11 Smart Tips to Elevate Your Visual Content Marketing Strategy

Content matters. Relevant content creates opportunities. Visual content that reaches and converts can take your online marketing business to another level. Data tells us that 70% of companies have invested in content marketing, including visual marketing. Other than that, more than 80% of adults dig on content on different devices at the same time.

Thus, it’s just necessary that you need to hone those strategies and level up your visual content marketing. We have here content marketing tips to help you elevate your visual content.

1. Consider Consistency

When you’re a business owner or a digital marketer, you know that building consistency with your brand is not only for brand awareness and uniformity in your posts or products. But mainly, it is to build trust with your target market. And also, when there’s a flow of consistency with every content you put out there, or product your launch, they will remember you and associate your logo or color theme with your brand.

You need to build and create a solid and consistent visual identity. Even in your social media feeds, the filter you use, the style of posting, the design elements-there needs to be unity and uniformity in these visual content. Cohesiveness is easily identified, and you get to express that with your brand and is one of the main thrusts for your content marketing strategy.

2. Know Your Market

Before you go hype things up, you need to do your research when you’re in the digital space promoting a product. To succeed in this arena, you need to know your target market, and you need to know who you’re reaching.

Collecting demographic data with the help of analytics is now essential when it comes to digital marketing. The primary data of gender, age, income and the like can help you create an audience database to gain insight into what content you want to put out there or how you want to deliver it.

Out of these demographic data, you can also start to build buyer personas, which will help you identify what content works. These buyer personas carry your client’s feedback, shopping challenges, etc. With all these, you can have a more extensive glimpse of how to approach your target market better-how you can provide better solutions and how your content can bridge this gap.

3. Believe the Basics

In the digital marketing industry, knowing your creative basics is essential. Best practices don’t just happen overnight. It has always been a process, and successful entrepreneurs understand marketing basics, even more so in digital marketing.

Here are some tips that are not only elemental in photography but in creating great visuals in general:

1. Natural Light is still the best light. When you want awesome outtakes, take them out in the sunlight. Pick a good timing, whether it be in the early morning when the sun isn’t too high yet, or the golden hour in the late afternoon- for sure, your photos will look amazing.
2. Remember the Rule of Thirds! You don’t necessarily have to put your subject or product in the center, but remembering this rule will provide creative awareness on how you want to highlight your subject better in the photo. Get that best angle!
3. Don’t overdo it. Stick with the design elements that will surely complement your image; you don’t need to create loud dynamics in a single visual. Keep it simple, and remember that you must express the core message of the image.
4. No to over-editing. Nobody wants to look at a photo that has strayed away from reality-one that’s almost close to being fake. Over-editing a photo sometimes takes away a visual’s ‘reality’ factor and will not be that appealing. It will build curiosity, yes, but it will also stir up criticism. You can still keep your visuals creative, clean and compelling without retouching them to create impact.

4. Choose Your Content

But of course, you need to choose your content. You just don’t want to randomly throw posts out there with no cohesiveness or affinity to your branding or anything you market. There has to be a core to the content, a message that you communicate. And ask yourself, what kind of content do you want to deliver? Informative? Entertaining? Creative? Dynamic? Do you want to use images this month and then videos the next month? Or, do you want to utilize both? Think about all these while not forgetting to maintain the consistency that stitches through and through your whole brand.

So plan, plan, plan. Evaluate the results of your brainstorming and carefully build and map out your content. You can now use tools to help you map your posts on social media and even help you source out the kinds of content relevant for a particular season.

5. Copyright Concerns

Whether we like it or not, copyright laws exist, and when you’re a business owner and doing marketing, you have to keep this in mind. Almost all images you see on the net are copyright protected. Even at times when one is not aware, you can be subject to infringement if you have shared or reposted visuals that are copyrighted. Basically, for copyrighted visuals, videos, music and the like, you need permission or even a license to utilize it.

If you are the one who created the image or produced the music, then you have the right to it. But of course, in sourcing other visuals, or other creative work, best practice tells us to inquire of the source and even read the material from where it’s sourced to get further details. You do not want to have legalities involved, so best that you do all your research and give credit to whoever owns it.

6. Get it with Dynamic Visuals and Videos

And yes, when we talk about elevating your visual content marketing strategy, you want to deliver something that stirs curiosity and captures your target market’s attention- making them click or watch whatever you have posted.

