To go where the customers are, you need to turn to social media. Millions of people every day spend time on social media. In order to engage with your customer base on social media, you have to embrace visual content. By and large, visual content is far more likely to be shared than text posts alone, in some cases as much as 94-percent more likely, in fact.
What could you do if you were reaching 94-percent more of the internet? The simple answer is to add visuals to your digital marketing strategy. With this five-step process to creating great visual media, you can grow the audience you’ve been wanting and in turn, your business will thrive.
- Save yourself some time by repurposing your most popular content into visual content.
- Don’t spend a fortune to create visual content. Instead, try the many free tools and apps now available.
- Always stay true to your branding, especially in your visual representation of the company.
- Never forget your basics: SEO, great content, and how to post on each platform.
- Stay creative, but be mindful about how you’re combining text and visuals.
Ready to get 94 percent more shares on your online content? The secret is more visual content. Experts have shown that visual posts get more shares and engagement than text posts alone. Check out these statistics:
- LinkedIn posts that include an image are 98 percent more likely to be commented on.
- Facebook posts that include photos have shown to get more likes and shares than text by itself.
- Tweets with a visual image are as much as three times as likely to have more engagement.
Social media is inherently visual. We’re sharing a glimpse into our world and as a business, you can’t afford to not spend some time on your visual marketing.
Here are the five steps to creating great content every time.
Pick The Right Type Of Content
Picking the right type of content is crucial. By first identifying your goal for your post and then picking the type of content that best aligns with that goal, you’ll have a greater impact with your visual media.
The first of the three main types of content is content that educates your audience. For B2B and B2C, this is should be the Number One choice. It will allow you to better explain your sales process, elaborate on the buying journey, or promote and demonstrate your products and services.
The second option is content that entertains. This is a good choice if you want shares, but won’t necessarily improve your customers life or add as much value.
Your third option is utility content, which aims to help the audience to do something. You are providing the information they need to make a decision and ultimately decide to do something. It could include an eBook, white papers, or a blog post with a download.
Find The Perfect Content Idea
Understanding how content and visuals interact is a big part of creating great visual content. Without the right content idea for your visuals, the whole post will fall flat. A great tool to use is Post Planner. It has a huge library of pre-created text to put with your visuals. Choose any of the 15,000 or more text content to strengthen your visual content.
The key to adding text to your visuals is focusing on the purpose of the content. Whether you choose a quote, question, fill-in-the-blank, or something else, the right text content will make your content make sense. When you combine it with the visuals or graphics, it will become highly sharable.
Use A Free Tool Or Resource
Finally, you’re ready to craft your visual content. If you’re lucky enough to have a graphic designer at your disposal, they would likely take over at this point. But if you’re like many small business owners, you will have to take on the creation of your visual media yourself.
Size Your Image
Have you ever seen an image or piece of visual content posted online that had the wrong aspect ration or low resolutions? It’s likely been caused by the image not being the right size. This can lead to the image looking stretched, cropped, crunched, or out of proportion. Not only is this not visually pleasing, it will end up reflecting poorly on your company because it looks unprofessional.
Instead, you should be tailoring your content to the platform where you intend to post it, both in content and the size. Take the time to resize all your visual content so that it best suits the platform.
Optimize For SEO
Even though your using visuals, you should still be using SEO. Take a few minutes to put in the alt-tags for your visual content. These tell the visual search engines what’s in your content. While Pinterest is the platform where this is most important, it’s worth doing on any platform. On platforms like Instagram, use hashtags. You should also be putting in geotags.
Finish your visual content by writing out an SEO-optimized caption. That plus the alt-tags will help your content be seen by the most people.
