Why is visual marketing important as a part of your overall small business marketing strategy? The answer is simple: images and videos are proven to be more appealing and engaging than any other marketing material.
People retain more information when they see it in action instead of reading or hearing about it. That is why 80% of marketers have already incorporated visual assets in social media marketing campaigns.
The fact of the matter is that our brains engage far easily with stories than just plain facts. When combined with visuals, your message engages with the mind of the consumer because our brains usually perceive them as actually experiencing a story instead of just reading about it.
So it’s no wonder that more than 70% of marketers claim that videos lead to more conversions than plain text. Marketers have realized that visuals offer a more immersive experience and trust them to engage audiences better than written promotional material.
Cut short – it’s time to include inspiring visuals in your small business marketing strategies to reach your overall business goals.
Here are four visual strategies to bring your marketing efforts to life:
1. Create Video Guides For Your Business.
What do you do when you need to learn a new skill or how to fix something?
You probably search for a video on the internet to teach you.
A TechSmith study revealed that 53% of people watch at least two instructional videos every week.
Outright selling and overt marketing just don’t work anymore – you need to educate customers about your product and help them understand it better to convince them to use it. A great way to do this is by creating what you know they want – videos.
No matter which industry you operate in, instructional videos, video guides or even short video promotions are an effective delivery method to inform your audiences about your offerings in a memorable manner.
If you are looking for ways to level-up your video making capabilities, you can check out this library of customizable video templates.
They make it easier and more affordable to create branded videos for your business than conventional video production methods that involve purchasing expensive equipment such as cameras, professional video editing software and hiring graphic designers.
This allows you to make a lasting impact on your audience, add your logo or branding to the template and you are good to go!
If you want more inspiration, look at this short video from Solo Stove. It shows their product in action and explains their brand positioning in an easy to understand manner. It’s a short and sweet video that got them plenty of attention from different channels such as product pages, Facebook covers and more.
2. Use Short, Digestible Slides To Disseminate Info.
Educating customers is the new way of selling to them, especially on social media.
Short snippets are more digestible on the go. Imagine your audience casually scrolling Instagram and they come across your post. Is it eye-catching and does it provide information or entertainment value?
People have short attention spans and there’s no better way to capture that attention than short, data-packed slides, either in story or post form, to pleasantly surprise them.
You can even create slides in the form of Instagram story ads, social posts, entertaining and educational infographics and a lot more – these slides can help you present results of a research you conducted or the benefits your products provide to your target audience.
Consider Gym Shark’s Instagram story ads to promote the launch of their ‘Flex’ clothing line. They created an engaging campaign to encourage store visits by the target audience with the ‘Swipe Up’ CTA. They successfully managed to generate 2,400 orders from this ad and secured an ROI of 900% on ad spend.
If Gym Shark can get these results from their Instagram stories and ad campaign, so can you. These results are easily within your reach when you can create impactful stories and posts with customizable templates.
3. Inspire Your Followers And Fans To Create Content For You (UGC).
User-Generated Content (UGC) will get you the stunning visual content you need to attract bigger audiences – and you won’t even have to lift a finger to create it!
A UGC strategy can impact your sales positively as 84% of people trust recommendations by others like them.
There are several ways that your business can go about implementing a UGC strategy, including:
- Getting influencers in your niche to host contests on social media. People who trust these influencers will be more likely to buy from you if they see the influencers using your products
- Creating and promoting personal and actionable hash-tags online and offline (at physical stores). Take inspiration from how Urban Outfitters uses #UOONYOU for their beauty apparel.
- Hosting meet-ups or events to interact with current and prospective consumers. Offer free-goodies and prizes to get a buzz going for your business
- Asking customers and prospects to follow your socials and leave reviews about their experience and the quality of your products and your service level
- Starting an online contest, encouraging people to post pictures with selected hashtags, and rewarding the best with prizes and giveaways
Just look at Starbucks’ #RedCupContest where they get customers to promote the brand by encouraging them to submit photos with the hashtag. They offered a Starbucks gift card to the best entries. This also generated sales for the red Starbucks cup as people flocked to buy it to submit their entries.
The fact of the matter is that people trust businesses that humanize their interactions. Encouraging user-generated content through reviews or contests is a great way to get higher engagement and referrals. Even big brands utilize user-generated content to gain insight into their audience, boost SEO efforts and enhance the reach of their social media posts.
4. Include Stunning Visuals In Your Blogs.
Long-form content like blog posts is advantageous to your business as it delivers better ROI, enhanced readability, and more conversions. And once you pair up your blog with relevant and stunning visuals, you create a long-lasting impact on your readers.
After all, pages upon pages of text can make the posts seem intimidating and you run the risk of disengaging the readers. So, create blog posts with infographics and customizable stock graphics to break that monotony and help your readers better envision the content.
You can easily find blog post headers and other graphic designs online to present quality content for your readers to enjoy and help you convert them to customers. Promoting your blogs with customizable social media templates can entice users to click, creating additional referral traffic for your website.
Later, you can even repurpose this long-form content on your website into smaller, bite-sized content on Pinterest or other social media, by just mentioning the important points and linking it to the main article.
In Conclusion.
No one can deny the fact that creating videos, images, social media posts, flyers animations can help you get better attention than just plain old text. Using eye-catching visuals in your content will create a lasting impression on your target audience, keep them engaged and get you higher conversions.
