10 Visual Marketing Tips to Master Social Media Engagement

It seems like a lot of the advice out there is all about maximizing quality and creating a ton of value in every piece that’s created for a content marketing strategy, with popular approaches such as the skyscraper technique and Moz’s whiteboard lessons on creating 10x content dominating the industry. What about e-commerce brands or other companies that drive engagement and sales through their social channels with visual content? Compile user-generated content The more you engage with your fans, the more likely they are to share photos with you. Get personal Marketers agree that visual content is critical for success in marketing, especially over social media. If your social strategy involves a lot of images, you should aim for variety to keep your fans from getting burned out on seeing similar pictures posted by you all the time. Share your brand’s values Behind-the-scenes photos are perfect for showcasing the workplace culture at your company and showing how your teams interact. Screenshots A screenshot is a great way to include additional advice and visual instructions to content when you’re sharing tips with your fans over social media. If you want to drive people to a call-to-action, or get more engagement on your content, then create a screenshot of that featured image to back up the claims you’re making. Trust the data to indicate what types of visual content are working, and determine which visuals you should discard from your social post schedule when they don’t perform well with your audience. Do you use any of these types of visual content in your social media posts?

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10-visual-marketing-tips-to-master-social-media-engagement

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding content marketing at the moment. It seems like a lot of the advice out there is all about maximizing quality and creating a ton of value in every piece that’s created for a content marketing strategy, with popular approaches such as the skyscraper technique and Moz’s whiteboard lessons on creating 10x content dominating the industry.

That’s good – we could always use more emphasis on high quality content. The further we get away from shallow, garbage content that’s stuffed with random keywords and lacking any real value for the reader, the better. It wasn’t too long ago that the search results were as vast as an ocean, but as shallow as a puddle.

That’s a content landscape that I don’t ever want to revisit again.

Still, most of the popular advice these days is focused on content – almost too focused. We can debate the value of short form content versus 3,000+ word blog posts and highlight the importance of stacking value indefinitely, but these discussions exclude marketers who don’t want to rely primarily on written content.

What about e-commerce brands or other companies that drive engagement and sales through their social channels with visual content?

A 10x content post doesn’t really help there, but if visuals are more your style, then there are plenty of ways to 10x your social graphics to boost your content strategy and capture your audience’s attention in the middle of their browsing.

1. Create infographics

In just about every industry, you can bet there are countless data hounds roaming in the audience. This is one of the reasons why infographics tend to perform well. In fact, studies show that infographics are often liked and shared 3x more than any other form of content on social media.

People love data, and infographics make it even easier to process the hard numbers. Tidbits of value-packed info, along with eye-catching visuals, simplify the process of evaluating data for consumers.

You don’t even need to hire a costly graphic designer to create an infographic. There are tools and services like Piktochart and Canva that let you plug in data, choose from themes and templates (free and paid options available), and put together an infographic on the fly.

Infographics take on a variety of forms, so don’t assume they’re just for nerd culture or Millennials. Brands often use infographics in clever ways to gain shares and brand lift, like this one from men’s apparel store Samuel-Windsor.

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Or this one from Slate showing which groups are involved in the Syrian conflict.
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2. Compile user-generated content

The more you engage with your fans, the more likely they are to share photos with you. This activity is most common with product-related brands, but it can work for service industries as well. User-generated content can be used in a variety of ways, including reposting on your own social media channels to show appreciation for fans that reached out and connect with you.

You can even take this type of content to the next level by combining multiple users’ submissions into mini presentations or custom slideshows – like a music video to put your biggest supporters in the spotlight and thank them for their loyalty.

Another successful approach I’ve seen was a brand compiling the pictures their reps took during promotional events or tradeshows, and subsequently creating a showcase video that was shared throughout the company’s social channels. If you were to try a similar approach, this would likely receive a lot of engagement from those who attended the event, as well as encourage other followers to come to the next event by showing them what they missed this time around.

3. Get personal

Marketers agree that visual content is critical for success in marketing, especially over social media. Studies have shown that out of all the types of content, pictures and images rank the highest for audience engagement.

If your social strategy involves a lot of images, you should aim for variety to keep your fans from getting burned out on seeing similar pictures posted by you all the time. This creates a great opportunity to show your fans that you’re more human than corporate machine.

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Share personal images not just of your staff, but of yourself as well. Get your leadership team involved in photoshoots around the office, warehouse, and out in the field. Not only will this add a more human element to your brand, but it also shows off your exciting company culture. This strategy will make fans feel closer to you, and it could even act as…

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