Visuals can have an enormous impact on the success of your content marketing and social media campaigns. Visuals help to grow more traffic, clicks, and conversion. When it comes to social media marketing, creating strong, engaging visuals is probably the most important aspect of the content you create.
Think about the posts you’ve engaged with recently. The ones which grabbed your attention, the posts which made you stop and think, laugh, shout, share, or those which were the initial inspiration for a subsequent purchase. Undoubtedly it will have been the visual which initially caught your eye.
The social media landscape has become increasingly crowded and noisy with brands constantly vying for attention. This combined with the increase in people accessing social media on mobile means that it has never been more important to ensure your content is visually strong.
When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
Brain Rules, April 2020
Visual Mediums
When planning content there are a range of visuals that can be used such as photography, designed graphic images, GIFs, infographics, and of course video and animation.
The balance between these different mediums will depend on your business and brand. Some products such as fashion, home interiors or travel are a perfect match for lots of stunning photography whereas for a B2B service provider might rely more heavily on specially created, branded graphics and infographics. Often the best approach is to use a combination of all of these types of visual across your planning choosing the right approach for the content you are sharing.
Platforms
Different social platforms are driven by different forms of content so whilst it is fair to say visuals are important on all the platforms it is always worth considering where your content is going. Some posts will work across all platforms whilst other won’t. For example, striking photography and graphics are vital to successful engagement on Instagram and Pinterest whilst on LinkedIn images will help to grab attention but will often be there to enhance informative written content.
Words still matter
Whether it is subtitles on video (this is really important for people watching on mobile with the sound off) or the copy which accompanies a post featuring a photograph it is important to remember that copy is still a key element. The secret is to combine imagery with words to create posts which provide everything needed to capture the attention and convey the message.
Creating visuals
There is no one size fits all approach to creating visuals. For photography and video can be created quickly by anyone with just a mobile phone, other visuals will take more time and effort but there are various tools out there which can help.
If you think your social media marketing needs more visual impact but you aren’t sure where to start then get in touch with ie instinct to find out more about how we could help with content creation and social media management.
Callie James, Managing Director, ie instinct
