Content Harmony: How to Integrate Visuals in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Define Your Visual Content Style

When it comes to visuals, consistency is key, but if you don’t have documented content guidelines in place, your consistency and brand messaging can take a hit–which makes visual content style a must.

It helps you set content rules to keep the tone of voice, format, colors, and other elements as per the brand voice–irrespective of who creates it. This should cover:

• Brand identity element: Logo, color palette, and typography
• Visual style: photography, graphics, illustrations, and icons
• Layout and composition: Grid systems, spacing, alignment, and hierarchy
• User interface elements: Buttons, menus, form, and input fields
• Tone: Brand voice and mood
• Accessibility: Color contrasts, alt text for visuals, and readable fonts

The goal is to communicate more effectively with your audience. Their needs, wants, expectations, behavior, and language should shape every section of your visual content style. 

Choose the Right Type of Visual

Visual content is much more than just pictures and videos. Using a healthy mix of different visual content can help you stand out and leave a lasting impact on the audience.

Other than images, here are some of the most important visual content types you can consider:

• Long-form and short-form videos (especially videos shorter than 60 seconds, as they get 40% more engagement)
• Infographics (ideal for presenting complex information in a visually appealing way)
• Memes and GIFs (best for boosting user engagement)
• Interactive content (it can include quizzes, polls, calculators, gamification, interactive maps, etc.)
• Lottie animations (a lightweight form of animation, perfect for adding dynamic and high-quality visuals without affecting your website speed)
• User-generated content (great for building trust and personifying your brand with customer stories)

Choose a few different types and roll with them. However, make sure all of it is high-quality and aligns well with your visual content style guide. 

Incorporate Visual Storytelling

If you can take one thing from this article, let it be to think like a storyteller, then plan and craft your visual content to tell that story across platforms. 

It all starts with creating a compelling brand story that is authentic, relevant, and has a sensory appeal and archetype. Next, create a relatable character with an exciting plot or conflict (usually the customer’s pain point).

Finally, using visual elements, you create a story with your customer at the center, and your product/service saves the day. This is crucial if you want to build trustworthy product pages that feature real customer stories, authentic photographs, and videos. The end result should be bite-sized, easy-to-consume, powerful visuals that are highly engaging for your customers to interact with and share. 

Maximize Visual Impact with Social Media Platforms

You’ve created amazing visuals–make sure they reap maximum ROI for your business by promoting them on different social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter).

Link back the visuals (say a reel you posted on Instagram) to a blog post that talks about a similar topic. It’ll help you get noticed by a huge crowd of organic traffic. 

You must also ensure that the visual style and format go with the nature and meaning of each social platform. For example, here’s what works well for the following social sites:

• Facebook: Highlights the impact of visuals in articles with statistics on shares and engagement.
• Pinterest: Imagine this as your visual pinboard. By naming your images and boards, you can leverage the platform to make your content and visual stories go viral.
• Instagram: Insta is all about visibility and engagement. With about 70 million photos shared daily, the platform is ideal for connecting with your audience through eye-catching images and videos.
• Snapchat: The platform is perfect for brands targeting younger audiences. But creating visuals on Snapchat is not just about snapping. It’s about creating a narrative that connects with the next generation. 

Other than social platforms, utilize these visuals in your email marketing campaign for maximum engagement and conversion. Here, images, infographics, GIFs, Illustrations, customer testimonials, image maps, and screenshots will be your go-to visual content choices.

Repurpose Information and Insights as Visuals

Who says you have to reinvent the wheel every time? You have a plethora of information, business statistics, and industry insights in written form–start transforming them into your scroll-stopping visuals. 

You can also use stock-image services if cutting-edge equipment and talents to operate it are out of your price range. However, make sure you adapt the images as per your visual content style guide before publishing.

Leverage Visual Content Creation Tools

Creating engaging visual content takes time, creativity, and money. Fortunately, there are many tools today available to you that shoulder this burden. Here are a few of such content creation tools:

• Canva: A versatile tool to create diverse and visually appealing images
• Snappa: A graphic design tool great for creating engaging images synced with your social media
• Skitch: Perfect for personalizing photos and screenshots
• Hootsuite: A platform for scheduling and managing visuals across all social networks
• Vine: Ideal for creating loop videos to showcase your brand’s personality
• Pinterest: Crucial tool for amplifying your visual content’s reach