Every day, people consume a massive amount of online content. In such a crowded landscape, it’s tough to grab your audience’s attention.
That’s where visual marketing can come in handy.
According to a survey, 73% of people said that they have less time for research and reading. However, they said they could devote more than five minutes for visual and interactive content.
Visual marketing works so well because visual content is a lot easier to consume. At the same time, it has the power to evoke emotions and grab your audience’s attention.
If you’re looking to boost engagement with visual content, here are a few tips to help you out:
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6 Best Tips to Boost Engagement with Visual Marketing
In this article, we have curated a few of the best visual marketing tactics for your brand to boost your content marketing efforts and engage more of your target consumers.
Evoke Emotions with a Quick Story
Evoking the emotions of your audience can do wonders for your engagement. Storytelling appeals to people and works great for businesses as well.
If you can establish emotional connections with your audience, you can expect them to share, like, and comment on your content. Good storytelling can help you build engagement.
So, how can you evoke emotions through well-told stories?
The golden rule for this strategy is, “Show, don’t tell.”
Instead of promoting your brand or product directly, showcase the values that you care about. Or get your customers to say how they benefited from your company or products.
Alternatively, you can also give your customers a sneak peek at your office culture. The goal of such stories is to showcase your brand personality and make it relatable.
Use Compelling Images
Regardless of the type of content that you use for marketing, you’ve got to use compelling images.
Why?
Even before people read an article, they likely see the featured image or graphic first. Similarly, a still shot is what users see before they watch a video.
If you use an intriguing image, you’re likely to get the attention of your audience. Think of images as a hook.
While uploading images, here are a few things you should keep in mind:
- Optimize your images based on the platform you’re uploading them on. Take care of details like format and dimensions.
- Always use images that are relevant to the content.
- Avoid using generic images.
- Include your brand colors to add a hint of personalization to your images.
- Edit your images to fine-tune them.
- Use Snapseed, Canva, and other online editing apps to retouch your images.
Use GIFs
You can also go beyond images. How about moving images?
That’s exactly what GIFs are. They are animated images that have no sound.
GIFs are easy to consume, visually appealing, and mobile-friendly. Plus, they can help you add humor to your content. The best part is that they are compressed, so they don’t take as much time to load as videos or heavy images.
So, even if your audience doesn’t have a good internet connection, chances are they will still be able to see GIFs. You can use them in emails, blog posts, and on social media. They provide a wide scope to pan out your creativity.
To get more engagement, you can use GIFs for product reviews or even for a product launch. Apart from using the already available GIFs on the internet, you can also use customized ones by integrating your brand identity like colors and logo.
Existing videos of your brand can also be edited and converted into GIFs. Just don’t go overboard with GIFs. If you use them too often, they may lose the novelty factor.
Looking for some inspiration to create engaging GIFs?
Below is how Google used a GIF to promote their science fair on Instagram.
Get Creative with Memes
If your memes are creative and funny, your audience will surely engage. The reason why memes are more engaging is that they are very relatable and humorous.
When content is relatable, people are likely to share it. That’s why memes can be a great addition to your content marketing strategy.
They are playful, engaging, and come with a strong entertainment value. While they can help you boost your engagement rate, you need to keep yourself updated with pop culture references to make sure your meme game is on point.
Barkbox often posts creative dog memes to keep their audience engaged. As you can see in the screenshot below, some of their memes are even topical.
Make More Videos
People are consuming more videos online.
According to a study by HubSpot, 75% of the millennials browse at least one video daily.
The same study also showed that video marketing impacts the buying decisions of 64% of an audience. It’s evident that videos are a powerful tool for marketing your products and brand.
When it comes to videos, you can experiment with different formats. From event videos to product tutorials, influencer reviews, and onboarding videos, you can choose any type of video to promote your brand.
Depending on your campaign goals, you should pick the kind of video that you want to create. For instance, if you want to boost your brand awareness and educate your customers about your products, you should make explainer videos.
You can get some inspiration from Microsoft:
To familiarize their audience with how their cloud system works, they created a short, animated explainer video.
Go Live on Social Media
Live videos are easy to produce. Unlike social media videos, you don’t need to spend hours editing them. Live videos allow you to be spontaneous and reach out to your audience on-the-go.
The best part is you can use live videos for various purposes, such as
- Launch a new product
- Review a product
- Interview celebrities/customers
- Question and answer sessions
- Tutorials
- Behind-the-scenes action
Chevrolet used Facebook Live to show off its all-electric 2017 Bolt electric vehicle at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Their video was shared more than 450 times on Facebook.
Ready to Boost Engagement?
It is not easy to create content that can engage your audience. If you want to grab the attention of your audience, it’s a good idea to include more visual content. You can use compelling images, videos, memes, and GIFs to add an element of fun to your content.
To create genuine connections, you should also focus on building a narrative that evokes an emotional response. It’s a strategy that can take your engagement rate to the next level.
Have you tried any of the tactics mentioned above? How well were you able to use them? Did you get satisfactory results?
Let us know in the comments section.
Image source: Freepik Premium
