6 Types of Visual Content to Boost Your Website’s Engagement

We’ve written time and again about how visual content should become the cornerstone of your marketing efforts in the modern era and that is something that is not going to change anytime soon. But success in this regard has less to do with initially capturing someone’s attention (although visuals are great for that) and is more about what you do once you have that person in the palm of your hand.

To that end, there are six keep types of visual content that are a great chance to boost your website’s engagement rate that are absolutely worth exploring.

1. Kandungan Video

Example:

Video content is great because it plays into the way we want to receive information in the first place. People would rather watch a five-minute video than read a 1,000-word blog post, even if the information being conveyed was functionally identical between the two.

But the key thing to understand about this is that 92% of people who watch video content via OTT apps on their mobile and TV devices are very likely to share that content with others. 65% of those people are likely to watch more than 3/4ths of the video. So not only is the video a naturally engaging format by its very design, but the amount of activity that a thoughtfully crafted video is almost guaranteed to generate will also bleed into other areas of your outreach campaigns, too. That type of social activity (and the fact that videos can help reduce your bounce rates) will improve your search engine optimization efforts, thus leading more people to your domain than ever.

Pro Tip: By adding the proper structured data markups to your website pages, you have a higher chance of getting your videos and your pages show up in SERPs! This will help Google understand more about the content embedded on your video website pages.

2. Infografik

Example:

(Credit: Uscreen)

Infographics are so engaging in large part because they’re simple. By design, the format is perfect for taking even complicated ideas and distilling them down to their bare essentials, creating the type of experience that nearly anyone can (and likely will) enjoy.

But more than that, just like video-on-demand (VOD) content, infographics are very likely to generate social media shares and engagements. That social activity has the potential to generate a tremendous number of quality backlinks, which ultimately funnel more viewers back to your domain. Those organic backlinks are also one of the cornerstones of your larger SEO efforts, meaning that Infographics can help significantly expand your brand visibility as well.

Pro Tip: Once you have published an infographic about a topic around your industry, you can then reach out to different blogs in your niche, and send them your infographic. This is one of the best strategies to gain high-quality backlinks!

3. Imej

Based on the fact that most of the information being transmitted to the brain is visual in the first place, it’s easy to see why image-based content is so popular. Making the effort to create something like a picture essay or even just adding relevant images to the blogs you’ve already written can generate a number of key engagement-related benefits for your site almost immediately.

For starters, one study revealed that articles with images tend to get 94% more views on average. This means that people will spend more time on page because they’re actually reading your articles through to completion. “Time on Page” is one of the key factors that Google looks at when determining search engine results pages, which means that your SEO efforts will get a major boost, too.

Pro Tip: You can and should always repurpose your images for social media. This way, not only are you boosting your website’s engagement, but you’re also supercharging your social media efforts!

4. Presentations

Example: https://www.slideshare.net/ElodieAscenci/38-employee-engagement-ideas-your-team-will-love

Presentations are great because they give you the chance to do a “deep dive” into a subject that your audience already cares about. You get to inform and communicate to your audience about a topic they already care about and, with a healthy dose of relevant visuals, you get to do so in a naturally engaging way they’re almost guaranteed to complete.
One recent study suggested that presentations with visual elements are considered to be 43% more persuasive than those without. Not only do visual presentations mean that people are more likely to finish them, but they’re also a perfect chance to cement your reputation as an authority to be trusted, too – something that is great for your long-term outreach efforts. You can easily create a professional presentation using a tool such as Visme, or Venngage.

5. Screen Captures

Example:

Speaking of your authority, screen captures are also a great chance to better inform your audience in a way that is more naturally engaging as well.

If you were creating a document designed to help your audience get the most out of your product or service, for example, you would almost certainly want to do so with a step-by-step guide. No matter what type of business you’re running, whether it’s an eCommerce story or an OTT service, by supplementing each step with screen captures of your software (or images of someone using your product) you get to explain how people can best use your products and services. This again will keep people more engaged and will ensure to keep them longer on your page, which in turn will drastically reduce your bounce rates and will supercharge your larger SEO efforts.

Pro Tip: Use screen captures on your help guides and FAQs. This will help your visitors learn more about using your services.

6. Graphs, Charts and other Visual Maps

Finally, we have collateral like bar graphs, line graphs and other types of visual maps. The factors that make these so compelling and engaging have to do with what these formats can do that others can’t – or at least, can’t as easily.

If you wanted to explain the complex relationship between two ideas in a visual way, for example, these types of charts would absolutely be how you do it. They can also be perfect for revealing hidden patterns, or even making it clear that two seemingly unrelated concepts are more closely associated than it may at first appear.

The major thing is that you’re once again taking a complicated concept and A) presenting it visually, in B) a format that is as simple and as easy-to-understand as possible. If people understand your collateral, they will engage with it. If they engage with it, your SEO and larger marketing efforts will grow all the better for it. It truly doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.

