What Is Visual Marketing?
To be successful at creative visual marketing it’s important to understand what it means, how it works, and the tools that you need to make it work. That’s why it’s called “creative” and in 2018 that’s what audiences are looking for.
We know that most people are visually oriented. According to David Hyerle, the brain can absorb 36,000 images every minute and 80-90 percent of information received from the brain is through the eyes. Wow, if that isn’t mind blowing. Keep in mind that the brain is a visual organ. So, to me it just makes since that using visual marketing should be a key factor in our marketing mix.
Visual marketing allows us to use a variety of design elements, graphics, photographs and videos to tell the story of our brands. The visual cues we use to tell that story will help make our brand more memorable to everyone who views the information. No wonderful live streaming and broadcasting has become so popular and keeps growing.
Pictures tell stories in ways that words cannot. Pictures combined with text will make your story come to life in a new way. Marketing is all about communicating a detailed message to a specific audience. And today’s online tools can help you create very effective images to help complete your marketing story and gain momentum online.
There are free or low-cost options to help you integrate visual eye candy. There is Canva, PicMonkey or Stencil.
Anytime you have the chance to include images in your marketing − whether it’s your social media profile, your website, your blog, or an advertisement, do so and give a lot of thought to every image that you put on your marketing material.
Using visual prompts helps tell your story and will attract the people in your audience who are interested in the topic but who don’t want to read a long text-based story. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is the case, the graphic images you show will enable you to tell your audience a thousand words of information with just a simple glance from them. Keep in mind that a lot of people skim what they are reading these days.
Plus, when you use graphics, photos, and/or video with your text information, blog posts, and sales pages, you make it easier and more likely that others will share the information via social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. In addition, it makes it easier for the search engines to locate the information due to the tags you place with the images. So be sure to use tags!
Using all the visually creative marketing material that you can craft will help you get information out to more people, because they will be more likely to share something that is great to look at.
Types of Visual Marketing
There are many types of visual marketing that you can choose from such as:
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- Banners
- Blog posts
- Books
- Brochures
- Business cards
- Direct mail
- Flyers
- Games
- Giveaways
- Graphics
- Infographics
- Kiosks
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- Letters
- Live Streaming
- Newsletters
- Postcards
- Premiums (tote bags, cups, shirts)
- Presentations
- Press releases
- Social networking campaigns
- Screen casting
- Webinars
- Widgets
- YouTube videos
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Depending on the marketing channel you’re using, you’ll use one or more of these visual marketing tactics. If you can figure out a way to add visual interest to every marketing campaign, you’ll experience more success and reach your goals faster than if you don’t.
So, let’s look at how to stand out visually and best practices.
Stand Out Visually
Choosing the right images can make your content and marketing stand out better than plain textual content. You can use creative copy, gorgeous typography and graphical images that bring your content to life, and draw the eye through the copy quickly.
- White Space – When you create anything graphical and textual it’s imperative to include plenty of white space by using bullets, spacing, and the right fonts. Choose images wisely and for a reason. Every word and every image should have a “why” for being in your marketing material.
- Color – It might take a little research into your target audience to figure out which colors will get the most positive reaction. You may want to cause emotions to come forth in your audience that only color can elicit. But, every audience is different, so it’ll take some research, understanding and testing to pick the right colors.
- Contrast – The more ways that you can make your call to action stand out from the rest of the copy and images, the better. By using contrast such as black/white, white/gray, or other colors that contrast but do not cause your audience’s retinas to burn, you can create the view you want to attract your audience’s eyes where you want them.
- Surprise – Most people today are practically blind to advertisements, and anything that wants to sell them something. The way to overcome this ad blindness is to use visuals to surprise the viewer. Change the fonts; make the CTA stand out such that your audience cannot miss it.
- Encapsulation – Use robust, vibrant shapes to highlight your call to action or anything you want to draw interest to. Put your call to action inside a highlighted, outlined box, or other form that will enclose it to draw attention to it.
- Arrows – Using directional cues will also help draw the reader’s eye toward the information that you want them to see. Anytime you want your reader to imagine the future or some destination in the future, for example, you could show a picture of a road that will take them on a trip.
We looked at what creative visual marketing is and its value for our future marketing efforts online. The psychological factor and how the brain works in absorbing visual information. We also looked at how pictures tell stories and when combined with text attract readers attention. And we know that visually appealing images results in more social media shares.
Also, we looked at the different types of visual marketing options and how we can engage the reader’s imagination with our marketing efforts through well-known visual cues that help your reader get to the mindset that you want. And over time, as you study your audience, you’ll come to know what types of visual cues will work best with them.