As it is rightly said, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and when it comes to capturing the audience’s attention, you do not want to leave any stone unturned to convey your message. Remember, short attention spans always make lengthy explanations less effective. So how do you make your brand storytelling hold the interests of your audiences? Yes, I am talking about picture storytelling or visual content that build brand awareness, loyalty, and trust and engaged communities.
Is it just the brand awareness? Definitely no. Visual storytelling has also fueled the content marketing race, the quest for producing what is relevant and valuable to a brand’s current and potential customers. Research shows that nearly 60 percent of people are visual learners and human brain processes visualization 60,000 times faster than it does written content. People love visual content and the more enriching the content, the more impactful the impression that the content can make.
But the million dollar question is – how do you make visual content the key to effective brand storytelling?
The introduction of data visualization in the content
Data visualization – infographics, charts, logos, memes, videos, graphs are all visual content media that are designed to simplify massive amount of data. Huge amount of numbers can make you feel like you are drowning in them can be merged into simple charts that can easily tell a single cohesive story. There is no substitute for a strong visual story. By conveying your message in a visually appealing way, you can make people more likely to support your cause, buy your product, or share your message.
Don’t just show but say…
Consumers often do not know what they want, and look for ideas and inspiration. However, if you serve them dessert along with meal, then nothing like it. Don’t just present your products via photographs and graphics but tell an interesting story via them. Make videos of the product you are trying to show to your audience and illustrate the product’s advantages in a unique and memorable way. This works as a successful visual content marketing.
Focus on your audience’s interests
Shape your visual storytelling strategy by listening to your consumers, their frequently asked questions, their interests, popular conversation topics, timely events and problems they care about. Accordingly leverage visuals to draw attention and engagement around popular content topics. For instance, a few months back, BBC news launched Instagram video as news service called Instafax to display 15-second news clips via Instagram video to the busy community who doesn’t always have time to watch news. This proved the useful of this content to the community.
Embrace the power of social media
Your consumer may like the content or the video you create, but are they sharing it with their social community? But when consumers do share your content in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Google+, you’re actually tapping into a powerful word of mouth endorsement from them. This is the time to analyze the most positive, most shareworthy content to date and look for trends in order to amplify what your audiences are sharing.
Read more: The Importance of Using Visual Content in Social Media Marketing
Be human
Visual content marketing performs better when the content has human elements. Right from user-generated images, to showing behind the scenes content on how product is made, consumers are always keen to see the human side of your brand. Being human also means using visual to shape your story around issues, interests, and causes that are important to the consumers. Compelling visual content helps to humanize an otherwise faceless brand and give people enough opportunities to interact with it.
This is not the end of your responsibility, to make your visual content marketing successful, you have to make an extra effort to make your message stand out from the competition, break through the clutter, and influence audiences.
Make your visual brand consistent
Your designs should be based on your brand ethics including the use of logos and colors. Visual content with a consistent brand motif can help others identify the brand instantly.
Customize the visual content
Don’t stick to one image and push it out to every platform. Each social media channels have different demands. Also, the audiences of each network are unique, so make sure your content respect the standards of communication everywhere it appears.
Create graphics and images that spark curiosity
Design your visuals to help your audiences get a deeper understanding of your brand and services. It helps you to understand how you’re uniquely qualified to solve their problems.
As you select images for visual content, focus on the context and the mental model your readers are likely to be in
Your products and services must appeal to both the emotional and rational sides of the brain. Emotions including anxiety, loss of credibility, longing for recognition and risk aversion are involved while selecting or buying a B2B product or service. Similarly, rational justifications include enhanced productivity, lesser downtime and growing and protecting the business.
Personalize your marketing strategy
For instance, if you ask your audiences for holiday gift ideas, within 30 minutes, you may see excellent number of ideas. The strategy tends to perform well, as long as it remains tasteful and in alignment with the brand’s voice.
Audiences have access to countless content. In order to divert their attention towards your content, it is necessary that your content is cohesive, consistent and visually engaging. It must demonstrate credibility. This shows that your brand is invested in providing value through communication, and that you are considerate of your audience’s time and needs.