Visual elements can make your content more engaging, memorable, and persuasive. They can also help you communicate your brand identity, values, and personality. But how do you use them effectively in your content strategy? Here are some tips to help you create and use visual elements that align with your brand goals and resonate with your audience.
Before you choose or create any visual element, you need to understand who you are trying to reach and what they want. Research your target market, their preferences, pain points, and motivations. Use tools like personas, customer journeys, and empathy maps to get insights into their needs and expectations. Then, use these insights to guide your visual content decisions, such as the style, tone, color, and format of your images, videos, graphics, and icons.
Your visual elements should reflect your brand identity, which is the sum of your values, mission, vision, personality, and voice. Your brand identity helps you stand out from the competition and build trust and loyalty with your audience. To define your brand identity, you need to create a brand strategy that outlines your core elements, such as your brand name, logo, tagline, and story. You also need to create a brand style guide that specifies your visual guidelines, such as your color palette, typography, imagery, and iconography.
? While creating a style guide it’s important to remember, it is a guide and should be used to stir the brand in the correct direction ? The team designing the actual creatives should have enough room and freedom to experiment with their creativity to give the best outcome for the brand.
Depending on your content goals, message, and audience, you can use different types of visual elements to enhance your content. For example, you can use images to capture attention, show emotions, or illustrate concepts. You can use videos to demonstrate how to use a product, tell a story, or educate your audience. You can use graphics to simplify complex data, highlight key points, or compare options. You can use icons to emphasize actions, categories, or features. The key is to choose the visual format that best suits your purpose, context, and budget.
Too often, visuals are treated as a check-the-box item in content creation. Your visuals should help the audience better understand your content. People learn and process information differently. Your visuals and other content assets should support each other. The different formats help each type of learner better understand your content. To achieve that, distill the content to the most important point. Your visual should be able to communicate that point at a glance. To connect that visual back to your brand, keep consistent with your brand style guide and personality for colors, fonts, style, and tone.
? It’s important to know where you audience sits and what they consume before deciding on the visuals. ? The platform on which the visual is used for is of crucial importance in developing the correct one to achieve the goal
To make sure your visual elements work well across different platforms, devices, and channels, you need to optimize them for quality, speed, and accessibility. For quality, you need to use high-resolution images, videos, and graphics that are clear, crisp, and consistent. For speed, you need to compress your files, use lazy loading, and avoid unnecessary elements that slow down your page load time. For accessibility, you need to use alt text, captions, transcripts, and contrast ratios to make your content accessible to people with visual impairments or disabilities.
? With so many mediums to cater to, the designs need to be responsive. ? Responsive designs mean they adapt themselves so they appear at the best version without losing their identity on all sizes and surfaces
Finally, you need to test and measure the performance of your visual elements and see how they affect your content metrics, such as traffic, engagement, conversion, and retention. You can use tools like Google Analytics, heat maps, A/B testing, and surveys to collect and analyze data on how your audience interacts with your visual content. You can also use feedback from your customers, prospects, and peers to identify what works and what doesn't. Based on the results, you can adjust your visual elements accordingly and improve your content strategy.