What is Visual Marketing? How to Make a Standout Visual Marketing Campaign
By Sam Nguyen
Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
In this article, let learn about visual marketing in an in-depth manner and know What is visual marketing? And how to make a standout visual marketing campaign clearly.
According to a study from MIT University (USA), it takes us less than 1 second to receive information in the form of images, colors. It can be said that visual elements have a strong impact on our brains, and even stimulate us to make decisions. Capturing that miraculous trait, marketers took advantage of it and even turned it into a term called Visual Marketing.
What is visual marketing?
Visual marketing is said to be a key to modern marketing. The phrase “visual marketing” describes the use of design elements, graphics and brand images in marketing. Harnessing the power of images and vision will make marketing activities more attractive and memorable. This contributes to reinforcing customers’ image of the brand and the message in mind and remembering the brand at the time of purchase. Thanks to this awesome method, stores become not only popular but also attract potential customers as well as retain loyal customers.
Have you ever asked yourself why you kept these images when you had never done a practical exercise to memorize them? The answer lies in the mechanism of action of the human brain. When exposed to images that carry a synchronized and repeated message, our brain tends to store and visualize when recalled.
Customers do not care about the branding strategy or the media plan behind them, but only remember what touches at the points of contact between them and the brand, especially the visual interactions. Therefore, brand managers in the world prioritize exploiting the power of the image in marketing activities, also known as visual marketing.
The World Trends:
For brands around the world, visual marketing is part of a mixed media activity. If you close your eyes for 30 seconds and think about the KFC brand, what would you envision?
Is it fried chicken, red, or familiar image of Colonel Sander? You get such visualization thanks to the consistency in your brand identity and image. KFC Logo Design is one of the most famous and instantly recognizable logos in the world. The KFC logo describes the company’s iconic founder, Colonel Sanders. KFC is known for its consistent, simple and great visual identity. Besides, with the characteristic of the fast-food industry, the red color is chosen to identify and appear synchronously in the images of KFC’s marketing activities both online and offline.
Color consultant, Alain Christ, said: “Color is the first message of the product aimed at consumers and consumers will feel it immediately.” Color also plays a very important role in reminding brands in consumers’ minds. It stimulates the feel and convey the message quickly, and easily evokes the nature and image of the product. That’s why the same fast food industry but thinking of KFC people will remember red and fried chicken while McDonald’s is yellow and hamburger.
Synchronizing brand awareness and image has become a mandatory activity for brands around the world. Not only stop at common identities such as colors, fonts, logos, etc, but even the style of design is also included in visual marketing, showing the characteristics and personality of the brand. Apple is a prime example.
Starting from the bad-hearted, simple yet full-fledged Apple logo and expressing the full desire, all Apple-branded designs continue to convey that message. The iPhone with a keyboardless design is a major revolution in mobile devices. Each generation of iPhone has later received the expectation from the technology user community because Apple has created demand and nurtured superior aesthetic passion, making consumers feel integrated with contemporary aesthetics and minimalistic yet sophisticated design style.
Why do you need visual marketing for your business?
Target to social media sites
A study by Statista found that most teenagers hang out at the five social media sites below:
- Snapchat - 79%
- Facebook - 76%
- Instagram - 73%
- Twitter - 40%
- Pinterest - 31%
These websites have in common a focus on images and short content. According to MDG Advertising, posts on social networking sites can increase views up to 48% if accompanied by images and videos. Because content contains attractive and interesting images and videos, it will easily affect the sight and emotions of the viewer.
For example, a content meme with funny and funny sayings will make people feel good, so they will easily press the Share button and create a new trend.
The Dunkin Donuts brand is an outstanding example of an effective visual marketing strategy. The brand’s posts are extremely “delicious” and lively, bringing a sense of creativity and fun through images. Dunkin Donuts has never done live advertising. Instead, they chose to show off product images in a special way. This makes their content widely shared by the online community.
Therefore, the views of the post and the number of followers of your brand’s social networking site will increase rapidly if there are smart visual content strategies. Good management of the images on these social networking sites will help you connect with the public and your potential customers.
Increase your business branding
Visual marketing gives you a great benefit which is to increase your business branding. Swim for your company’s values and beliefs expressed directly through visual content.
Potential customers will often be persuaded by the effort to explain why your company exists more than what you are selling. In particular, remember that branding things like company tags or logos are associated with visual marketing. More importantly, as mentioned above, when targeting social media sites, before you post infographics, images, videos or even games, you need to identify the target audience to know what message to send to the viewer. This will not only create a positive impact but also make viewers remember your brand.
