Author: Giuseppe Caltabiano
Visual content has the power to break through the noise and grab the attention of our audiences in a way that words alone simply can’t. It goes beyond mere aesthetics, too—the human brain processes visual information much faster than text, making visual content a powerful tool for conveying complex ideas quickly and effectively.
In content marketing, visual content enhances engagement, improves brand recall, and can significantly influence consumer behavior. And, when your visuals are optimized correctly, they can help new users discover you in Google Search.
For all these reasons, visual content is an indispensable tool for marketers looking to capture and retain audience attention in an increasingly crowded content landscape (which has become even more nuanced with the introduction of AI-generated content).
In this blog post, I’ll cover every aspect of modern visual content marketing, including:
Understand your audience to create more effective visual content
Knowing your audience helps you tailor your visual content to meet their needs and interests, ensuring it resonates and engages them effectively.
Before diving into visual content creation, you need to gain a deep understanding of your target audience. This step isn’t just important for visual content—understanding your audience should be the first phase of any solid content marketing strategy.
This involves identifying your audience’s:
Demographics
Preferences
Interests
Pain points
Online behavior
Etc.
If you don’t have this audience data, new generative AI tools can help. For example, Rock Content’s AI Persona Creator GPT can help you learn more about your audience simply by providing a website domain.
Or you can go with an ‘old school’ approach and conduct thorough market research and audience analysis to gain insights into the type of visual content that resonates the most with your audience, enabling you to plan and tailor your content accordingly.
Just ask yourself these key questions:
Who are you trying to reach? Consider factors like age, location, occupation, and income level for a B2C audience. For B2B audiences, get a good understanding of the job profiles and responsibilities, sales cycle, and the brand decision-making process (for purchases, in particular).
What are your ideal customers’ passions, aspirations, and pain points? Identifying these allows you to tailor your visuals to address their specific needs and desires.
Where do they spend their time online? What kind of content does your audience consume? Which content influences them? Understanding which social media platforms or publications your target audience frequents lets you optimize visuals for those specific channels.
Once you understand your audience, the next step is to create visual content that aligns with their interests and preferences. This means selecting the right narrative, choosing specific themes, design schemes, or types of visuals that appeal to them. Let’s take a deeper look at those considerations in the following sections.
Connect with your audience’s emotions through visual storytelling
Posting an image or video online and waiting for the audience to engage is not a strategy. Like with any other content format, you need a compelling rationale for visual storytelling and a clear plan for turning views into meaningful marketing results.
Ben Horowitz, a startup founder and VC expert who has invested in the next generation of leading tech companies (including Airbnb, Facebook, and Twitter), was asked in an interview some years ago about companies insisting that products are the only thing that matters. His answer was enlightening:
“Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well-thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy”. — Ben Horowitz via Forbes
Humans are wired for stories. Stories evoke emotions, create connections, and leave a lasting impression. Stories help us to connect with our audience and, on a biological level, they make our brains light up, meaning that information is wired in more reliably. Stories help create memory structures, which are the foundation of all brand building activities.
Visual content marketing unlocks the power of storytelling, allowing you to craft captivating narratives.
Whether through a series of captivating images or a narrated video, storytelling can humanize your brand, foster emotional connections with your audience, and distinguish your content from competitors, de facto making your message more memorable. The key is to ensure that your visuals tell a story that is aligned with your brand message and values.
To craft compelling visual stories, focus on creating a clear narrative flow, use consistent visual elements, and incorporate emotions that resonate with your audience. Below are a few examples of effective visual storytelling techniques.
Explain complex topics with infographics and motion design: Visualize complex datasets and statistics through interactive or animated infographics. These enhance knowledge absorption and engagement by using charts, graphs, and illustrations to make information easier to understand and retain. Convey complex topics and concepts that are paramount to your brand narrative with motion design and animation techniques for even greater visual impact.
Highlight customer success stories: Showcase positive customer experiences using visuals that illustrate testimonials or case studies. Customer stories build trust, demonstrating your brand’s value.
