Visual setting

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Visual media marketing isn’t only about the right imagery. Imagine the power of great copywriting and imagery combined. Two powerful concepts that support each other have the ability to be greater than the sum of their parts. Read on to learn more about how you can be the master of your marketing art forms

We’re visual beings. So is it really that surprising we expect to be wooed by visuals instead of text on social media?

It’s easy to understand the importance of visuals in our daily communication. After all, 90% of the information our brain processes is visual. Building a marketing presence designed around visuals is only natural.

And yet, companies have tried (and failed) to crack the social media marketing code for years. Nine out of 10 businesses have a presence on at least one network. Far fewer are actually successful.Take a look at their brand presence and you’ll realize that far too often, they try to promote themselves using outdated tactics and — above all — not enough visuals.

The statistics bear that out. One study found that Facebook posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Meanwhile, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets compared to their counterparts.

It’s not a solve-all, but one thing is clear: visual social media marketing is absolutely vital to succeed both today and in the future. Every post you make, every update you share, should have some relevant visual attached.

That seems complicated at first. It definitely requires a well thought-out plan. Knowing where to start, though, is half the game. Consider these 11 tips to make your brand’s social media presence more visual and enhance your success over time.

1. Brand Your Social Media Presence

When your audience first visits your brand page or scrolls past one of your posts on their newsfeed, what do they see? Humans form a first impression in as little as 50 milliseconds, which is not nearly enough time to read any text. Instead, you have to make sure that you get the visual branding of your entire brand presence right.

Branding your social media presence, above all, means building a compelling logo and cover page. Think Pop-Tarts, whose Twitter logo immediately pops (no pun intended) while the cover image makes any breakfast-ready mouth water.

Getting to a similar point means finding the intersection between branding and visual social media. The brand has to be clear from the first millisecond. That’s only possible if the visuals are strong and consistent enough to communicate your brand value at first glance.

2. Improve the Quality of Your Images

Just using visuals is not enough. According to one study, 40% of social media marketers use stock images. Here’s what that means: your competitor may well be using the exact same visuals as you for promotion. If you want to be unique, that’s not an ideal position.Ideally, it always makes sense to use your own media. Images that are uniquely yours cannot be easily replicated. You can work with a partner like 99designs to get graphics and visuals specifically for your business. If that’s not an option, sources like Canva allow you to easily generate graphics that make even generic stock images more unique.

3. Create Social Media-Specific Videos

Video is, without a doubt, one of the most (if not the most) important visual aspects used in content marketing today. If you include video in your regular content strategy, you’re almost guaranteed to boost engagement among your followers.

That’s because, in addition to their inherent visual appeal, videos have found a unique spot within the social media hierarchy. On platforms like Facebook, they autoplay. Other platforms, like Snapchat, optimize their entire algorithm around it.

As you build videos in this medium, you have to keep a few things in mind:

• Your videos should be effective on mute. After all, 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound
• Shorter is better. Regardless of channel, 60 seconds tends to be the cutoff for engagement on social media
• Sizing and dimensions matter. Vertical video, for instance, can actually be surprisingly effective on mobile screens
• Catch the eye and generate attention from the first second to translate autoplay into an active viewer
• Authenticity matters. It might even be more effective than high-gloss, overproduced alternatives

4. Leverage Facebook or Instagram Live

Using video doesn’t just mean recording stuff ahead of time. In fact, you can be just as, if not even more, effective going live. Networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer live options for marketers and regular users alike.

Going live gives you the opportunity to show your face. It helps you go behind the scenes of your product or service, making your audience feel more involved in the process. One survey found that 82% of users prefer live video from brands over regular posts.

5. Visualize Your Data

Data and statistics are among your most powerful persuasive tools. They can also be immensely boring. Here’s the good news: they don’t have to be.

Effective data visualization can do wonders for your social media presence. It makes complex topics more approachable and digestible. It also helps you combine two of your most powerful rhetorical tools available in marketing, logic, and emotion.

Visualizing your data on social media can take on a variety of shapes. It might be a simple graphics or chart that highlights just what makes a given piece of data so compelling. Alternatively, a full-fledged infographic can do wonders on more complex topics.

6. Consider Interactive and Animated Infographics

Speaking of infographics: they can be more than just a piece of clipart thrown in with a statistic. Much more. In the digital realm, you have the unique opportunity to make your content interactive, allowing your audience to immerse themselves in it.

A poorly designed infographic can actually reflect badly on your brand. Animating it can be the key to turning the switch to a genuinely valuable visual marketing tool. GE’s World in Motion is a classic and a stunning example of how data can be presented in a way that makes us want to keep looking and to click.

Creating an animated infographic is not simple. It requires some basic design skills, along with either extensive coding ability or a paid tool like Displayr. The results, though, can be stunning. They effortlessly engage your audience, immersing them in detailed information without even realizing it.

7. Create Visual Instructions and How-Tos

Especially for more complex products and services, How-Tos are likely already part of your content strategy. They help answer common audience questions and increase their knowledge. The same tactic is also commonly used for more general tutorials related to your industry.

