Creating Visual Content That Converts – Strategies, Tips and Tricks

Many of us have grown accustomed to seeing the use of visual content alongside written words to increase the chance of your business standing out and being noticed in the vast world of the internet and social media. Visual media such as photos, reels, videos and clips that bring added value without using text can be a powerful way to communicate with an audience. Pictures and videos help text-centric content shine; they can stand alone to create powerful messages without the need for words. Audiences vary in what appeals to them, however. Some will find visual images more effective and compelling than spoken or written words so it’s important to consider and make use of the various ways that are available to reach out.

How to win with visual content

By following a few best-practice tips, you can review how it’s possible to get your brand to do the talking by cleverly using videos, photos and graphics to support your content marketing aims. Building a solid brand requires confidence and ongoing understanding of how trends and creative platform trends come and go.

Stories with visuals

Effective content marketing strategies include supporting visual content that will help prevent a random approach to postings that quickly lead your brand message astray. Think further than the pictures you choose. The visuals must support a clear story, and your brand message must be consistent. You are looking to ensure that your audience can follow the narrative of your business thread even when individual assets do not offer an obvious story. Forethought and planning about the general messages and approach will keep you on track.

Visual Content Creation – A strategy

Work out the answers to questions such as:

• What do we want our visual content to accomplish?
• What are the content experiences that engage our identified audience targets?
• How do we solve our client’s problems, and why do they need our product or service?
• How is our brand unique, and how should we convey this to the audience?
• How will we measure success?

A clear idea of where you need to head to make your content convert is vital. It means you can align the visual story into your content marketing strategy without falling into the pitfalls of anchoring your visual content success on creating a new viral phenomenon. An effective plan will turn views into sales and marketing results.

Use what your fans create

Whatever the age of your customers, you are sure to find consumer snaps and selfie videos that allow you to incorporate some of their creative works into your content. Encourage hashtag use so your customers and fans do the work for you. If they can add activity to your platform ads and partner posts, you will reap the success and build a more substantial brand presence without doing all the work yourself.

Tailor content to the platform

Consider the style of the platform you are sharing. You can give the same message, but you may need to review how you give it. Your visuals must fit the audience preferences, conversation style, and platform context. Text-heavy content can be adapted into bite-size visuals for platforms such as Instagram or TikTok and delivered in additions that may well reach are far broader or more diverse audience than it seems the subject would attract. Including frame pauses so that readers have time to read, see and digest the fast-moving Instagram frames can be a great way to attract followers who would otherwise struggle to keep up.

Tap into emotions

Audiences are more likely to react, remember and act if you evoke emotions within them. Understanding how your product or service benefits your customers is the start to creating content that speaks to your customers. Tell stories, and use powerful images that look at the camera in ways that speak without the need for explanation as part of your overall strategy. Include a mix of approaches and be clever about when you want your audience to smile, laugh, cry or feel empathy for the story.

Use online DIY design tools

When your budget doesn’t stretch to bells and whistles advertising, many DIY online and social media design tools make it possible to create free or inexpensive yet compelling and readable images and videos. It’s worth spending time getting to know how you can edit and play with your imagery to tell your story better.

There are many templates that can be used and adapted, and you will learn how to get the best of the platforms keeping in mind the need to give your image room to shine and leave white space on pages so it doesn’t become too cluttered. Keep on your branding guideline colour wheel. One base colour and a few complementary colours work best. Fonts are also critical to clear readability. Poor decisions can often spoil the message’s understanding and memorability.

Diversity

Ensure that the images you use reflect the diversity of our world. A powerful image may say a lot, but you must be mindful that not everyone receives the same message when a healthy balance of perspectives is missing for the many diverse people who will see them.

This isn’t about every single image or video being inclusive or making diversity the focal point of the visual story. Representing diverse communities across your creative process as part of your normalisation of diversity throughout your business will allow you to include variety within your content marketing. Your representation of diversity should not be forced but something as an organisation you embrace organically. The more diverse and inclusive an organisation’s ethos, the more likely they are to find success.

A strong brand

Last but certainly not least! If your content, whether visual, written or moving, will have a greater impact and longevity if they all feature a recognisable brand design. You are already ahead if your audience recognises the content style no matter who created it or where it appears, shared or direct.

That said, sharing or creating content that works on multiple platforms is something to pay close attention to. Not all specifications will work in the same way on each platform. Always check and adapt the content to be optimised on each platform and ensure that embedded links are working, the thumbnail or preview is the one you intend, or that cropping hasn’t changed the image’s resonance and branding.

With a recent figure showing that 91% of consumers prefer interactive and visual content, you should certainly seek to use this to support and drive traffic to your traditional written content to get the best multichannel approach. Use our tips above, and you’re sure to take those first steps into visual content creation with confidence.