 

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Why You Should Invest In Visual Campaigns In Singapore

There comes a time when a brand can’t tell the whole of its story in a single piece of visual content. Often, this occurs when the business has multiple sections, different lines of products or a very long history of innovations.

So instead of packing too much info in a single piece of infographic, the business may find it more effective to adopt a visual campaign.

Ever wondered why business are resorting to visual campaigns to tell their stories? At the very start it’s because visuals help to break their stories into digestible and easy-to-understand chunks. That way, majority of your online users can easily decode the nature of your content without getting thrown off along the way—a common case with texts.

Better, visual campaigns make it easy for businesses to target a common goal, made of multiple pieces of visual content pieced together for a more consistent look and feel.

Whether it is animation, graphic design, or interactivity, each piece is meant to help your business tell a certain segment of your campaign story, creating suspense in between to keep the reader hooked in all the way to the end. No extra context will be needed to aid with understanding as the visuals tell the entire story as is — in a clear and elaborative manner.

What happens is that: each piece tells a different part of story, thus adding a more consistent feel and touch to the entire campaign story.

Meaning you have to start by formulating a greater way to tell your campaign story. Look around for all the visual languages you’re likely to find and pick the most appropriate from the bunch you see. What should follow is you building your content around the style you’ve chosen. And consequently, connecting with even more customers, compared to what you’d have achieved had you opted for text content.

What is Visual Campaign?

As the name suggests, a visual campaign is a campaign strategy that aims to target a common goal or a set of them using visual content. At basic level, the campaign involves a series of branded media, living within a defined art direction and not requiring external explanation to give meaning. Instead, it relies on the one-glance simplicity of visual content to give context.

Usually, the information being passed across can be broken down in design graphic, interactivity, animation and so forth, all hopping to drive the main message home.

Using Visual Campaign to Create Brand Identity

Your starting point as a self-driven digital marketer looking to drive your business to greater heights of success should be to work on creating a formidable brand identity.

By launching a more successful brand identity, what you’ll be showcasing stretches far beyond your products or services, to the value you represent as a company.

One thing to note is that brand identity is more than the fonts and the colour palette you choose for your business visuals. It encompasses all the elements that together play part in determining how your customers view and feel about your business. It includes the illustration practises you settle for, the icon styles, the charts you use and so much more.

The decisions you make towards the best visual direction you take as a business should reflect on your site and every single one of the content distribution channels you choose to use.

Shareable Content

You’re NOT limited as to the number of ways you can integrate your visual content into various online formats. From social media and online newsletters to trade show takeaways, visual campaigns present a set of strategies that you can use to get your brand noticed.

Here’s a list of shareable content that you can adopt for your visual campaign:

Conference Materials

Conferences are a great way to connect with customers and fellow business people within your area of operation. As a business person, this comes as an opportunity to come up with more appropriate materials for sharing memorable messages with the people you get to meet. Your options are NOT limited and here are a number of ways you can take advantage of visual campaigns while sharing your message:

1. 1. Printed collaterals. This includes the printed pamphlets and booklets that you get to share with the people you meet in conferences.
   2. Video Content. This includes the motion graphics and media videos that you share with the people you connect with. Works magic for booth displays.
   3. Custom presentation. Just in case you’re given the opportunity to make a presentation, make sure you have great visuals to accompany the message you share.

Product Launch Collateral

While launching your product, you want to target potential customers in the best possible way there is. And what better way do you have than to come up with great visuals that sum up everything there is to know about the products or services you’re offering?

Here’re a few components of visual campaign to consider while launching your products or services:

• Explainer Videos

Shareable infographics and thumbnails. Most suited with the campaigns you run on social media

Mailer Templates for your email marketing campaigns

• Blogs and Social Media

Social media campaigns are better accompanied with great visuals. Here are a few elements of visual campaign to cash in on while targeting social media customers:

1. 1. Blog Headers
   2. Icon sets

Social assets including custom illustrations and banners

• 1. GIFs
  2. Memes. One great thing about memes is that they could go viral. And you of all the people should know what that amounts to in your line of business.

• Internal Content

Visual campaigns aren’t just meant to pull in external prospects. If anything, you can integrate great visuals in the content you post on your blog or website so your visitors can get to understand your business and the messages you share better.

One approach to take is to create a habit of creating annual reports so your employees can know what your business goals are.

Also, try working on a business book that best sums up your brand standards and everything else. In the book, you can include your training, hiring and brand guidelines.

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Superior Ways of Increasing Social Media Engagement Using Visuals 

Social media platforms are digital marketing powerhouses with immense potential of helping virtually any brand scale up to the top levels of success. However, the ever-changing trends make it difficult for most of them to achieve this goal.