Here’s the problem: when based just on text, they’re not very attractive. In fact, few members of your target audience might actually go through them. That’s because, according to research, people who follow directions that rely on illustrations learn 323% more than those following plain text.You can use that to your advantage. A quick, animated explainer video can do wonders in getting your audience to understand a common blind spot or answer a question.

If you don’t have video capabilities, you don’t even have to go that far. In fact, a simple infographic that breaks it down into visual steps can do the trick.

8. Build a Branded Frame Image Template

For some marketers, the above seven tips may be a bit overwhelming. And we have to admit: it seems a bit like you have to spend significant time on each visual piece of content you’re sharing on social media. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case.

In fact, for at least some of your content, you can leverage templates to your advantage. One option: build a branded image frame that you can simply plug pictures and graphics into. The frame communicates your brand, so you can easily add quicker types of content (like an inspiring quote that lines up with your mission and values) for a slow day on social media.

As an added benefit, you might even want to consider sharing the frame with your audience. Your more loyal followers may run with it and share their own images. In exchange, you get free brand exposure that expands your reach and maximizes the power of your visuals.

9. Repurpose Your Content in Visual Ways

Stop thinking about a blog post as a blog post or a whitepaper as long-form content. They’re all opportunities to curate and repurpose content that sustains your social media presence. All you have to do is pull out interesting info nuggets, and find interesting ways to share those nuggets.You can repurpose your content into any kind of visual already discussed above. It might make sense as a simple static visual, an infographic, an animated visual, or even a video. Which works best depends entirely on the type of content.

Plenty of online tools like Canva and Displayr exist to help you create graphics and animations. Video tends to be a bit more complex. The video production services of 99designs are designed to help marketers who don’t have the capability to create their own videos. Either way, the ability to repurpose content into various types of social media visuals can be an immense boost to your presence.

10. Create Your Own Memes

You know memes. They range from silly to offensive to straight-up hilarious. You might even use them personally or with your co-workers. Have you thought about extending that usage into your professional social media presence?

Internet users are uniquely compelled to share memes on social media. It’s why The Dress went viral within a matter of hours and the This Is Fine dog is still relevant today. I even saw a cheezburger reference on Twitter the other day.

You can tap into that same enthusiasm, but you have to walk a fine line. Share the wrong meme, and you can actually alienate your audience. With the right one, though, you’ll get instant engagement. Plenty of free meme generators can help you get started.

11. Build Thumbnails for Every Video

By default, networks like YouTube and Facebook pull a random image from your video as you post it. Depending on what pops up, that means someone looking at it may not be very compelled to actually play it. Fortunately, the remedy is simple.

Make it a rule to build thumbnails for your Facebook and YouTube videos. Then, as you upload and post them, choose the custom thumbnail option. It’s an easy way to make sure that the videos seem as compelling as they actually are to an audience still on the fence about viewing them.

The defining factor for engagement

If we’re to apply the fact of “we’re all visual creatures” to social media, it becomes clear that what we see forms our entire experience online and sets the course of every action. So, a social media user who visits your profile will make the decision in a millisecond – to like, share, maybe comment on your post or to indifferently continue scrolling.

How your post looks, therefore, determines its performance. To be honest, there is a lot of whatever-quality content on social media, gaining hundreds of impressions because of its amazing visual presentation. Is that fair? Of course not. Fortunately, a clear-cut design strategy fills the gap between the “nothing to see here” and “I would marry this post if I could” type of content.

The challenges of visual content

Take a brief look at your social media channel, any one. Casually scroll through the latest posts your friends have posted. Observe the ratio of purely textual posts versus visual ones. Chances are enormous that images, gifs, videos or graphics rule your news feed as grumpiness rules the Mondays!

On one side, this means your social media friends are well informed (good for them). They’re aware of the public secret: people engage with visual content on social media. Both marketing amateurs and professionals know this by heart – stunning content attracts likes, shares, it grows the traffic, boosts the engagement and builds an enjoyable sensory experience.

In a situation where everyone is using this type of content as a marketing tool, several challenges might emerge:

These and similar questions keep marketing enthusiasts and professionals up at night. Let’s resolve them first, then move on to detailed explanations, tips and advice.

1. Non-visual companies and visual content

You can gift your followers with visually irresistible content, even if your products and services are based on physical appearance (e.g. as a service or an online product). Take software

 companies for instance. They could surely post screenshots, which probably wouldn’t result in 2. Visual logic – do you need a design strategy?

The most common mistake among social media managers, besides posting content that promotes the business but doesn’t give value to the reader, is not posting strategically in the means of design. Placing the company logo on your social post is fine, but there’s a lot more to design and learning its tricks brings you to truly magnetic content. Finally, having a clear strategy in place brings your brand’s uniqueness to light. Anyone using social media for business should have a clear design strategy for every channel.

