How to Power your Content with Visual Marketing

Visual marketing is the art of creating visuals to share your social media marketing using photographs, graphics, videos, or even GIFs. If you have a blog or website, visual marketing is key to getting your information seen and shared by more people.

“Visual marketing can be a part of every aspect of the Communication Mix. Marketing persuades consumer's buying behaviour and Visual Marketing enhances that by factors of recall, memory and identity.”

Creating visuals is something that I'm very passionate about and I was thrilled when Darren Rowse of Problogger had me on his podcast as the visual content expert because I respect his work so much. In fact at the last Social Media Marketing World conference, Darren even used examples from my blog for his “how to create a great blog” session. In our interview Darren said, “Visual content helps you to stand out from the crowd, it gives your content personality, it makes it more useful and it increases the chances of it being shared.”

Spending the time to make your blog beautiful and add gorgeous visuals will pay off. I promise!

These ideas will help you power your content with visual marketing!

Build Trust with Visual Marketing

Think of the visual you create as a promise to your audience that they'll get what you're advertising when they click through to your article.

“Why change? Everyone has his own style. When you've found it, you should stick to it.”  Audrey Hepburn

Define your Brand Identity

Even though you might not be a big brand you still need to have a solid identity for your blog or company and social media posts.

Your brand identity is the visual pieces of your brand such as your logo, color palette, fonts, and style of graphics or photos. It's important to be consistent with your brand once you've established your brand identity.

A brand identity should be easy to spot once out in the wild. You should have all the pieces planned and prepare your content for marketing to check each detail relevant and on brand.

Visual marketing reinforces your brand and builds brand awareness each time people see your logo or colors represented in your content marketing.

Stand Out from the Crowd

Being original is always a plus. Instagrammer carolyn_mara created this photo for @instagram‘s #WHPinthekitchen.

Carolyn joined in Instagram's Weekend Hashtag Project theme of In the Kitchen but stayed true to her visual brand on Instagram. She earned over 4,000 likes on this photo and usually pulls in 1,000 likes so her efforts paid off.

sink bath | because cooking isn't the only thing that happens in the kitchen. for @instagram's #WHPinthekitchen

A post shared by carolyn mara borlenghi (@carolyn_mara) on Aug 5, 2017 at 11:45am PDT

Educate People with How-to's

Use an infographic or video to show how to do something or use your product.

I found these examples by searching the #howto hashtag on Instagram.

This amazing video by SweetAmbs had over 67,000 views in an hour. This is a teaser video that inspires viewers to click through to the full tutorial on YouTube. Brilliant!

Tag a friend who loves to bake! ???????????????? See the full tutorial at YouTube.com/SweetAmbsCookies ???? #sweetambscookies #cookieart

A post shared by SweetAmbs – Amber Spiegel (@sweetambs) on Sep 3, 2017 at 6:45am PDT

Using the carousel post feature on Instagram and Facebook is a great way to show how to do something with a series of photos. Amber also makes a beautiful carousel post for the same video tutorial. So smart! It takes hours to bake and decorate her treats – add in the video time and it's well worth creating shorter videos and photo posts for social media.

Watch my video tutorial on how to decorate cookies for people who love cookies at YouTube.com/SweetAmbsCookies ????#sweetambscookies #cookieart #meta

A post shared by SweetAmbs – Amber Spiegel (@sweetambs) on Aug 31, 2017 at 11:33am PDT

Add a Call to Action on your Photo

This is an Instagram post that I created for a blog article – I've been testing adding the call to action right on my blog content and using the descriptions for storytelling or how-to information depending on the post.

A post shared by Peg Fitzpatrick (@pegfitzpatrick) on Aug 8, 2017 at 8:00am PDT

Be nice to your blog by following these best practices for loading images to your articles:

1. Make sure to give each photo a descriptive name when you save it. [here's how]
2. Save each photo as a .JPG. You can easily do this in Canva and save as .JPGs.

3. You can optimize photos like .PNGs with transparencies [here's how]

4. Add ALT tags to each image. [here's how] Every image should have an ALT attribute. While ALT attributes should be written naturally and concisely, with their main intention being to convey to search robots and visually impaired readers what the image shows, there is major SERP-position benefit to be gained from subtly working keyword phrases into ALT attributes. Never skip this step.

5. Smush your images even more with a WordPress plugin like WP Optimize.

I hope that these help generate some ideas for your visual marketing and best practices for your blog articles. Don't forget to share on social media with your beautiful graphics as well!

Below is an infographic from Canva with ten types of awesome visual content your brand should be creating right now. Please repin to your favorite social media or visual marketing board and hit the share button for a large image to share or pin this article.