Without proper social media marketing campaigns, businesses risk losing thousands of dollars in sponsored posts and ads without any substantial ROI. Another challenge is the unending battle for customers attention and engagement with competitors. Like social media trends, customers’ needs and preferences are more unpredictable than ever before.

The battle is not lost, though. You can profit from social media by posting more visual content. Unlike text, visuals such as infographics and images are easier to process and preferred by millions of social media users.

Bob Cargill stated that content is king in a recent interview, but visuals rule the digital space. They command more attention than text posts. 

That said, you need to cleverly combine text and visuals to unleash the potent social media ability to connect your brand with the target customers.

Here are some statistics that prove visuals are essential for spurring engagement on social media platforms.

1. 94% of website visitors first impression is based on the web design
2. 34% of active Twitter users are inclined to retweet posts that contain images
3. 32% of digital marketers say visuals are essential to their business marketing campaigns, and 67% create infographics. 
4. On average, 90% of information processed by the human brain is visual, and only 10% is non-visual.
5. Presenters can increase their persuasion by 43% when marketing products or services using visual ads.

You can successfully and effectively communicate with the target audience by using visual content and visual ads. 

Planning for Visual Content

First, you need to have a clear understanding of the target audience before creating visual content. Their needs and expectations from your brand will inform the complexity and depth of your visual posts. 

Carry out market research to develop a robust visual content plan that’s better than your competitors. Set realistic and measurable goals that you want to achieve by distributing the visuals on social media.

More importantly, you need to stay abreast of the current trends to expand your clientele base. For example, the most successful brands rely on images and other visual formats such as GIFs and infographics.

The best way to get started is by thinking about how much information you can pass to the target customers without writing a blog post or creating other forms of text-based content. Concisely, plan well and envision what the customers want before adding any visuals or images in your articles or web page copy.

Leverage Smart Formatting

Before adding visuals to your content, you must consider its quality and relevance to the topic. If not, you will record a low engagement rate, and conversion rates will dip despite investing hundreds of dollars in the strategy.

The best way to ensure that you get the best results is by creating and formatting content with the target audience in mind. There are thousands of charts, videos, GIFs, stock photos and images online that you can use to spice up your content.

Here are four principles that you should adhere to when designing visuals.

• Select the right colours to make your posts professional and appealing to customers
• Use more expressive images 
• If you can’t create the visuals, consider hiring a pro designer
• Don’t rely on just one type of visuals; use different formats 

Unlike before, when you would require to have special skills to design an infographic or any other visuals, there are tools that you can use online to create visuals in minutes.

Mereka termasuk;

1. Canva
2. BeFunky
3. Snappa
4. Skitch

The tools have a user-friendly interface that is intuitive and ideal for all designers. 

Let us shift gears and discuss seven superb ways of increasing engagement on social media platforms using visual aids.

1. Illustrate Taglines with Impressive Images

Brand taglines do the hard work of grasping the target audience attention and luring them to visit the website or social media page to learn more about the brand. Make it stand out from the crowd by using impressive images.

The more appealing your taglines are, the more recognisable and shareable they will be. For example, the cover photo used by Uber on Twitter is directly related to the brand’s niche. It’s also memorable and complements the logo.

McDonald is another successful brand that includes images on its famous tagline “I’m lovin’ it.” The images of happy customers used to create its Facebook page collage help the brand attract more customers by showing how existing customers enjoy their food.

2. Create Different Infographics

Research shows that infographics can deliver more than 180% better engagement than general blog posts. It’s the perfect way of assembling and presenting information in a visual and easy-to-understand format. 

Instead of a PDF document with a ton of text, you can create an infographic with all the key statistics or research findings. Use charts and graphs to explain the data or industry facts. Some blogs have successfully managed to increase their readership by creating listicle infographics.

Below is an overview of the six types of infographics you can use to connect with your customers better.

• • Data Visualisations

Help the audience to understand research reports or findings by presenting the data using pie charts and bar graphs. Use different colours and creativity to make the two visuals appealing to the audience.

• • Anatomic

Any concept that can be explained using anatomy can be covered in an infographic. It will help you break down and organise the different points well.

• • Process

Use an infographic to describe a complicated process such as the buyer’s journey or how to start an email marketing campaign. You will get more engagement from such content than you would if you wrote an article.

• • Timelines

Timeline infographics are perfect for describing events that happened within an extended period. For example, when discussing Google algorithm updates, you can create a timeline to show how the algorithm has changed over the last ten years.

• • Comparative Infographic

Online customers take time to compare products and services before deciding to buy. Make it easier for them to make this decision by creating a comparative infographic. They are perfect for buying guides as you can highlight products unique selling points using a few words and related images.

• • List Infographics

Don’t just provide blog posts to your website visitors. Make their reading process more interactive by creating listicle infographics. 

