On any social media network on any given day, you’ll see an image or video that has gone viral. It might have been shared, retweeted, liked, pinned, or commented on, but it’s generating hundreds of thousands of views.
This is the ideal form of visual marketing because people are being introduced to your company in a way that doesn’t feel like advertising. That matters because each generation has its own way to avoid traditional marketing. Baby Boomers use the ad break to make a cuppa and millennials use an ad-blocker on their web browsers.
As people find ways to avoid ads, companies have to get smarter about the advertising they put out and provide value to potential customers.
Let’s look at the different forms of visual marketing and design to see what is best for your company.
Infographic Design – Perfect for sending a complex message
Infographics help to make dense information more palatable for regular people by using visual aspects, like pictures and pie charts. This works because images are processed 4 to 12 times faster than text. Had you heard it was 60,000 times faster? That’s a myth, as are many other myths surrounding the visual brain.
If someone shared a 1,000-word Facebook post about the, “Best non-dairy milk to buy in 2020”, you might not read it. However, that same data on an infographic would take less time to read and be easier to digest, so it’s more likely to be shared.
This makes infographics a great way to market your company, so long as you combine an interesting subject, top-notch research, an attractive design, and professional marketing. To create the best infographics, it’s important to have your copywriter and graphic designer work together to ensure the text and images complement each other.
Educate your customers
Of course, infographics shouldn’t be used exclusively as sales adverts because pushing a, “Buy this now” message will make potential customers turn away. Instead, think of infographics as a means of educating your customers, with a small section about your company.
With most service industries it’s easy to come up with ideas for infographics. If you offer an online French course, then there are a myriad of topics on learning French you could cover for example. If you’re selling a technical product, like a laptop it’s also easy to cover a wide range of technical questions that someone might have. Or you can compare different similar products and explain what the difference is. But what if you’re selling a product like office furniture, which might not lend itself to an infographic quite so easily?
Here are 7 ideas for infographic themes that could be adapted for most products, using office
furniture as the example:
- Which is most environmentally friendly – metal or wooden desks?
- How to decide what office furniture you need
- Tips for setting up a home office (think of a context where your product is useful and create
an infographic about it, from a bigger picture perspective) - How to set up an office space for team working (alternatively zoom in on more specific use
and create an infographic about that) - What’s essential for good body posture (the health angle)
- How office furniture has evolved over the last century (a history of…)
- What was the most popular office furniture in 2020?
To sum up, infographics should have short sections of content interspersed with pictures, diagrams,
and bullet points. They should also use a color scheme that reflects your company’s branding.
Quotagraphic marketing – Using the wisdom of the past
Quotagraphics are images featuring a famous quote or a quote from a famous person, like the one above. They can make you laugh, cry, or think, but most importantly they will resonate and compel you to share the image. This makes them a perfect way to organically increase visitors to your website or social media page without paying for people to see them, as you would through traditional social media advertising.
How do you design a Quotagraphic?
- Find a quote relevant to your industry.
- Check if the person being quoted is still alive or died recently. If yes, then you’ll need their or their estate’s permission to use their quotes. Read more on which images on the internet are copyrighted.
- Create an image to go with it, ideally featuring a photo or illustration of the person being quoted.
- Add your company logo and web address to the image to help with branding, drive traffic to your site, and ensure that no one can steal your work.
- Share far and wide on social media, in relevant groups and on your profiles, using the necessary hashtags.
Videos – For an interactive experience
Video marketing is the art of using videos to promote your business online. It’s an important way to advertise to and educate your potential consumers because it can be shared on every social media platform.
You can shoot high-quality videos using your smartphone and edit it with cheap or free software, so a viral video doesn’t need to cost the world. The important thing for most videos is that they’re authentic; something that consumers are looking for over high-cost, glossy TV adverts.
Videos have the potential to reach the widest audience and can be dubbed if need be to reach an international audience.
Read more about video marketing in this 8 step guide on how to build a successful video marketing strategy.
