In the modern era, it's all about the visuals. From the explosion of video across social media to the popularity of memes across the internet, visual content marketing has become vital in the business world for big companies and small startups alike. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, which is a great return on investment from a marketing perspective.
In this guide, we'll explain exactly what visual content marketing is, what types are out there, why it's important for your business, and how you can implement visual content marketing strategies effectively.
Top Visual Content Marketing Stats
Whether you're simply sharing the occasional Instagram or using a full-on social media management tool, integrating visual content into your marketing strategy can have a significant impact on your bottom line. But if you need any further convincing, check out these notable visual content marketing statistics below to understand exactly why this medium is so valuable for your business:
- 91% of consumers prefer visual content to written content (Forbes)
- 84% of consumers agree that watching promotional videos have convinced them to purchase a product or service. (Wyzowl)
- 62% of marketers use visuals primarily as part of blog content or landing pages (Venngage)
- Design and visual content are the biggest challenge for 23.7% of content marketers (HubSpot)
- 41% of marketers are focused on creating more video and visual content (Semrush)
As you can tell, these stats paint a pretty clear picture to show that investing and actioning visual content marketing into your business can make a big difference to achieving your business goals and staying ahead of your competitors. But before we go any further, what exactly is visual content marketing?
What Is Visual Content Marketing?
Visual content marketing describes the use of visual content, such as images, videos, infographics, and even memes, to inform, engage, and connect with your audience in service of growing your business.
Considering visual content has infinitely more staying power than the written word when it comes to marketing, this kind of strategy is highly recommended across the marketing world.
In so many words, users engage more when they have something to look at. In fact, users are 30% more likely to send payment when visuals are involved with your marketing.
Main Types of Visual Content Marketing
Now that you know what visual content marketing is, here are some of the specific types you might want to explore for your business, including video, images, infographics, and memes, listed in order of popularity
Video
Video has been the most popular form of visual content marketing for a while now, with virtually every large corporation deeming the medium an absolute must for all of business. From TikTok's meteoric rise during the pandemic to the expansion of video tools across social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it's clear; the future is video.
Video marketing provides a unique opportunity for allowing a lot of information in a short period of time. From a marketing standpoint, video content is best used to demonstrate setups, solutions, and other step-by-step processes that would otherwise be challenging via standard images. You could use it for demonstrating your products and services or simply producing content that will appeal to your target audience, to increase brand awareness.
Images
Yes, videos are the most popular option when it comes to visual content marketing, but let's be honest, they take a lot of work and money to get right. Fortunately, images are a stalwart in visual content marketing, providing an easier avenue to engagement than their motion-based counterparts.
As for how much more effective images make your marketing attempts, one study found that articles with images in them were twice as likely to be shared than those without. Suffice it to say, images have an impact on your marketing, whether they're moving or not. Still images with accompanying text, no matter which platform you’re using, are the foundation to visual content marketing, which no business has an excuse not to use, especially with the amount of free image libraries available online to help you get started.
Of course, unique, custom imagery will take you further, allowing integrated branding and tailored messaging. Personalized imagery has even been shown to decrease cart abandonment rates by 17% and improve conversion rates by 200% (Hyperise).
Source: Starbucks email marketing campaign
Infographics
If you still need to use some text to get your point across but want to add a bit of visual flare to your marketing, infographics are a great way to do so. They combine engaging design with pertinent information to draw in readers in a more meaningful way.
While less popular than videos and images alone, infographics are highly shareable thanks to the easily digestible information that is often contained within. Particularly when it comes to studies and statistics, they can take your marketing efforts from drab to fab with minimal effort — there are plenty of easy-to-use infographic creation tools available online.
Memes
Business marketing used to be all about buttoned-up, no-nonsense strategies with good ROI and broad appeal. Today, however, businesses aren't the overly professional entities they once were. In fact, the most successful marketing campaigns are often founded in some kind of relatable meme, so it's time to loosen your collar and have a little fun with it.