The type of content you intend to publish will determine the kind of infographic you create. Monitor the engagement levels each type of infographic delivers to know which format relates to the audience best.

3. Include Text Overlays in Images

Text overlays on images is an ideal way of expressing the depth of your brand. The text should be a phrase that most customers use when discussing what you sell. In the image below, Folgers uses a common phrase relatable to the target customer and posts it across all social media platforms.

Carry out extensive research to identify these phrases. If you are unsure if a phrase will give your brand the kick it requires to generate more engagement and sales, use season-themed phrases. Folgers have mastered this tactic, as evident from the many shares, comments, and likes that their posts receive on Facebook.

4. Encourage the Customers to Participate

User-generated content (UGC) is super effective in attracting sales. This is because online shoppers often read several reviews and watch videos from other customers before converting. The more UGC you post on social media, the higher the engagement rate you will receive. 

This form of content does an excellent job promoting brand awareness, especially on photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram. Frequently check the comment section to respond to queries from interested customers. Also, use the opportunity to thank the poster for reviewing your product and affirm your determination to deliver the best products or services.

For this strategy to work, you need to have a strong brand personality that users are not afraid to get associated with on social media. The surest way of achieving this goal is by providing excellent products and customer service. UGC is free, and so you will save thousands of dollars that you would have spent on digital marketing campaigns to achieve the same goals.

Buffer is a perfect example of a campaign that used UGC to create a buzz on Instagram. The company used the hashtag #BufferCommunity to flaunt the best workplaces that their personnel work from. Shortly after launching the campaign, the hashtag gained massive traction and viral.

You can achieve even better results by creating a similar campaign. 

5. Use Quality Images to Show What you Sell

As a digital content marketer, it’s normal to run out of ideas. That shouldn’t deter you from continuously engaging with the audience. Use images to pass the message to the audience. The secret is finding a stock photo closely related to your product or brand. Edit it to describe what your brand stands for and post it on social media.

Below is a simple image posted on Instagram by RiverWalkNola. This single post helped the brand gain massive popularity and more than 8,000 new followers.

As mentioned earlier, respond to the comments left behind by the viewers to promote your brand further. Posts that spur the highest engagement levels are ranked on top of the user’s news feed than the low engagement posts. Increase engagement by promptly responding to all the comments on your images.

6. Don’t Be Boring

Many businesses are afraid of using humour in their social media posts. Unknown to them is that the fear holds them back from realising the full potential of their social media marketing campaigns. Sometimes, it’s challenging to create funny posts in industries such as banking, insurance, or accounting.

However, a pinch of humour will give your brand a higher cutting edge by making it more discoverable and relatable. Very few things can create a deep connection with customers than a laugh. 

One of the companies that used this tactic to grow is Dollar Shave Club. Its hilarious video of Michael Dubin, the CEO, exploded on Facebook and YouTube. From that one video, the brand got thousands of new customers. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI

Social media users are bombarded with marketing videos and posts often too salesy and crafted to suit the brand’s bottom line – profits. Be different and relate better with the customers by using laughter. Make funny visuals that the audience can relate to and watch your brand grow. 

The content doesn’t have to be a video; it can be an image or GIF. Otherwise, if your visuals are bland and too professional or showcase your brand as too perfect, you will lose customers to competitors who are not afraid to go against the grind to engage with the customers using humour. 

7. Use Text Wisely

Earlier, we recommended using text overlays on images to spark the customer’s interest in your brand. This tip goes deeper to recommend you be more tasteful with your text. In the context of social media marketing, less is always more when it comes to the total word count.

Strive to deliver the message using as few words as possible. The text on the visuals should be concise, legible, bold, and straightforward. There should be enough contrast between the visual’s background and the text to be readable and easily noticeable as a user scrolls the feed.

According to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the contrast between the text and the background should be 4.5 to 1. Monitor the results to know the ideal image to text ratio that works for your brand. Images posted on Facebook that contains 20% less text get higher engagement than images with plenty of text overlays. 

Therefore, if you plan to include text in an image as an overlay, ensure that you don’t suffocate the visual. That is, leave enough room for it to be visible. The goal should be to enhance the image’s ability to engage with the audience. 

Finally, check the text for glaring grammar errors and be open to using two different fonts that complement each other such as sans serif and serif. Go an extra mile to animate the text to stand out from the millions of posts made every minute. 

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Ia adalah Bungkus

One thing with visual campaigns is that you have so many elements to leverage and pump up sales while growing your business. Your only limitation is how far you’re willing to explore with your creativity. Just in case you ever find yourself stuck, consider aligning your business as per your core adjectives and let your campaign strategy point you in the right direction.

Any question about visual campaigns? Kindly consider reaching out to MediaOne today with your query or for a free SEO consultation.