Pleased to offer you a Guest Post by Catherine Parks this week.

If you are not taking advantage of visuals in your content marketing, then you should start now.

Visual content is gaining in popularity
currently and for a good reason: People are attracted to content with images,
videos, infographics, and other visual content.

In fact, visual marketing studies show that many people will likely watch a video than read plain text information. Internet videos contribute a lot when it comes to web traffic. Content published with related images and interesting videos is the most shared frequently and attracts engagement among readers.

Visuals Enhance Your Brand Recognition and Increase Engagement

There are numerous types of visual content you can include in your content such as:

·    Videos

According to visual marketing statistics, content with videos gets more shares than textual content. However, you must ensure to use videos that relate to your audiences’ needs and likes. Videos can be for corporate use as well as professional or training courses.

The good thing is that you can also create audiovisual content using your digital camera or smartphone. But your videos should not be lengthy as no one will be willing to watch long videos.

·    GIFs

Truth be told:  GIFs are interesting and effective as well. So why ignore them?

Note that although it is advisable for content marketers to use short videos, people may still not have the time to watch your 2-minute video and this is where GIFs become helpful since they run for seconds. In addition, GIFs are great when it comes to boosting your brand’s awareness and sparking engagement at the same time.

Important Note: GIFs are more powerful
for your social media marketing so incorporate them in your strategies on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms.

·    Images

When speaking of visual content, images take the lead when it comes to reaching many people with visual marketing strategies. When implementing your visual marketing strategy especially for social networks, images should be your number one visual content.

Images are easy to create and get and are frequently shared hence reinforcing and emphasizing your message across platforms. That being said, images can boost your search engine rankings, but you must name them appropriately since search engines don’t read images.

·    Graphics

There is no better way to distribute data or statistics than using graphics. Content shared using graphics is easy to absorb. Using graphics is a powerful way to communicate numbers in visual fast. In addition, graphics are great when it comes to elaborating instructions as well as creating “how to dos”.

·    Memes

Memes are popular and powerful tools to attract traffic and are shareable.  Creating a meme takes only a few minutes and the good thing about them is that they are perfect for sharing on social media.

·    Screenshots

Screenshots are great when you want to explain or prove something in a detailed manner. They are mostly used for illustrating guides and tutorials. Besides, screenshots are a perfect visual resource for social platforms.

·    Infographics

Posts with infographics attract more traffic than those without. In addition, people are likely to read a post with infographics more than twice than one with text-only content.

To ensure a powerful visual content marketing strategy, you need to be consistent across types of content. Your business, website or blog logo is the number one visual marketing piece. It makes your business recognizable.

How to Reach More People with Visual Marketing Strategies

As we’ve mentioned above, visual content increases the chances of people reading your posts by 80 percent according to a study by PBN Pilot
and content with related images gets more views than plain text. 

This shows how important visual content is when it comes to creating an effective content marketing strategy. How is this done?

·    Incorporating Visuals In Your Content

If you want to et the most engagement on your blog posts or articles, you need to include images. Include an image right above your blog post at the beginning or after your headline.

Also, ensure to include images across your entire blog posts or articles.

·    Having a Consistent Visual Style

Well, although images are important when it comes to attracting traffic to your site, you must have a consistent style to increase your brand awareness. When it comes to colors and patterns everything should be incorporated consistently to make your content absorbable to your readers since this will increase their chances of sharing it thus reaching more people.

·    Incorporating Your Logo in Custom Images

If you decide to create your own  custom images such as charts, graphs, infographics and more, ensure to add your logo somewhere within the images. This way, when other users include them in their posts, your name is exposed to a wider audience for free.

Remember, if your images are for a specific industry, they will be used by people within your industry and hence increasing your reach to your target market without spending a penny.

Using Visual Content on Social Networks

Social networks have their own unique etiquettes. For instance, you can use the same image on Facebook and Twitter, but the same image cannot be suitable on Tumblr due to the artistic style of the platform. Also, you need to avoid being too  salesy. Readers should not think that you are advertising your products or services to them but make your post informative and educative.

In addition, when it comes to social media visual marketing, avoid asking or demanding anything from your readers, but instead include a call-to-action in your posts. Let your readers know that you are there as a rich source of information to them as well as a source of entertainment.

Final Thoughts

A successful visual marketing strategy aims at adding value to your audience. Information distributed in visual form is much easier to absorb and process and it grabs users’ attention making it shareable.

To take advantage of this, you need to include images in your social media and blog posts in a manner that attracts people’s attention and makes them relate to it. Last but not least, you achieve all by sharing tips and tricks as well as statistics using infographics.

Thank you to Catherine Parks for being our Guest Blogger this week, we really appreciate it.  Catherine is known as a connector with Caffeinated who helps businesses find their audience online. She loves working in the ever-changing world of digital and is fascinated by the role content plays in today’s marketing.

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