If the reason your business exists is inconsistent with your message, it’s highly recommended that it not be used as part of an intuitive marketing campaign.
People like to share visual content
Typically, there is a group of customers who like to share what they like with others called Millenials. The fact that they share your content gives the profound meaning that it is worthy and engaging enough. This will sometimes explode into a trend and become popular. Thanks to this, your store will become more popular and more popular, which means you will have more customers.
In particular, Millennials like to share visual content like a funny meme or hilarious video about shooting interesting people at your workplace. Visual content tends to be shared more than text-based content. In addition, it creates more responses from viewers. Many people will interact immediately when they are intrigued by visual content and continue to share and talk about it enthusiastically.
Visual contents engage the brains
Research shows that humans are heavily influenced by visual content: 90% of information is transferred to the brain in visual form, 65% of us are visual learners. Visual images attract attention, strengthen emotions and affect our attitude.
When people read the information, they are likely to only remember 10% of that information three days later. However, if a related image is paired with the same information, people will retain 65% of the information three days later.
So, articles with visual content that will help your business achieve immediate effects include: Get more clicks because it stimulates readers’ curiosity, get more trust when content has clear images/clips, and help readers stay longer posts because the content is short and easy to understand; help readers remember more about the message or brand of your business.
Visual contents are easy to learn and consume
Visual content is super easy to understand and consume.
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The brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than plain text.
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40% of us respond with images better than text.
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50% of us have a particularly active brain when processing images.
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Infographic companies attract 12% more interactions on average.
Visual contents draw attention
Visual content attracts attention, strengthen emotions and affect our attitude. It will be boring when the whole long paragraph makes viewers unable to find the end. The period of their interest is very short, shorter than ever, really. In this situation, visual content will help you convey the content and messages of the entire article to viewers simply and quickly.
Do you believe that when the number of views, likes, shares of articles with visual content (even a lot of images, videos, memes, etc) posted on the blog has 30 times more views and shares than those with the full-text article? That’s not a small number, and it reminds you to focus on investing in visual content to attract more viewers.
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How to make a standout visual marketing campaign?
Successful marketers need to know how to blend channels and images harmoniously. To to make a standout visual marketing campaign, here are some ways for you.
Start telling stories with pictures:
Have you ever wondered how to make a big explosion among the content on social networks?
Using images to tell stories is the golden key to the above question. Instead of the method of telling the great story in words and words, images that tell stories are the methods with the goal of “show, don’t tell”. This method has proven effective in attracting a large number of followers, visitors, and of course, increasing sales.
Storytelling images are simply images that just look at it and the viewer will immediately understand and remember the message that your brand wants to express.
5 tips for telling stories through pictures:
- Use images to tell a story about your brand culture:
The most effective way to engage with potential customers is to share with them images that reflect the brand’s culture and spiritual values. This will win the trust of the community of fans, which will allow them to bypass a host of other competitors in the marketplace to remain loyal to your brand.
For example, the photo showing the responsibility and support of The Home Depot with Veterans shared on Facebook on The 14th by The Home Depot on February 14, attracted a strong online community.
- Use mascots to speak for your brand:
Aflac had successfully used the image of the lucky duck on Facebook in its famous campaign when it moved from television to encroaching social networks, with the number of fans has reached over 600,000.
Mascots can really do miracles on social networks. The fact is that mascots are more likely to give your brand sympathy to customers among dozens of competitors’ logos. A little note that you should choose the mascot to suit your target audience, especially children’s customers. One more note is that science has proven that fictional literary characters will be able to make a buzz on social networks a lot more times than celebrities can do.
- Take advantage of creativity from your customers:
Your customers are the most creative, let them become “spokespersons” for your brand by encouraging them to tell your brand story. Sharing fan-made content on social networking sites is not only a way to show your gratitude to your brand’s sympathy, but it will also help strengthen the bond between the brand and the customers.
In the picture is the design of a customer’s Starbucks coffee cup. Immediately after Starbucks shared the image of this cup, the company made users really excited with more than 80,000 likes and 1,400 shares, 350 comments.
- The main characters in the video about your company’s story:
Images that tell stories are nothing more realistic than videos that capture the customer’s feelings about your product. Share customer videos that record their reviews and experiences about your product. This will give customers confidence and build their thinking about how your product is helping the surrounding life.
The most successful example of applying this secret is a share on Kiva’s Facebook page: Kiva shared on her Facebook about a customer who used the green loan from the company to start a business with a hair salon in Mongolia.
