VISUAL MARKETING

Visual marketing is the way of marketing using photos, videos, presentations, and other visual elements to portray the value and image of your product or brand. In today’s world, which is getting smaller and smaller every day, visual marketing captures the consumers' attention at a fast pace. It focuses on studying and analyzing how images can be used to make impactful communication.

By using the power of images and visuals a marketing plan can be made more powerful and more memorable. Images, if used strategically, can turn concepts and ideas into concrete messages influencing a viewer. This creates a clear vision in people's minds for the brand.

WHY VISUAL MARKETING?

Let us know have a look at some facts that prove the concept to be powerful:

1. As facts say, humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. 2. While consumers only retain 20 percent of what they read, they can retain 80 percent of the visuals they see.

3. Scientists have found that the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. And a human’s ability to concentrate is typically lost at eight seconds.

4. When information is presented with a relevant image, they will most likely retain at least 65 percent of that information three days later.

TYPES OF VISUAL MARKETING

1. INFOGRAPHICS - Infographics helps in conveying all of the complex data and statistics easily. The depiction must be easy, colors must be right, and the information must be accurate. This increases consumers' engagement span. You can use programs like Canva (which is free) and Adobe Photoshop (which is not) to create your own effective images.

2. VIDEOS - Videos are great tools for engaging consumers and offering solutions with the products you sell. A great video acts as your impression on consumers demonstrating your authenticity. According to Forbes, the belief is that “video will revitalize email marketing.” And although email marketing is still far from dying off, it has been given less attention from users since the invention of social media advertising.

5 IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT VISUAL MARKETING

1. Visual Marketing - a must-have strategy for your business. Listening to ads and reading a newspaper takes a lot of time. Visual marketing makes promotion fast and impactful.

2. A planned campaign is required - to create effective marketing, there must be some guidelines for all visual elements. These guidelines are set to outline what image, graphics, videos and design will be used and where and how. Brand guidelines should be constructed in such a way that the message that is marketed is reflected accurately across every medium.

3. Avoid overloading – when launching a new product/service it is natural that you would like to share all the information with your customer. But sometimes this can overload the consumer and the main features might get ignored in the crown of information. Identify the highlights of your product and frame your campaign around them. Feed your consumer with less and important information so that those can be remembered and can create emphasis.

4. Measuring the success rate – Your visual marketing campaigns need to be measured in order to understand which visual had the most impact. A/B testing is crucial in visual marketing. It allows you to see which visual elements provoked the response you want. Any social media platform today has in-built analytics tools for testing engagement and response. In this split test can be used to switch between two visuals and record success rate for each.

5. Change can be good or bad – Many a times you might feel to change the brand guidelines and tell a completely new story to the consumers by completely over flipping the campaign. This can be good idea, but be cautious of the fact that it can confuse your brand followers and hamper your previously built image. Big brands find it most difficult as their brand image is carved in people’s minds and any change in it can receive negative response. The solution to it is doing occasional change and that too with existence of your original image. Too many changes frequently can result in consumers losing interest.

Below are 20 tools that are most preferred by the professional visual content creator for their work:

1.  Adobe Photoshop

2.  InstaQuote

3.  Unsplash

4.  PhotoGrid

5.  PowerPoint

6.  Canva

7.  Chrome Eye Dropper

8.  Designinspiration

9.  WordSwag

10.  Pixlr Web Editor

11.  Pinterest

12.  PicMonkey

13.  Over

14.  QuotesCover

15.  Palettab

16.  Afterlight

17.  VSCO Cam

18.  Adobe Illustrator

19.  Snapseed

20.  Piktochart

Below is a video to understand how to leverage the visuals to improve your marketing.

“Visual marketing is an integral part of strategic marketing which can take your brand to the new heights and create an influence that will last forever”