Unveil your company culture with humanized content: Offer a glimpse into your team, work environment, and core values through engaging photos or short videos (like in the example below). This fosters transparency and helps your audience connect with the human element behind your brand (in addition to building your brand as an employer).
By weaving storytelling into your visual content, you move beyond mere information dissemination and create an emotional connection with your audience.
Maintain visual consistency for better brand recognition
Your visual content should reflect your brand’s identity through consistent use of colors, fonts, logos, and imagery. Visual consistency not only reinforces your brand message but also helps establish a cohesive brand image across various marketing channels and touchpoints.
When your audience encounters your visuals across various platforms, they should be able to instantly associate them with your brand. You can achieve this by maintaining a cohesive visual style across all your content. Here are some visual branding elements for you to consider:
Color palette: Establish a specific color palette that reflects your brand personality. Use this color palette consistently across all your visuals, from website design to social media posts.
Fonts: Choose a set of fonts that complements your brand identity and ensures readability across different platforms. Maintain consistent fonts throughout your visuals.
Logos: Your brand logo is a visual representation of your company. Ensure proper and consistent logo usage across all your visuals.
Moodboard: When brainstorming branded video content, begin by collecting all visual and sound references as well as media assets you want to use. This visual mind map is called a “moodboard,” and it helps you consolidate your visual concept and align it with your brand guidelines.
By maintaining a consistent visual style, you create a recognizable brand identity that reinforces brand recall and recognition for your audience.
Choose the right format for your visuals
With a myriad of visual content options available, it’s essential to select visual content that aligns with your content goals and resonates with your audience. Whether it’s eye-catching images, informative videos, or interactive infographics, select visuals that effectively convey your message and evoke the desired response from your audience.
Each visual content format has its particular strengths. Let’s explore some of the most common and powerful types of visual content.
Images: Images are the main pillar of visual content marketing. From captivating photos and product illustrations to informative charts and data visualizations, images offer a versatile way to grab attention, communicate ideas, and enhance content.
Videos: Videos come in various styles and formats, including brand stories (excellent for branding campaigns), explainer videos (such as the one in the example below), tutorials, product demonstrations, testimonials, and vlogs. Short, highly engaging, and shareable video content is key to expanding your audience on social media and shaping brand awareness.
Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of data, information, or knowledge presented in a concise and visually appealing format. They combine text, graphics, and imagery to simplify complex concepts, explain processes, or communicate statistics and trends effectively.
Interactive content: Interactivity allows users to actively engage with and participate in the content (rather than passively consuming it). This includes interactive infographics, quizzes, polls, surveys, games, calculators, and interactive videos. This style of content can enhance user experience, increase engagement, and provide valuable insights into audience preferences and behavior. I cover interactive content in more detail in the next section of this post.
Branded images: These are images that incorporate a company’s branding elements, such as logos, colors, or fonts. Branded images help create a consistent visual identity across various platforms and marketing materials.
Consider your content goals and your audience’s preferences to narrow down the right visual formats. For example, infographics may be more suitable for educational content, while videos could be better for storytelling.
Engage your audience with interactive content
You can design visual content to encourage interaction through calls-to-action, polls, quizzes, or clickable links. This not only engages your audience, it can even foster a sense of community and return valuable feedback and user behavior data.
Interactive content is a form of content that enables marketers to create a digital dialogue between a visitor and their marketing automation platform.
Integrate interactive elements (e.g., polls, quizzes, clickable links, etc.) into your content to encourage participation and conversation. These elements make your content more dynamic and can provide insights into your audience’s preferences. They let you engage with your potential customers in real-time, respond to comments, and solicit feedback to create a dialogue and build deeper connections that promote repeat business.
Creating interactive content is easier when you have a platform that won’t require custom development and coding for every experience. There are a few options on the market, including Rock Content’s Ion, a robust platform that allows companies to create engaging interactive experiences with just a few clicks.