Memes obviously have their limits, often relying on humor and timely events, giving them a short and competitive shelf life within the noise of the internet, so they aren't likely to be as effective or popular as videos, images, and infographics when it comes to your overall visual content marketing strategy. But when it comes to social media, they are uniquely positioned to humanize your brand while engaging with younger demographics that see through the average corporate marketing strategy. They’re cheap to create, and basically built to go viral, so why wouldn't you take advantage of that potential?
Actionable Ways to Implement Visual Content Marketing Strategies
We know what visual content marketing is, we know which types are most popular, so now it's time to start implementing and improving your strategies, to improve your bottom line. Follow the steps below and you'll be on your way to a more effective visual content marketing strategy.
Consider your audience
Before you do anything, you should consider who will be viewing and engaging with your visual content. While broad appeal can help, it's always best to know exactly who you are targeting with your strategy and what the best way to reach them might be.
To narrow down your audience a bit, you'll want to ask yourself questions like, “what problem are we trying to solve?,” “who are we trying to help?,” and “how will we measure our audience engagement?” These will help you to get a better picture of your audience to better inform your strategy.
Establish your brand
Visual content marketing isn't just about throwing memes at your social media feed and seeing what goes viral. It's about telling a story that is unique and special to your specific brand. Subsequently, you're going to have to establish your brand in a concrete way that will inform your future visual content strategy.
The best way to establish your brand is by being consistent. If you're a retail business, try to keep your visual content marketing based in the retail space, rather than branching out for the sake of a broader appeal. Use your brand’s colors, tone, and style wherever you can. Having a mission statement actually written out can help too, as long as you actually let it inform your content rather than just sit on a web page that no one clicks on.
Encourage user-generated content
As a business, the idea of posting enough content to get noticed can seem like an insurmountable task. The sheer volume of visual content out there admittedly could make it feel like you'll never make a dent. However, if there’s a niche for your business then there’s a niche for your audience, and by encouraging user-generated content, you can build a community that enjoys engaging with your brand and wants to spread the word themselves, helping your visual content marketing to go further.
Whether it be soliciting reviews for your products, posing questions on your social channels, or even hosting a caption contest on social media, you can get your potential customers to drive engagement for your brand all on their own, making your job infinitely easier in the long run.
Optimize for specific platforms
Just a few short years ago, brands were being told that they have to optimize their content for mobile devices, as the majority of users were logging in on their smartphones. Well now, with so many different social media platforms out there, marketers are being encouraged to cater their visual content to specific platforms as well, in order to play the algorithms and get the most views.
From TikTok and Instagram to Gmail and Outlook, visual content can take many forms. Most notably, Reels and TikTok style videos are huge drivers for discovery and are pretty much exclusively portrayed vertically, on mobile devices. Subsequently, businesses focusing on those platforms should avoid horizontally framed videos to ensure they have the best chance of making an impact.
Be genuine
Consumers in the modern age are smart. Sales-y language, marketing jargon, and anything implying that all you care about is making money will almost assuredly fall flat. If you really want to build community, engage customers, and unlock the full potential of visual content marketing, being genuine needs to be a priority.
How can you be genuine? It all depends on your business, your customers, your team, and all the other details that make your business special. It may seem like we're quoting a Disney Channel original movie here but being true to yourself and your business’ value can go a long way when it comes to visual content marketing.
Verdict: Should Your Business Use Visual Content Marketing?
Your company should absolutely be using visual content marketing to supercharge your business. The return on investment is high given the low effort it can take, the engagement can be substantial, and the ability to reach more and more customers than you can with words alone is undeniable. Whether it's through video, images, infographics, or yes, even memes, visual content marketing is an absolute must in 2023.
Getting started isn't easy, particularly if you've been hesitant to jump in with both feet until now. But there are plenty of tools online that can help you start designing and posting your visual content on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you want to make the biggest impact, you'll need to invest to make sure you don't go viral for all the wrong reasons.