How to Use the Art & Power of Visual Marketing to Advance Your Brand
Exquisite photos, enticing images, and captivating videos.
Striking visuals can say SO much more about your brand faster than words EVER could.
In fact, the right pictures and videos can communicate a world of information in seconds, making any audience feel far more connected with and more curious about your brand.
That’s how visual marketing works and why viral brands are using it more than ever before.
What Is Visual Marketing?
Visual marketing is the use of images and interactive content to differentiate brands, engage specific audiences, and crystallize brand identity.
To do that, visual marketing can include all sorts of digital assets, like (and not limited to):
Photographs and artistic renderings
Image carousels and reels
Infographics, graphs, and charts
Memes, GIFs, and other multimedia
Visual marketing can be used for practically any brand with extraordinary effect, especially when it focuses on:
Unique products, services, or offerings
Gorgeous interior and exterior spaces
Specific events, including both small, large, public, and private events
Staff and clients, particularly when they interact with each other
“Behind-the-scenes” activities, parties, work, and more
New projects or developments that will be launched soon
Brilliant visual marketing can propel brands to the forefront of the most competitive spaces. That’s why more and more brands are using visual marketing to set themselves apart, communicate better messages to their audience, and grow exponentially faster.
How Effective Is Visual Marketing?
Visual marketing can be exceptionally effective with the right strategy and rollout. In fact, it can be one of the MOST powerful ways to activate and showcase brands while supercharging growth.
That may sound like a big claim, but it’s backed up by biology. That’s because visual marketing takes advantage of how our eyes and brains work. That can really hit home once you consider these facts:
We are 4x more likely to remember pictures we see versus words we read.
Our brains process images ~60,000x FASTER than text and ~30x faster than the blink of an eye.
Images and visual content can activate more areas of the brain than text alone.
Visual content can get and keep our attention longer than text can, allowing visuals to communicate more.
Roughly 9 in 10 pieces of information our brains consume daily are visual pieces of information.
About 4 in 10 people actually process visuals better than words.
Now, quick question — feel a little hungry after looking at that tablescape to the left? THAT is the power of visual marketing at work!
Translation — if your brand isn’t using visual marketing or if you haven’t revisited your digital assets and visual marketing strategy lately:
Your brand identity may not be as strong as it could be.
You could be LOSING ground to your competition.
How to Use Visual Marketing to Advance Your Brand: 5 Strategies
Visual marketing can transform your brand and your big-picture marketing strategies, supporting outreach, social media marketing, events promotions, and so much more.
No matter how new or established your brand may be — and whether your brand is rooted in hospitality, travel, events, lifestyle, or another space — it’s NEVER too late to get started with visual marketing.
When you do, here are a handful of visual marketing strategies that you can use to hit the ground running and start seeing some real success right out of the gate!
1. Dial into your brand’s values.
Brand values are the beliefs, ideals, and mindsets that make up a brand’s foundation and “personality.” These values can define a brand’s relationship with its customers, acting as an important cornerstone for growth. With that, brand values can also fuel:
Authenticity: Your brand can come across as truly genuine when you dial into your values and communicate them in the right ways.
Better customer experiences: Consistent brand values across different touchpoints can make for an optimal customer experience on social media, websites, and anywhere else customers come across your brand.
Stronger customer loyalty: Customers can connect more deeply with the companies that support the values they care about.
2. Use unique, high-quality images & visual content.
Your brand isn’t going to stand out or look sharp if you’re using stock images, poor-quality photos, or odd visual content that just feels “off.” Those visuals can be ignored, misunderstood, and even just plain confusing. Instead, set your visual marketing apart with images, videos, and other digital assets that are:
- Crystal-clear and focused on obvious subjects
- Distinct to your brand and unlike your competitors’ visuals
- Top quality in terms of picture resolution and sound
Remember, poor-quality images can send the message that brands are OK cutting corners or doing the bare minimum. If that’s not the message you want to send, your visual marketing needs to center on unique, top-quality imagery.
3. Share stories.
It’s not enough to just capture unique images of your products, services, venue, staff, and business activities. Your visuals have to tell the right story — and they have to do that in a matter of seconds. With these stories, it’s crucial to keep it:
Relevant to your audience
Concise and to the point
Authentic and honest
Also, think about what you want your audience to DO after they engage with your visual marketing. That can help you better frame your stories while getting the right tone and message across.
4. Leverage the right platforms.
Visual marketing can happen in almost any digital space your audience is in. Ideally, it happens across multiple channels. That could include some combination of:
Instagram, YouTube & other social media
Google Business
Your website
Email marketing campaigns
And more
The point is to reach out, branch out, and put visual marketing out into multiple spaces simultaneously.
If you do, you can lay out enchanting “breadcrumbs” that attract your audience wherever they come across your brand.
5. Be consistent, flexible & vigilant.
With visual marketing, success isn’t just about what you show and where you activate your campaigns. It’s also about:
Staying on schedule and delivering your message consistently, so your audience knows when and where to expect it
Keeping a consistent voice and message, so your visual marketing continues to resonate and hit home with your audience
Trying new elements and strategies, like A-B testing, telling different stories, and connecting with your audience at different times (of the day and week) to see what’s most effective
Keeping an eye on the results, so you know what’s truly working and so you can continue to fine-tune your visual marketing strategy going forward.
Ready to find out how visual marketing can drive more success for your brand?
If so, let’s talk. We handle visual marketing for new and established brands nationwide, with mind-blowing results. We’d love to do the same for you.