Embed accessibility and inclusion into visual content plans
Accessibility is about removing barriers that may prevent people with disabilities from accessing your website or content. Inclusion is about going a step further and ensuring that people with disabilities are included as valuable members in all aspects of society.
Consider the following:
Today, 15% of the world’s population experiences some type of disability.
Nearly seven out of ten participants (69%) opt out of using websites because of accessibility issues, according to a study conducted by Click-Away Pound.
In addition, 86% mention that they would spend more time in online stores that were more accessible.
This makes accessibility crucial for visual content marketing. Fundamental optimizations include using alt text for images, captions for videos, and ensuring color contrast is sufficient for those with visual impairments.
When planning your content, make sure to also reflect the following accessibility best practices to ensure that all members of your target audience can understand and appreciate your visuals:
Video transcripts: Include transcripts alongside videos to ensure that individuals with hearing impairments can access the content. Transcripts also benefit users in noisy environments or those who prefer reading over listening—and they are filled with keywords that can help signal relevance in Google Search.
Keyboard navigation: Make sure your visual content is accessible via keyboard navigation, allowing users who rely on keyboard-only or assistive technology to interact with your content seamlessly. This includes interactive elements, such as buttons and links.
Screen readers: When creating visual content, consider how it will be interpreted by screen reader technology used by individuals with visual impairments. Structure all textual content, including captions, overlays, and alt text in a way that can be accurately conveyed by screen readers.
Color contrast: Employ good color contrast to ensure visuals are discernible for viewers with color vision deficiencies.
Audio descriptions: For videos or animations that contain important visual information, provide audio descriptions that explain the visual elements to blind or visually impaired members of your audience. Audio descriptions should be concise, descriptive, and synchronized with the corresponding visual content.
Accessibility testing: Regularly test your visual content using accessibility tools and guidelines to identify and address any potential accessibility issues. Conduct user testing with individuals with disabilities to gather feedback and ensure that your content is truly inclusive and accessible to all.
Optimize visuals for your audience’s favorite platforms
Different social media and digital platforms have unique requirements and best practices for visual content. To maximize engagement and reach, adapt your visuals to fit the specifications of each platform. Whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, or LinkedIn, optimize your visual content’s format, size, and presentation to ensure it resonates with your audience and stands out in their feeds.
You should follow platform-specific guidelines for format and size, as well as keep up-to-date with competitor activity and trends to maximize the impact of your visuals. This may involve creating multiple versions of a visual to suit different platforms or adapting them to different formats.
In addition to understanding platform demographics, consider the following optimizations:
Aspect ratio: Each platform has its preferred aspect ratio for images and videos. Ensure your visuals display correctly across all channels. For instance, Instagram Stories utilizes a vertical format (9:16), while YouTube videos typically display in a horizontal format (16:9).
Duration: Adapt your content to each platform’s output duration. While Youtube Shorts are up to 60 seconds long, TikTok has been pushing for more lengthy content and currently allows up to 10 minutes of video.
File size: Large file sizes can lead to slow loading times, hindering user experience. Utilize formats that deliver reasonable image and video quality with mild compression loss, like JPEG for standard images, PNG for transparent images, and MP4 for videos.
Attract audiences on Google with visual content SEO
SEO for visual content focuses on enhancing your brand’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Key aspects include:
Using descriptive file names and alt text
Optimizing image size and format for faster loading
Sharing on social media and obtaining external backlinks
Mobile optimization via responsive design
To optimize visual content for SEO, it’s essential to follow a few key guidelines. First, ensure that your content is relevant to your target keywords and complements the surrounding text on the page. Use descriptive filenames and alt text for images to provide context for search engines and improve accessibility for visually impaired users.
It’s crucial to use relevant keywords in file names, alt text, and captions. This practice helps search engines understand the content of the images or videos, making them more likely to appear in search results. Additionally, optimizing file sizes and formats ensures that visual content loads quickly, improving page load times and user experience, which are key factors for search engine rankings as well as conversions. Implementing structured data for images and videos can also enhance visibility in search results through rich snippets.
