You want to know 5 types of visual content your business needs? We’ve put this together and are going to cover each and every part of that question.
Key Content Marketing Points
- Content is crucial for business success. It sells products, engages audiences, and showcases your brand personality.
- A good content strategy is a diverse one. Blogs, Q&As, podcasts are all great formats that engage audiences with your brand messages. But just as important as these is visual content.
- Visuals are a quick and effective way of connecting with your customers online. If you need some inspiration for your own visual content, read on to find it.
- Before you get started, it’s worth getting to grips with the meaning of visual content for your business. Check out this useful guide to get started.
Make tricky data easy with infographics
Everyone has a different learning style. Some people are happy to sit and read a dense piece of text and instantly grasp a concept.
But others prefer a more visual style of learning. They need visual aids such as diagrams, flashcards, or colour-coded systems. Infographics are one such visual aid.
Infographics are perfect for conveying otherwise complex data in an easy-to-understand way. Distinct colours, clear symbols, and concise copy make for simple, easy-to-understand visual content for your audience.
These are easy to create too. There are plenty of tools available to help you quickly create slick informative visual aids. The infographic creator from Piktochart, for instance, is easy to use and highly customisable. Plus it has the added advantage of built-in SEO to help you get your infographics found in the SERPs.
Don’t neglect your admin content
When people talk about content, they often refer to things like social media, blogs, and videos. But content also extends to the other less marketing-centric but just as important administrative content.
Take your company invoices, for example. Whilst this is more functional than engaging, it’s still important to ensure that it looks good.
An invoice says a lot about a business, and a visually appealing bill is both easy to understand — plus it gets paid quicker. Bill generators like Invoice Simple save you time and effort by generating easy-to-understand bills that look good and get paid. We recently implemented a custom designed invoice for a building marketing client which create 3 referrals just because we asked for them on the bill and the client noticed them when going through their filing process after we finished the project.
This even includes otherwise trivial items like your internal documents, such as contracts and company updates. These communicate important information, and their design should reflect that. Visual content like this should convey professionalism and elegance.
An untidy, unintuitive internal document doesn’t inspire trust, but a sleek, clear one looks and feels reliable. Consequently, a clean, minimalist layout helps your staff digest information easier and builds trust between your internal communications and your employees.
Lean on “user generated content (UGC)” for an authentic content fix
User-generated content is the perfect solution for time-poor businesses. It’s genuine, simple to source, and people-powered, helping businesses engage their audience on a personal level.
UGC’s success lies in its authenticity. It is produced by customers for brands, and consequently serves as an implicit approval of your business.
Sourcing UGC is much more straightforward than creating 100% original content yourself. Your target audience regularly shares their own photos and videos on social. UGC simply turns it to suit your business’s needs.
The simplest way to gather UGC from customers is through a competition. Encourage your social followers to submit photos or videos centered around a theme — GoPro’s UGC campaign is a good example of this.
But if you want to really step up your UGC campaign, take it offline. Take control of your UGC by sourcing visual content from real-world seasonal events you’ve either hosted or attended.
Take Christmas, for example. People love taking photos around holidays, and there are a lot of eyes on things like Christmas marketplaces and shopping centres, so why not do something interesting at such a location?
You can do something charitable (give away toys, for instance) to get some PR-friendly photos, or sell your products at an interesting place as part of a festive pop-up. Many ecommerce tools offer easy-to-use POS hardware that lets homepreneurs or SMEs benefit from offline events.
Not only will it look good when people share photos on social media (boosting awareness and footfall to your event), but you can also compile those shots for a website album to show how active you are in the community.
Put video at the core of your product pages
One effective but underused form of visual content is product videos that are actually embedded in the product page.
Instead of just relying on photos to showcase a product, create a short clip of the item and build this video into the product page itself. Place it alongside the product photos so users are compelled to view it.
We are increasingly seeing brands, particular (but not exclusively) apparel brands, using these video clips on their product pages.
Clips are generally between 10-15 seconds and focus on a model using the product — wearing a jacket, turning a handbag over in their hands, and so on. These help prospective customers engage with a product by showing its real-life application.
Remember to keep your clips silent — mobile marketing customers frequently browse on their phones in public, so they won’t appreciate the unexpected noise. Short and silent wins the race.
Embrace memes to connect with your audience
When it comes to marketing, memes can be a divisive thing. Some brands embrace them, peppering them liberally throughout their content. Others deem them unprofessional — you wouldn’t find a meme on the Vogue social feed, for instance.
But when used correctly, they inject some light-hearted humour into your strategy and help you connect with your audience on a personal level. They’re an opportunity to gently poke fun at yourself or your competitors, and help connect younger demographics with your brand.
And it’s not just B2C brands that can benefit from memes — even otherwise uninspiring B2B businesses can use memes in their onsite, email, and social content to great effect. Of course, this all depends on your brand personality. As in the Vogue example earlier,
The KnowYourMeme meme database is ideal for determining what kind of meme you should use and when. Before creating a meme, check out its meaning and history. This helps you prevent any avoidable faux pas online.
Visual content is a necessity in your business’s content strategy. It connects with audiences, easy to create and cost-effective. The examples listed above are just a few types of visual content your business needs. Embrace a variety of visual formats and enjoy the benefits for your business time and again.
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