3. Everyone relies on visual content, so how could you stand out?

Although most brands on social media recognize the benefits of visual posts, probably only a couple of them are actually incorporating a solid design strategy! Therefore, the initial step on a path of becoming a memorable social media figure is to think strategically in the first place. With a clear plan of how you wish to present your brand, it becomes easier to add personality, unique traits, the creativity which will set you apart from the crowd.

Creating a design and visual strategy for social media: Where to begin?

Great job on learning about various forms of visual content you can use, then further improve with smart design! The creation and posting process of each and every format we mentioned is a fun, almost addictive process (been there-enjoyed that).

Beyond the masterfully crafted content, a clear design and aesthetic strategy is what brings a brand under the social media spotlight. The question is – how to start building and implementing a design strategy which suits your brand like a glove?

Of course, you should never copy someone else’s exact design strategy. Rather than imitating, we’ll help you craft your own design, visual and aesthetics plan for social media, inspired by successful examples. Several ideas you could meditate on in this initial planning phase are:

 

Instagram: the types of visual content and basics of design

In one of our previous social media guides we covered the ins and outs of Instagram marketing. As you’re already aware, the heart and soul of this platform is visual content, particularly images. On Instagram, each visual post can be enriched and explained with a caption or (and) search-friendly hashtags.

This social media website is an ideal place for the exploration of design and aesthetics, giving the needed straightforwardness and vast space for creativity. The majority of users (especially on Insta) buy various products after being inspired by a stunning social media post.

Consequently, it might be challenging to stand out from other brands on this platform. Step ahead of your competition and learn how to craft irresistible Pins which will attract a lot of Re-pins:

• Give the preference to vertical images/Pins. On Pinterest feeds, your posts will be organized in columns, which means that vertical visuals will stand out more than a horizontal one.
• Consider collage images. Particularly for DIY niches, it is recommended to present multiple as collage images. This method looks amazing for step-by-step projects, such as arts and crafts tutorials or recipes.
• Think of the user perspective (again and always). We all use Pinterest as a wish list or a source of inspiration! What does mean for your design strategy? Well, take a step back and try seeing your Pinterest profile as a visual portfolio: are your pins appealing enough? Would you pin that content to your own board? How does the pins represent your brand? Remember, the goal is to design your pins in such a way that people can’t resist but start pinning.
• Should you stick to one style? The same idea of “freedom within borders” applies to every social media design strategy. In order to stay memorable on Pinterest without becoming boring, you could try to be consistent with main branding (logo, brand’s name), a general color scheme, same font (s), an overall style, and simultaneously experiment with photos, complementary text and smaller, yet structurally important content.
• Skip the mystery. While a certain dose of “so post-modern I don’t even understand myself” might work well on Tumblr or perhaps Facebook, you should probably skip such an approach on Pinterest. Users of this giant gallery love straightforward and highly informative content. Bear in mind that Pinterest is often viewed as a wishlist, a resource for tips and how-to ideas. The insanely popular Pinterest content represents the fine blend of style and relevancy. Post clear, helpful and eye-catching Pins and enjoy the marketing effects that will follow.

• Design planning for dominantly visual platforms: Instagram and Pinterest
• We hope that the problematics of creating a foolproof design strategy for mainly visual social platforms is much clearer to you now. Make sure not to miss out on the impressive promotional potential of Instagram and Pinterest. When it doubt which design approach to follow for these pocket-size online galleries, just come back to our checklists and use those tips to construct a perfectly fitting visual strategy for your brand.

How to craft the design plan for a non-visual business?

We completely agree that this is not fair: it is much easier for a fashion company or a restaurant to create a stunning design and aesthetics strategy, when they already have a library of beautiful photos directly connected with their business! What were the non-visual brands supposed to do?

The fact is that every business, whether small or gigantic, visual or non-visual, starting or established, could vastly benefit from the marketing opportunities lying in social media. So, is there a way (preferably, a simple one) for companies that offer services or unattractively looking products, to enjoy the power of social media promotion?

Let us be the bearers of fantastic news – of course it can! We already briefly touched on a topic of which types of content you could use for a non-visual business. Now, observe and apply these design tactics that could place your non-visual business shoulder to shoulder with most successful social brands:

• Embrace the power of education through visuals. Think of instructional content, how-to tutorials related to your business, DIY manuals, presentations or maybe, infographics covering the topic you as a brand care about. It doesn’t really matter that you don’t have stunning photos to show, if you have a problem-solving knowledge worth sharing!
• Use GIFs, illustrations, animations and/or emojis. Could you tell a story through these types of content? Let your imagination fly and play with different formats available.
• Showcase the lifestyle your business is enabling. As a service or perhaps, an online product, think of the benefits your customers are gaining with your offer. Are you helping people become happier? Financially stable? Inspire social media visitors to seek for your service through carefully chosen, inspiring images.

Try behind-the-scenes company and product photos. Do you have an interesting scene from your workplace worth presenting? Or is there an entertaining way in which some of your products can be handled? By displaying how the business functions from inside, you will encourage the feeling of connection and closeness with the audience. People love being involved in brand’s often hidden stories, so take the opportunity to explore this fact.