- Make the most of the power of videos:
Videos are a visual storytelling tool that single images can never do. Facebook has statistics that 8/10 of the most shared content on this social network last year all contain videos. Converting the content you want to convey to users into videos that can serve as mini blockbusters makes users enjoy and share each other.
Samsung is one of the famous phone brands that always knows how to tell video stories about their phone products in a very interesting way.
Trust the numbers
Tracking your visual marketing activities and their popularity is essential. To do this, perform simple A/B tests. Then, you can refine your visual marketing strategies to become the most attractive.
Bringing readers the visual breaks
Your image is like oxygen to readers. Let them breathe and feel comfortable between passages and be inspired to read more.
To do that you can use:
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Graph
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Chart
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Custom images
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Cartoon
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Screenshots
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Memes
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Video
Whatever visual form you use, add an alt tag to it. By doing that, you make your images easy to find on browsers and search engines. This will improve your rankings on browsers.
Make sure you do NOT allow readers to suffer from dizziness. Social Triggers founder Derek Halpern noticed a psychological effect when the characters on each line next to an image:
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Easier to read.
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Text appears smoother.
A lot of people don’t like to read, they just like to glance at it. Please add some changes by changing the font size. Or by adding a change of font size and adding images, so you will help readers more skim.
Learn from the masters
One of the best places to learn is Facebook or Instagram. With the participation of over 500 million active users, you will have many people to learn from. Take your time surfing around such social networking sites and learn about current trends. Thanks to this, you can be inspired and make sure what you post is always fresh and interesting.
Stay organized
The image you post on your social network is very important, as the image of a brand depends on it. On social media, use your own images or use stock images. Readers like to read text combined with images. An image covered with text overlays is becoming increasingly popular. When you put the message inside a picture, readers will feel more interested. Besides, make sure to arrange images appropriately in size, quantity, and quality.
Use featured images at the beginning of your content. It will attract the reader’s attention and inspire them to stay.
Alternatively, you can choose the style for the image:
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Your image may be opened to the width of the post.
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Half-width image.
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For the wrapped text around the image.
Best visual marketing examples for you to learn
Infographic on KISSmetrics
Infographics bring a great effect on visual marketing. A particularly successful example is KISSmetrics. On the KISSmetrics’ infographics page, you will find dozens of examples of useful content including content marketing and growth hacking using visualized vividly via infographic. This is considered a great success and brings a lot of traffic to the site.
This is an ideal place for you to start the visual content marketing journey because the tools are always available to assist you and the content is closely related to what you use to handle. You can leverage Google to gather the necessary data and tools on the KISSmetrics site that will help you put it all together. In particular, you can also combine graphics yourself or buy stock graphics if you know how to use Photoshop at a basic level.
Grammarly Cards
I use grammar badly, which is why I make every effort to improve it, including the Grammarly subscribe, the online grammar editing tool.
As a result, I have been watching and enjoying their visual content marketing for years. Grammarly is especially good at creating memes that bring value and humor to their followers.
Some of their images are better designed than the majority. This also proves that visual content does not always require high design techniques. Grammarly won through clever and humorous ideas.
Starbuck Channel on Instagram
Starbucks is a personality brand. They bring not only a delicious coffee flavor but also a lifestyle company. While regularly posting product images, they also incorporate their branding in a positive way. If you notice, you will see that they often combine personal pages with images to help increase brand value as well as the interest of followers.
Neil Patel’s Infographic
Neil Patel is a talented content marketing expert with great personal brand. He is also the creator of compelling visual creation tutorials. Not only does this guide contain valuable sharing, but it also creates a great landing page for visitors. Get to Neil’s Beginners Guide to Online Marketing to learn the great values he shares.
Coca Cola on Tumblr
Coca-Cola has always been known as a famous brand with effective visual content marketing strategies. For example, in their 2020 initiative video, they were able to emphasize their content marketing strategy by moving from one-way messaging to carefully optimized content marketing to engage audiences.
Coca-Cola’s Tumblr page is another great example. When you visit their Tumblr page, you will be like visiting a funny, lovely, even a little weird world with lots of brand memories and animated gifs.
Conclusion
In short, visual marketing is an integral part of every marketing strategy. It helps your business stand out and attract more audiences. Visual content not only makes text content easier to read, and more memorable but can also be used to create compelling messages with content in just a small part. Right now, more marketers than ever need to have a better insight into the management of visual marketing and efforts to improve the image to enhance the competitiveness of your brand.
Our article details what visual marketing is and how to create a standout visual marketing campaign. Hope this will be useful to you.
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