How to Use Content Marketing in Your Visual Branding (+AI Tools to Help)
Visual content marketing is essential for better branding.
Text-based content is important, but it is most effective when supplemented with visual content.
The biggest advantage of visual content is …
Visual Content Grabs Attention
Researchers have found that looking at colors increases a person’s willingness to read an article. Mundane text copy has no color or design, only black text against a white/gray background.
Despite having informative content or a clickbait headline, it will never be as appealing as visual content.
Visual content, on the other hand, can showcase great design and eye-catching fonts, grabbing the attention of the onlookers.
Ever wondered why content is essential for branding?
The average person now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Most visitors leave web pages within 2-3 seconds of landing. Visual content can grab your visitors’ attention and hold them on the site, increasing retention.
When creating and publishing videos, make sure to:
- Brand them well! Every interaction with an image should be a reminder of your brand, so make sure to use watermarks, fonts, and colors that are consistent with your brand’s visual identity.
- Use SEO best practices when publishing on your site. This includes compressing the images to load faster (there are plugins that do that automatically once you upload an image to WordPress) and adding meaningful alt text (this is also a good content accessibility tactic).
Instruction Materials
Giving consumers instructions on how to use branded products is a simple way to build credibility. And visual content is the best medium for delivering instructions.
Engaging illustrations and cool fonts make the information delivery process smooth and exciting. If it is just text, audiences could find the information gathering process boring.
AI tool to help:
Visme has a cool AI integration allowing you to create all kinds of infographics and decks from a prompt. The results may require some editing and adjusting, but it still saves lots of time. All you need is to type your prompt and choose the style.
Visme is a great tool to create visual instructions, flowcharts and presentations.
Remember, there are lots of free and freemium social media graphics creators, so test a few before choosing one!
Product Photography and Branding
Most brands feel photography is crucial to their existing marketing techniques, and marketing executives consider photographs taken by professionals as visual assets for brand storytelling.
Product photography is way cheaper than video production and 3D rendering, both of which can cost an arm and a leg. A professional photograph of a product can create a lasting impression that stays, maybe not forever, but for a long time.
More importantly, brands can convey ideas and abstract elements through product photographs in order to improve content marketing.
On social media, users can react to photographs. They can express their eagerness to know the full story. If the photos receive a high level of engagement, then Facebook will display them in more news feeds because that’s how Facebook’s algorithm works. You can also use remarketing on Facebook to capture the audience that once engaged with your content or your site. These campaigns are much more efficient if you repurpose your product images as ad creatives.
When people disagree with something shown to them in their news feed, they won’t like or share it. This applies to political commentaries and personal opinions, but product photographs do not qualify as any of these. There’s no question of agreeing or disagreeing and nothing can impede engagement.
Brands want audience engagement. When product photography, the newest addition into the fold of content marketing, meets social media, audience engagement gets a boost, and visual branding turns into a huge success.
AI tools to help:
There are lots of ecommerce tools that help with product photography, so I’ll just suggest a couple. Claid.ai is an AI image generation tool that allows you to create images using your own product photos.
Create your product first by uploading your photo. From there, you can describe the theme of your new images. I added “Nature” and ended up with these images:
Another tool, Pixelcut allows you to stylize your product photo in different styles (like “Beach,” “Meadow,” “Industrial,” “Garden,” “Autumn,” and more. Once you click “Generate,” it will create 4 images. You can re-generate four more images in the current style or choose another one.
The nice thing about this tool is that you can keep generating your images in various styles and then download them all in bulk.
Visualizing Customer Service
The stats related to display and banner ads are discouraging. The average display ad CTR, regardless of the format and medium, is less than 1%. Ad blocking grew over the years and banner blindness is another phenomenon to deal with.
Publishers accessing these stats are clueless how to complement the brand experience that ads deliver. Advertising humanizes a brand. The same can be accomplished by improving customer experience. The easiest way to humanize customer service is using visual content. The task of offering visual customer service rests on the shoulders of the CCEs.
Social platforms are critical to visual customer service. Brands can leverage social media to interact with customers and take personalization to the micro-level. They can use free visual marketing tools to create funny avatars for each individual CCEs. Interacting with characters would be a fun-filled experience for customers.
Tutorial videos with animated characters can spice up an otherwise mundane experience and create engagement. It’s an offbeat approach, but when so many brands are competing for customer experience this year, doing something out-of-the-box is the only way to beat the competitors.
Final Thoughts
Visual content marketing is a double-edged sword. If done right, it can bring a high volume of search and social traffic. If done wrong, it can throw a wrench into the initiatives, taken to solidify branding. So be careful when applying it.
What is visual branding and how does content marketing play a role in it?
Visual branding involves creating a unique identity for your brand through visual elements like logos, color schemes, typography, and imagery. Content marketing enhances visual branding by ensuring these elements consistently appear in high-quality, relevant content that engages and attracts your target audience. This strategy helps in building brand recognition and loyalty.
Can AI tools really improve my visual branding strategy? How?
Yes, AI tools can significantly enhance your visual branding efforts by analyzing data to identify trends and preferences within your target audience, suggesting content personalization strategies, automating design processes for consistency across platforms, and optimizing content for better engagement and SEO performance.
What types of content are most effective for visual branding?
Effective content types for visual branding include infographics that present data attractively, branded videos that tell your story, social media posts that incorporate your visual identity, interactive content like quizzes or games designed in your brand style, and high-quality images that reflect your brand’s ethos.
