What type of content is most likely to touch emotions and increase interaction with your brand? What type of content has been shown to be more likely recalled by the majority of the American population? Visual. If content in general can be viewed as king or queen, then visual content is prince or princess.
Strong visuals are central to any content marketing strategy. Writing for the Content Marketing Institute, Robert Katai shares five lessons content marketers need to know about visual content.
1. Less is more
“Creating a lot of content, articles, videos, and social media posts won’t get you more clicks, leads, or whatever else you want to get,” says Katai. To maximize value, focus on what’s most important for that specific piece of content, your content strategy as a whole and your audience.
Design your content for your audience to easily comsume, think about and interact with it. Not going overboard with text, reducing clutter and making your content breathe will increase the likelihood of all of this happening.
2. Strike a balance
Visual content creation should be as important as text or audio content creation, says Katai. To make content more engaging, add imagery every few paragraphs. In fact, a 2014 study showed that the 100 most popular blogs used one image every 350 words.
But simply adding visuals isn’t enough – make sure you are respecting basic design principles. If you’re not skilled in design, this may require you working closely with someone who is, such as your organization’s graphic designer.
3. See the colour
Think about your colour combinations – what messages do they give off. Are they appropriate for the context and content strategy? Are they aesthetically pleasing? Answering these questions may require inputs from colleagues or friends, particularly those that have any eye for design. Most importantly, make sure your use of colour stays true to your brand.
4. Think about typography
“If your type is hard to read, readers will ignore your articles,” says Katai. If you need to, learn the basics of typography to ensure that readers won’t find your content hard to read. While I believe that headlines and body copy should use the same font in most cases, ensure that they are differentiated by style (such as italics and bold) and/or font size.
5. Don’t let page-load times deter visitors
Isn’t it frustrating when web pages take forever to load? If you think so, your audience more than likely thinks so too. Katai shares this statement from Google: “The best brand is the one who is there, useful, and quick.” One way to avoid the audience-repelling page-load time conundrum is to ensure visuals are optimized for online platforms. This means that they should be appropriately sized and compressed using software such as Adobe Photoshop. This is another scenario where your design colleague/friend can come to the rescue!
Featured source: patchtok, Flickr Creative Commons
