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Today, effective marketing requires a carefully measured online and visual approach. Rather than merely expressing a brand with strong images, a combined digital and social vision is essential to promoting your brand identity and positioning it from the get-go.
For sure, visuals are a key component in your marketing success. It’s what people see and associate with your business, and keeping your visuals consistent is essential to building brand awareness, increasing revenue and boosting brand loyalty. On the flip side, inconsistent branding can confuse your audience and damage your reputation.
Here, we focus on how merging powerful visuals with a well-orchestrated digital strategy can enhance your brand’s success.
Raises Brand Awareness
If you want customers to remember your brand and return to it time and time again, you need to use visual content. For example, 93% of marketers who use video content say that this form of content has helped them increase brand awareness, and 87% state that it has helped them increase traffic to their site. Visual content may require attention to detail and forward planning, but the results are long-lasting and can give your business the edge when it comes to influencing purchasing decisions.
Reinforces Your Core Messages
As a business, you need to ensure that your messaging is clear and defined, so that customers know exactly what you stand for as a brand. Strong visuals help you to convey a coherent message that draws people in and reinforces your central messages, whether you’re promoting your brand through:
- conceptual shots
- product images
- video content, or
- graphics.
So many businesses focus exclusively on brand voice without considering their supporting visuals, but combining the two can set you apart from others in the industry and really elevate your message.
Consider a well known brand like Starbucks. While they may mix up the types of visual content they promote, the values and styles are representative of the brand as a whole and the interests of its followers. The brand evokes a certain lifestyle that its customers aspire to, and its visuals showcase this but in a subtle way.
Increases Web Traffic
Visuals are effective in keeping visitors on your site for longer or attracting people to your products when they may not have been aware of your business beforehand. Brands often use visuals on social media or other content platforms and this can help to drive traffic to your website, which in turn can boost conversion rates. Visuals can, therefore, be an incredibly powerful tool for:
- telling your brand story
- showcasing a product
- explaining the benefits of your product, or
- sharing testimonials from customers.
Projects a Brand’s Story And Improves Engagement
Visuals can make your marketing materials more interesting to look at, which can help to make them more engaging for your audience. Storytelling is so much more impactful when it includes a visual element, and that makes your content not only more engaging but also more memorable so customers will retain your brand and message for longer. According to Clinical Psychologist, Haig Kouyoumdjian, adding a visual element to a fact can make the average person 65% more likely to retain the information.
Humans are wired to understand topics visually and we can recognize symbols and imagery far quicker than we can read and comprehend text – in fact, we retain as much as 80% of what we see, versus 20% of what we read – so if you want to build engagement and have your audience retain what they see, visuals are an essential tool in your marketing toolkit. Brands like Coca-Cola are experts in using visual marketing to generate genuine customer engagement, such as through named bottles to encourage people to snap photos of their personalized drinks bottles and share in the campaign with their own videos or photos.
Triggers A Reaction
Because visuals are processed more effectively, they’re capable of producing a stronger emotional reaction in your customers compared to other types of content. From a scientific perspective, visual stimuli and our emotional responses, whatever emotion that may be, are connected in the brain and that means that we create memories from those connections. So, if you want your customers and audiences to remember your brand and your products, you need to use visuals to spark that reaction.
Showcases Personality And Authenticity
Visual content is primed for sensory marketing that evokes emotion and connects directly with your target audience. Sensory marketing is when a brand uses multiple senses to evoke a positive impression of the brand, winning over the attention of the customer. Subtle tactics and ‘experiential marketing’ that considers your target customer’s sensory, emotional, cognitive, and rational triggers are valuable. And, pushing forward emotional responses ties in perfectly with the way brands can show the personality and character behind the business with an authenticity in a way that’s not overly promotional. For example, brands can show the behind the scenes of the business or create content around the employees in the business. These types of visual content are something that aren’t always seen by customers and it gives customers a glimpse into the brand that feels more genuine.
The Key To Success
Visuals are the gateway to brand success, especially if you’re consistent in the style, consistency and platforms you use. From photos and video content to infographics and interactive content, there are various ways that businesses can incorporate visuals into their marketing strategy to enhance success, boost brand awareness and build a loyal audience. When planning marketing content for your brand, visual elements need to be as much of a priority as your written content.