Furthermore, creating high-quality, original visual content encourages shares and backlinks, which can increase a site’s authority and ranking.
AI and visual content: What you need to know
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming visual content creation, offering solutions for generating personalized content, enhancing images, and even creating entirely new visuals.
While AI-powered tools can streamline workflows and enhance efficiency, you need to understand their capabilities and limitations. Even though some tools have been able to successfully automate visual content creation processes and techniques, such as removing backgrounds (Canva, Photoshop), generating subtitles (Opus Clip, CapCut), and voicing video narrations (Eleven Labs), they still require a human professional’s touch for consistency, content accuracy, as well as art and visual concept direction.
It’s important to note that the technology still cannot generate original and branded content. It can, however, still serve as visual inspiration in the ideation phase. One of our designers tested one such tool, Firefly, trying to duplicate branded images.
It’s important to be aware of these limitations and ensure that visual content generated by AI aligns with your brand values and messaging. Use AI responsibly to streamline, rather than replace, human creativity in visual content creation.
How to measure visual content success
Track key metrics to accurately evaluate how your visual content is performing and optimize your strategy for better results. Here are some additional metrics to consider alongside engagement, reach, conversion rates, and return on investment:
Click-through rate (CTR): Measure the percentage of users who click on a call-to-action or link within your visual content. A high CTR indicates that your visual content is effectively driving user engagement and prompting action.
Time spent on page: Analyze how much time users spend interacting with your visual content. Longer times suggest that your content is engaging and holding your audience’s attention.
Social shares: Track the number of times users share your visual content across social media platforms. Social shares serve as a measure of content virality and audience engagement, indicating how well your content resonates with your audience.
Heatmaps and scroll depth: Use heatmaps and scroll depth analysis to visualize how users interact with your content. Heatmaps can highlight areas of high engagement or interaction within your content, while scroll depth analysis can reveal how far users scroll down the page and which sections are most engaging.
By incorporating some of these additional metrics alongside traditional KPIs, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your visual content’s performance and identify areas for improvement.
Leverage user-generated content for marketing and product feedback
Encourage your audience to share their own images related to your brand/products and showcase that user-generated content (UGC) across your marketing channels to engage new potential customers and provide authentic content that enhances your credibility. In addition, highlighting user-generated content helps build a sense of community and trust. It shows that you value your audience’s contributions and can lead to increased loyalty and engagement.
One of UGC’s lesser-known benefits is its ability to improve your brand’s visibility within search results. Not only does it increase the amount of content pertaining to your brand, but UGC is also often keyword-rich content, which may increase the number of keywords your content ranks for.
There are many examples of UGC in B2B and B2C. Among them, LEGO is probably the most significant and my favorite case. At the heart of LEGO’s user-generated content is LEGO Ideas—this is where aspiring LEGO designers can submit their own LEGO designs (as shown above).
LEGO’s user-generated content strategy contributes to many of its crucial business priorities and marketing channels:
Direct product development
X/Twitter marketing
YouTube marketing
Niche marketing
LEGO has essentially made any of its fans a potential independent LEGO content creator. The fans play the role of both designer and marketer. This puts LEGO at an extreme advantage as it helps the company tap into new niche markets with ready-made influencers eager to help and show off their own creations.
See the bigger picture with visual content marketing
When used strategically, visual content marketing can significantly enhance your content marketing strategy, offering boundless opportunities for brands to engage, inspire, and connect with their audience on a deeper level.
By implementing the best practices I’ve outlined above, you can unlock the full potential of visual content marketing and propel your brand towards greater engagement, visibility, and success.
Giuseppe is a global marketing leader with 20+ years' experience. He excels in crafting content and marketing strategies for B2B enterprises. Recognized as 2-time influential European B2B marketer, he has an MBA from SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at London Business School. Twitter | Linkedin
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