How Visual Content Makes Your Social Media Stand Out

When you start a blog or a brand website, you need to attract your audience with means other than just informing everyone about your product. This attraction can be developed through visual content marketing. Visuals are essential to make your content stand out. Studies show that content becomes stored in memory easily when it’s in visual form than just texts.

Not only is visual content more readable, memorable, and recallable, it’s also easier when creating compelling communication channels without the need for too many words. Social Media Marketing isn’t all about getting leads, but to provide quality content for your audience to drive value from. As the world keeps changing rapidly, we’re always going to want to test new ways to reach out to our target. And visual content makes this happen with relative ease.

The fact is that for your social media to stand out you need visual content. Because if you’re not capturing your audience’s attention with visual content, your competition is. Our brains are dominantly visual, and we can’t emphasize enough on this. Reaching your audience even with paid marketing can get difficult, let alone organically. Hence, the stronger your visual content, the better leads you get. Below we discuss a few pointers on the importance of visual marketing with real-life brand examples.

1. Visuals Make Your Social Media Attractive

Visual content is a great way to transform your boring text-based branding to adopt a more interesting and exciting approach. According to Venngage, visuals increase one’s desire to read content by 80%. This makes sense because none of us would want to read a list of 50 tips without having any visuals to look at, even if we’re the ones who came up with that list.

Example: Dark Netflix (Spoiler Alert)
If you have watched Netflix’s trending ‘Dark’, you would know how complex everything keeps getting in the show up until the very last minute of the last episode. And yet, their Instagram is something that appeals to the visual aesthetic of every creative person alike, even if they’re not a fan. The way their social media team has designed a grid to explain the complicated tree of how every character is related to one another, one would think this one account is why Instagram Grid was introduced in the first place. A perfect mind-mapping example, this visual attractiveness is what audiences demand from the brands they love and support!

2. They’re Preferred By People

Forbes reports that 90% of people prefer visuals over any other form of content. With the use of mobile phones increasing dramatically, people find it easier to look at images and videos than read entirely text-based material on the tiny screen of their cell phones. Hence, visuals increase your likelihood to reach your audience than just texts.

Example: Sharpie
Marketing a simple product with a few different varieties can be difficult, especially when its just markers and pens. But Sharpie has taken full advantage of their creative brains to come up with attractive and helpful posts that make it easier for their audience to track.

3. Visual Content Increase Views

As discussed above, the use of mobile phones has increased significantly in the last few years. With that being said, Kleiner Perkins report that viewing minutes has increased by almost 10 million daily with the increased use of phones. Using infographics and CTA-based copies in the form of visuals, you can get the result you want from your audience.

Example: Whole Foods Market
Healthy food is not something anyone gets easily attracted to and Whole Foods Market knows that. So they’ve come up with strategies to share information and stories while making it appealing. From product advertisements to infomercials to simple product images, they make everything look worthy of your attention.

4. The Audience Loves Videos

According to a HubSpot survey done in 2018, 54% of consumers want more video content from the businesses they support than any other content. If your video has a strong message, it won’t even need a lot of text to get the message across. Videos tell your story, boost awareness, and get shared over platforms to give your brand the recognition you need.

Example: KLM Lost & Found
KLM Airlines promoted a Lost & Found video that remains one of its most successful campaigns to-date. A lot of it may have to do with the adorable Beagle as the star of the video, but apart from it, the video has just the right amount of emotional and human touch without under or overdoing the message intended to be conveyed.

5. Visuals Boost Engagement

Visual content is easier to understand and share for people. Buzzsumo reported that Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement than those without any visuals. As discussed, when people get attracted to your posts, they find it easier to relate with them and pass them forward. Another survey of over a million articles from Buzzsumo reveals that blogs that have an image after every 100 word gets read and shared more than those without images.

Example: Grammarly
The leading giants for language and writing processing, Grammarly uses a series of engaging visual posts to keep the audience’s attention intact. They provide a humorous and realistic touch towards promoting ‘good writing’, a practice that would otherwise seem boring to follow an entire page about.

6. Gives Your Brand a Human Touch

Visual content on social media platforms make it easier for your audience to view your posts, it also results in making your brand more human than the robotic tones of primarily textual content. This makes it easier to send your message to the audience and also tell your story without being misunderstood.

Example: They Can Talk
One way to create engaging visuals is through comics and Jimmy has got it right. An artist who focuses on giving animals a human touch, Jimmy creates comics with different animals communicating with each other while giving them human narratives. His social media became so popular, that he started selling brand-based t-shirts and other products to a very loyal audience. A perfect example for up and coming content creators.

7. Drives Action

Visual content can bring a direct increase in traffic and conversion by driving action from your audience. Introducing campaigns and using CTA and hashtags to promote it paired with the right kind of visuals can do wonders for your campaign. Using humor, stories, and giving people the directions you want them to follow along with images of a step-by-step guide can also get you the results you need. According to Springer, people perform 323% better when given directions paired with illustrations than those without illustrations.

Example: Metro Trains Dumb Ways to Die
Promoting your social media campaign can always be a difficult task, especially when you’re trying to teach people about how they should take care of themselves instead of dying by a train, gloomy, isn’t it? Metro got the perfect answer. They made a song displaying hilarious and dumb ways to die to send a message to the audience without making a depressive note.

Visual content in the form of infographics, short videos, and even simple images have a much higher likelihood to be shared by your audience. This is the next big thing in the social media marketing world. Cisco reports that by 2021, all consumer traffic will include almost 82% of traffic from videos and visuals. Hopefully, the above-given facts and examples will give you the creative spark you need to make your visual content such that your social media receives its all-needed boost. Get to work, and make sure to cater to your audience’s aesthetics through your visuals.