. Therefore, proper planning that keeps the audience in mind at all times should be the basis of a winning strategy.
Also, note that your business does not have to be on all social media platforms, just pick one or two you will most likely find your target audience in and master it. Generally speaking, professionals and top executives hang out on LinkedIn while Facebook is very diverse, making it a suitable platform for most businesses. Teens love SnapChat, Instagram is for photo lovers, and Twitter is for trendy folks.
Another point to keep in mind is that different social media platforms support different types of visual content, so the ones you pick may ultimately decide the kind of visuals you post. Snapchat is all about concise fun videos. Infographics are more effective on Twitter and Pinterest than Facebook because Facebook’s design generally doesn’t support vertical images. Infographics may come out blurred on Facebook, and low-quality photos give a terrible impression. Memes and Gif images are a hit on Facebook and Twitter plus they incorporate a lot of humor and humor is one of the best ways to engage an audience on social media.
It is advisable to hire an experienced social media marketing company to create a foolproof visual marketing strategy.
Be Consistent
The best way to boost trust and reliability is consistency. Be consistent with your brand voice and messaging. Maintain brand color, tone and messaging with your visual content, header, captions, and promotions. Inconsistency confuses the customer or follower and causes loss of trust. Social media users are often cautious of inconsistent brands because many of them have been deceived or scammed in the past.
Be aware that being consistent can also often lead to being too repetitive. Your followers want to see something different, and repetitive visual content will bore them and push them to unfollow. Therefore, incorporate many forms of visual content, use images, GIF, memes, infographics (where applicable) and videos while maintaining a uniform theme.
One way to do this is to convert an old blog post into an eye-popping infographic or videos. You can also cut short videos into GIFs. This way, your visual marketing is consistent in color, fonts, tone, and message with a variety of visual contents used.
Involve Your Audience
The essence of visual marketing on social media is to build a more intimate relationship with your audience. You can get your followers more involved in your business by asking for visual content from them. They can even send in images of them using your products or services, whatever it may be. This not only promotes creativity, but it also makes them more involved in your businesses because now it is about them. This also gives your business more trust and credibility, as potential customers can see you are a real business with real products that work.
Visual content provided by audience also bring a personal touch that other members of your audience can relate to. Some of their content can inspire ad campaigns, which most will view as paying homage. This will make customers feel more appreciated and will solidify the bond between the brand and the customer.
Another way to involve your audience with your visual content is by creating interactive contests and quizzes where you will reward winners. Aside from helping your audience escape the monotony of continuous reading, competitions also help you collect data and insight. This could skyrocket y our engagement level, especially when there is a prize to be won and you could make it a routine – monthly, quarterly or yearly – so your followers look forward to it.
Use A Clear Call to Action
Using high-quality images and graphics are good practices for visual marketing on social media, and when you add an emotive, relevant, and clear call-to-action (CTA), they become far more effective.
A clear CTA can boost your conversion rate because it tells people what they will get for taking the action you asked them to take. If your call-to-action is not clear enough, your followers will not bother to take any action, and the reason is simple: They are not sure what they are getting from this deal. So, why bother?
An effective way to create a clear call-to-action is to add a question. An example of such call-to-action is one that asks the question “Let us know what you think in the comments section?”
Test Your Strategies
There are three actions your audience take when you post a visual content on your social media page: They ignore, respond with a like or comment, or respond even better by clicking your call-to-action button, e.g., Read More, Shop Now, or Sign Up.
If your current visual marketing strategy is not giving you the response you want, you can switch things up and test another approach. For instance, you could test a different type of visual content to see if it will engage your audience more. If your audience has been ignoring your high-quality images, try posting videos to see if it will engage them more.
You could also test short videos and long videos; see which one engages your audience more. There are so many test variations with visual content. Here are some examples:
- Original Photo vs. Stock Photo
- Static Image vs. GIFs
- Infographics vs. Slideshows
- Post with Video vs. Post with Image
Analyze the result of your test and pick the winning strategy.
Conclusion
If you want to build a strong social media presence and engage your audience, you will have to incorporate relevant visuals in your post.
Use the above few visual marketing practices and experiment with different strategies to know what works best for you.