Make it dynamic but don’t overhype it, if you know what I mean. You need an excellent graphic designer or photo editor for outstanding images and illustrations if you want everything to look professional. But suppose you’re watching your budget yet not short-changing your capacity to deliver incredible visuals. In that case, you can always utilize the available photo editing tools and illustration software to elevate your work.

Videos, on the other hand, are definitely one that can capture your audience’s attention. Depending on the content-and the length of the video, it can go a long way in digital marketing. Most of the time, a person can quickly shift attention when the videos go beyond a minute or two-unless you’re aiming for a vlog.

But wait, there’s more-you can also go live! If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to have a deeper connection with your audience, you can go live and get into a more personal and relatable vibe but not straying away from your marketing goals. You can also incorporate online events or games where you can give away freebies and encourage more following.

7. Put it in the Calendar

Not everyone has the luxury of time to monitor daily posts or post daily and several times a day. What’s helpful and has proven efficient for digital marketers is scheduling their posts online. Without careful planning and scheduling, you’ll cram and risk your content marketing success.

There are now tools available such as content calendars, that can help you schedule your posts on different social media platforms. Being able to see everything ahead -when you’re posting content, what you’re posting, is so necessary. Managing this area and solidifying your online logistics can keep you steady and help you focus on other significant details of your marketing process.

8. Size Matters

When it looks great on your phone but not on your laptop-this means you have missed out on double-checking the correct media image size for your post. Posting visuals with very low resolutions, pixelized, stretched, really looks unprofessional. This can communicate a negative message to your audience and may leave a bad taste in their mouths.

You can always check social media image size guides online to double-check the right visual specs before posting anything. Remember to preview your posts first, as visuals or other images are not uniformly displayed on all devices.

And again, maximize those photo editing tools and illustration software; these have features that can help you get your social media image sizing right.

9. Optimize

What exactly do you mean by this? I’m glad you asked. When we say optimize, we mean the images, visuals, videos that you post. You can optimize by using keywords and certain descriptions to enable these to be readily searched in search engines, making them SEO-ready.  Based on data, more than 25% of all internet searches are heavily attributed to visual search, which can lead to an increase in traffic. Your visual or image descriptions must include your keyword, and of course, resonate with what the image reflects.

10. Audit. Assess. Analyze

This is our way of saying to mind your metrics. You are not the only business running in the digital sphere, and you need to know what works for you and what can help your business become better.

Considering the competition around, you need to discover (with the help of data and analytics) what content has driven you forward or what has brought in more leads or site traffic.

Logging your content-titles, length of content (for videos), number of shares is significant. You can create your spreadsheet for this. Then you can assess each post/ content to its level of relatability, usefulness or impact. Afterwards, analyze and draw from insights (coming from analytics too) where you have missed out or some gaps that you can bridge to create better content.

By managing this and making sure you are monitoring what’s necessary, you can guarantee that you’re on your way to establishing great content marketing strategies.

11.  Share. Share. Share.

Social media has created ways wherein CTAs or Calls To Action have been simplified, and even you, as a social media user, don’t even think twice about doing. Liking, sharing, reacting to posts are simplified and creative ways of taking action on specific content.

Sharing a post or content helps increase awareness of what you’re trying to market. When you already have a following, and your posts/content gets shared by your followers, it will create an impact. But of course, our prerequisite to this is that the content is worth sharing or even by liking it means it has somehow graced their feed and has captured their attention for even a few seconds.

You can start this by sharing your post first! Or Link it to your other social media platforms; share it in groups and other relevant pages-and don’t forget to add hashtags!

Takeaway

We all know that images tell stories and can create powerful messages when delivered accordingly. It’s possible-you can keep these visuals relevant, dynamic, and impactful simultaneously. But managing all the visual content you put out there and optimizing them for a higher engagement is another story. Remember to utilize the automation tools necessary to help you keep your workflow more efficient while not neglecting the value of a powerful storyboard and the results of a strong brainstorming session.

Visual storytelling is a process, and establishing great visual content marketing strategies involves different methods as well.

Manage. Monitor. Until you can make it work for you and your brand.

Author’s Bio:

Shelly Solis is a digital marketer with more than a decade of experience as a freelancer. She loves to write articles on telehealth, accounting, photography, SaaS and IT, finance, and infrastructure management.

She is the co-founder of  SaaSLaunchr: SaaS Marketing Agency, a marketing service provider for SaaS businesses focused on SEO and guest posting services.