Whether you have a brick-and-mortar business, an online business, a hybrid business, or you operate a website or blog of any kind, digital marketing is essential. The majority of digital marketing often revolves around your social media content, and social media is inherently visual in its approach to reaching your targeted audience.
No one is going to go on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest and be drawn to your content or social sharing if excellent visual elements do not accompany it, but the visual aspect of social media is one that a lot of marketers and businesses get wrong.
Visual content is important, with nearly 63% of social media consisting of images. Images also tend to be more shareable across platforms than other forms of content.
Below are some tips to help you boost your digital marketing results by improving your social visual content.
Use Templates
There are some great templates and tools available for promotional and social media content, so take advantage. You can find industry-specific options, such as design templates for restaurants, or templates based on the type of image you want to produce, such as infographics.
This saves you time and money when it comes to planning visual content, but you can still customize templates and make them unique to your brand and business.
Switch It Up
Visual content doesn’t just refer to images. It refers to a myriad of content including infographics, memes, videos, and screenshots.
Try to use all of these different visual options on your social media profiles. This will not only improve engagement, but it will draw in a more varied audience because you’re more likely to have something that appeals to everyone.
Be Careful With Stock Images
Using stock images on social media can be okay, but it’s a place to be careful. Stock photos tend to feel generic and overused, so if you are going to use them, try to find high-quality images and ones that you haven’t already seen floating around.
You can use photo editing tools to customize stock images and make them more distinctive to your brand and your content.
Also, never use irrelevant stock photos or images of any type. Often even worse than not using images at all is using irrelevant images just for the sake of having them.
Screenshots
Don’t overlook the value and simplicity of screenshots. Screenshots are excellent for providing evidence and background to the claims you’re making or to show how your company or products work.
They’re a great visual tool to boost credibility, and they can serve as part of a testimonial.
Also, there are simple ways to add things like arrows to your screenshots highlighting key areas you want your audience to focus, and even options to add buttons where they can see something in a more in-depth way.
These are just a few options for using visual content in your social media marketing. Visuals are great to encourage sharing, highlight key points you want to make, and generally just to attract attention and improve engagement, so go ahead and experiment.