Every day, we see lots of new content being produced by individual users and brands. This means that whatever you create will have a lot of competition. If there's one thing you can do to significantly improve the chances of your content standing out, it's counting on visuals. Numerous studies have shown us that posts featuring visual content are much more popular and receive more shares or likes. Here are six kinds of visual content you should use for your marketing campaigns.
The word ‘meme’ was first coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s to describe an idea which had the capacity to replicate itself and acquire different meanings among different people. Today, memes are images accompanied by humorous captions. When they first began to appear, not many predicted that they would soon play a huge role in content marketing. They're easy to create and quickly become massively popular, so marketers were bound to learn how to use this funny form of visual content.
Creating memes is a perfect plan if you'd like your brand to stand out and forge a meaningful connection with consumers, especially if they're younger and appreciate good humor. Memes won't be appropriate for every niche and in some cases simply won’t bring any engagement to your audience at all. Memes are great, however, if what you're looking for is content that would allow you to poke fun at your sector or industry.
Many blogs offering guest post opportunities ask authors to provide screenshots and high-quality images to accompany their posts. A how-to guide without useful screenshots will never be as interesting or instructive as one which visually shows every step of the process.
Screenshots are easy to create and can be of great help in presenting your solution. You can modify them to be even more instructive by adding arrows, underlining content or marking it in visible circles or squares.
It goes without saying that seeing a large body of a text might cause readers to simply abandon your content. User attention spans grow increasingly shorter, so it's in your interest to split your text with some compelling images.
Images should also be of high quality and always relevant to the topic. Studies show that visuals which play a purely decorative role are simply ignored by users.
What comes in handy here is the image-to-word ratio. The optimal ratio ensures greater popularity of your content. How many images should you add to your posts and articles to get the most from these visuals? A recent study from Buzzsumo suggests that posts featuring one image per 75-100 words are likely to receive more views than articles following a different ratio.
Use original images to add a personal touch to your visual campaign. Stock photos are alright, but only as long as you make sure that they're of high quality and don't scream the fact that they’re stock photos. Before publishing content with images which aren't yours, take extra care to ensure that you're using them legally.
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Users love content with lots of strong data from reliable sources, but all this data can sometimes turn out to be overwhelming. This is where data visualization techniques come in. Tables, charts, and graphs will all make your posts more attractive and readable, helping you to communicate a stronger message to your audience. Such images are also highly shareable on social networks like Pinterest and posts based on data visualizations generally drive high traffic.
Infographics are an obvious choice here. They can present a lot of valuable insight about a topic in a user-friendly way. The format is perfect for step-by-step tutorials, where you can easily present your expertise with some labels and short informative content. A visual guide engages a much wider audience.
Trying new formats can revitalize your marketing strategy. That's why it's essential that once in a while you reach beyond your usual channels to discover formats that can easily serve your needs. One of the content distribution giants in the making is Slideshare. Many marketers are already uploading their content in the form of presentations to reach new audiences.
Presentations should be visually consistent. Elements such as fonts, borders, and colors need to match. Take extra care when adding text captions. Users do read them, so avoid misspellings or grammar mistakes. And keep your data sources reputable.
Create an inspiring presentation and your content might become part of the Slideshare homepage as one of the Slideshares of the Day or featured in the Trending in Your Network section. These are both amazing opportunities for boosting your traffic.
Videos are all the rage right now in marketing. They're lighter than ever and a perfect format to present solutions that products or services can offer. There are many affordable and easy tools on the market to help you create stunning videos to accompany campaigns.
A recent study showed that a video on a landing page increases conversions by 86 percent. Whether it's animations, product demonstrations, how-to videos or customer testimonials—they all add something to your online branding. Moz recently found out that posts with videos receive almost 300 percent more inbound links. So yes, the effort is very much worth it.
Visual content gives a major boost to your textual content and consequently improves user engagement with your brand and product. Great visuals will help your content stand out and easily render your brand an expert in your field.
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