It’s better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. Visuals matter and in this day and age, people are far more efficient at devouring images than at reading text. Creating visual content requires certain skills and before you start creating it, you need to know what kind of a difference it’ll make. You also need to know how to create incredible visual content that gets noticed. We’ll cover all that and more in this guide to creating awesome content that’s worth a thousand shares.
Types Of Visual Content
Visual content is king when it comes to engaging an audience. With visuals you can deliver a compelling message, engage your followers, stand out from the crowd and go a step further than your competitors. While many novice bloggers stick to plain text, in the modern landscape, visual content has become equally important. Let’s take a look at the forms of visual content:
- Images;
- Video content;
- GIFs;
- Infographics;
- Presentations.
Each type has its own properties and advantages and is suited to different groups of people and contexts. If you’re trying to utilize a visual content marketing strategy, it’s obvious that you’re also trying to convey important information in a visually compelling way. A lot of bloggers on social media sites do that to pull their followers to a certain resource.
Why You Need Content Marketing
Creating and sharing content to satisfy the needs of a clearly defined target audience is called content marketing. The process of content marketing involves defining an audience to cater for, creating, and then distributing relevant content. If you already know your audience, picking the right platforms for distributing content is easier than you think.
While usage of the major social media platforms varies by factors such as age, gender, and educational attainment, it’s essential that you match the content with the audience and then with the platform.
Visually appealing content can drastically increase the recognition levels of your account or channel. Bloggers, as well as brands, need it to drive more engagement and generate leads. Although with so much content out there only greater targeting and personalization works in a modern world, so to succeed your content should address the needs of a very specific audience.
Why Visual Content is So Important
There are many forms of content that may do well on your blog or channel. But creating visuals saves users time and makes it more comfortable to consume and understand information.
According to a recent study, the brain can process visuals way faster than text. Why not take advantage of that? You can spend seconds looking at an image, instead of spending minutes reading text.
And many users on social media rarely read long captions, whereas they’ll be more willing to scroll through carousel posts.
In general, most people opt for the options that demand less effort when it comes to engaging with information. Visually appealing content is oftentimes fun and engaging, gives more opportunities for hooking a user before leading them towards the more demanding text.
Another reason why you should use visuals is that they break up the text. A text divider provides users with a chance to take a break and avoid being confronted with a long piece of writing. In this case, an image or an infographic take away the sense of intimidation some might feel when presented with a wall of text.
The Marks Of Great Visual Content
When it comes to creating engaging content you should exactly know what actually works and what doesn’t. While there are countless purposes for making useful visual elements, the foremost reason is to make complex ideas easier to consume and understand, especially for users who are not experts.
You probably now thinking about infographics. Indeed, these types of visual content deliver great value to people and many financial bloggers use them to make complex information easy to digest.
However, even if you’re a blogger from a different niche chances are your followers are looking for information in a pretty much similar way. This way is called the buyer’s journey. To be effective, you simply need to deliver the right information in an interesting package, in the right format, at the right stage. Here’s how you can make it work for you.
Stage 1: Awareness
Let people know what you’re blogging about and what are your goals. Focus on creating content that helps as many users as possible. This stage may involve generating entertaining, educational, or inspiring editorial content.
Stage 2: Consideration
Express a willingness to help your audience and solve their problems. Let your visual content speak for you, valuable pieces of information make people return to your blog or channel. Eventually, such content will build trust and establish your credibility as a blogger.
Stage 3: Analysis
Give your target audience a reason to follow you by establishing yourself as a definitive leader in your niche with a unique perspective, the right experience, etc.
Stage 4: Purchase
Create visual elements that will support your audience’s purchase decisions, such as how-to guides and tutorials or product reviews.
Stage 5: Loyalty
Show appreciation for your followers, remind them why they like to watch your videos or read your post, and offer them content that continues to help them solve their problems or enhance their lives.
No matter what stage of the buyer’s journey you’re focusing on, visual content must deliver real value to people.
How to Use Visual Content to Improve UX and Boost Conversions
Before creating visual content, keep in mind, people have different learning styles.
Some people find that they absorb information best when they listen to audio, others preferring watching videos. Some of your followers learn when they have opportunities to learn, and others learn better with the help of books.
If you want to cater to a wide target audience, it pays off to combine different methods, and that’s what visual content marketing makes possible.
By combining visuals with text, you diversify your content marketing strategy and can benefit the maximum number of followers.
In addition, visual content can impact people’s mood and emotions. And when you utilize this tool in the right way, it makes easier to engage people with your ideas. Awesome visuals entertain and engage people making them more receptive to the messages you’re trying to get across to them. Loyal followers will result in eventually higher conversion and increased click-through rates.
How To Create Great Visuals If You’re a Beginner
When you just starting out you have to compete with bigger rivals and that might sound intimidating.
In fact, by merely taking steps and making an effort to add better visuals to your content, you’ll already be ahead of the many other folks who aren’t even trying.
You’ll soon get better at understanding what kind of content your audience needs and discover tools like Canva or Adobe Lightroom that will help you create incredible illustrations by yourself.
Many graphic design platforms offer ready-to-use templates that you can implement to streamline the whole process. These are the right tools you can use to create awesome visual elements.
The guiding principles to follow when creating visuals for your blog or channel should revolve around the user’s experience and their journey when interacting with your content.
Do your best to help users solve problems and bring value by leading them from one experience to the next in a way that’s digestible for them.
Over time, you’ll figure out what your followers respond best to. You can then repurpose existing visual elements and make them as appealing as they can be to your target audience.
How To Monetize Your Visual Content
When it comes to making money online as a content creator, you need to ensure it’s custom-made for your work. Your visuals have to be super-relevant and speak to what your followers is looking for when they come to you.
Maybe you want to use minimalistic flat design graphics or charts to convey information or illustrate a particular point. If these are visually appealing and answer users’ questions, they can even complement the text and replace some or all of it.
As you remember, user experience journey matters a great deal. As well as understanding what your followers want. With this in mind, you might want to direct them towards a particular website or encourage higher conversions.
Keeping your followers engaged is a challenge and something you’ll need to work on. Your visuals should complement calls-to-action and links to product pages or landing pages where people can finish their journey by purchasing something.
Now it’s your turn. What are your tips on creating visual content for social media? Let us know in the comment section below.
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