How to build a Visual Marketing strategy

In the digital age, there’s a high density of content circulating online. Creating content and hoping it will succeed isn’t sustainable for brands who want to see their visual marketing drive brand awareness, audience growth, and sales. Truly shareable content is authentic, unique, eye-catching, and— in order to generate sustainable engagement in this day and age— visual. 2021 HubSpot research revealed that 70% of companies are investing in content marketing which encompasses visual marketing strategies.

Visual marketing impacts the bottom line, contributing in a meaningful way to improved sales, customer engagement, and internal employee engagement for B2B and B2C businesses that can sell software, products, or anything in between.

When used as a tool by marketing, sales, customer service, and HR teams, a cohesive visual brand strategy can set companies apart from their competition and drive growth like never before.

In order to see the benefits of different types of visual marketing, teams who create and share brand content need to understand how content marketing strategy⁠ works. Let’s get started.

What is visual marketing?

The definition of visual marketing is fairly straightforward: it’s a content marketing strategy that uses graphics, images, video, or visual material to market a product or service. Visual marketing falls under the umbrella of content marketing, which is part of the marketing organization.

Visual marketers can be content creators, brand strategists, internal communication teams, graphic designers, content strategists, or any other individual who uses, creates, or distributes visual marketing in their role.

And beyond simply interpreting images more quickly, visuals help aid in making faster purchasing decisions. Shoppers make decisions about products in 90 seconds, and 90% of shopping decisions are made based on visuals alone.

Is visual marketing the same as visual content marketing?

Visual marketing and visual content marketing are not the same.

Visual marketing uses visuals to market a product or service and can include video, images, GIFs, presentations, PDFs, one-pagers, or any visual used in pursuit of marketing and advertising. Visual marketing can include sales enablement content, advertising, or marketing.

Visual content marketing on the other hand is when marketers employ content marketing strategies to attract ideal customers using visual mediums like social media, email, blogs, and long form content like reports or infographics.

Why is visual marketing an important business strategy?

Remember how humans are wired to process information visually? That’s evident when you look at our eyes— turns out they’re actually the windows to the brain, not the soul after all.

Studies have also found that images have the power to evoke feelings far more effectively than words⁠, perfectly summarized in the popular phrase: “a picture tells a thousand words.”

The power of visual marketing becomes even clearer when diving into the data. Image posts attract 650% higher engagement than text-only posts, for example, while a product is 85% more likely to be purchased if a customer watches a product video.

In short, no brand can be without visual content in an increasingly digital world and therefore, can’t be without a comprehensive visual marketing strategy.

How to build a visual marketing strategy

In the same way as you would with a generalized digital marketing strategy, your visual marketing strategy will tap into what you’re already doing right, figuring out what you can be doing more of, and a heavy reliance on your audience—with visuals at its core.

Here are a few key steps to creating your visual marketing strategy:

1. Find clear value propositions.

As a business, you offer your customers and clients something that no other brand can—this is your value proposition. By identifying your target audience and value proposition, you can determine how viable and competitive your business will be. The same should apply to your visual content; what are you going to offer your audience that’s uniquely yours and solves a need or problem for them? What is relevant to them, considering the context of your product or offer? Everything you create should be adding value.

2. Identify marketing strategy objectives.

Creating a strategy without setting objectives is a bit like a stab in the dark. If you don’t understand what you’re hoping to get from your new strategy, how can it be deemed successful? How can you know where to make changes when things aren’t working if you’re unsure what ‘working’ looks like?

Clearly define the specifics of success for your visual marketing strategy: are you concerned with the shareability of the content? How much community engagement your visual content generates? Or are you hoping to drive more viewers to your website? Put together a list of 3-5 key objectives using SMART goals ⁠and set a time frame within which to achieve them.

3. Create a well-rounded picture of your target audience and ideal buyer personas.

Your audience—or in your company’s case, your customers—is at the heart of everything you do, including your visual marketing strategy. First— who are they? Who represents your ideal customer? A buyer persona is a representative of a potential customer who is likely to buy from your company.

Their online behaviors, demographics, and preferences are all important elements that will influence how you’re marketing to them, so it’s crucial to understand what’s relevant, important, and entertaining to them.

Where does your audience live online? What social media platforms are they on? What types of visual content do they consume and share?

4. Examine your competitors.

A good way to know where to head—or not to head—is to take a look at your competitors. Perform a competitor analysis⁠ or a SWOT analysis on their brand as a way of discovering what you might use for inspiration, what you should steer clear of, and what room there might be for opportunities.

5. Decide on what is ‘relevant’ content.

According to content marketing expert⁠ Gregory Ciotti, the most important aspect of your content marketing is to “creatively capture the concept in a visual.”

The best way to achieve is by keeping in mind what each type of asset can do and choosing the best possible type of visual marketing content to represent your information. For example, you wouldn’t use a comic to represent your company’s growth, a chart or graph is a better visual representation of data and would serve that purpose much better.

Break down what constitutes an effective piece of visual marketing —not just generally, but to your brand and your audience specifically. Ask yourself a few questions about your content: does this asset enhance my message in some way? Is this asset clear and easily read or understood? Is this the best possible type of asset for this context? How will my audience react to this asset?

6. Define your brand identity and visual brand guidelines.

Creating a visual brand style guide is one of the last steps since it relies on the information you gathered about your audience.

A visual marketing style guide should include:

• Logo guidelines

• Your color palette

• Company fonts

• Iconography

• A photography style or guidelines for choosing photos

• Design elements

• Your brand voice and tone

• Brand templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

When you compile your brand identity assets into a brand kit⁠ it makes it easier for marketing teams to create and share visual marketing content at scale. As your content marketing team grows even more, you can implement brand approval workflows that streamline the content creation process and get your content out to your audience faster.

7. Audit existing assets and find ways to repurpose them into visual content.

In the context of visual marketing, ask yourself these questions pertaining to your brand: what visual content has worked for us in the past? What has proved ineffective? What resources do we have at hand that can allow us to create more visual content quicker? What are our competitors doing that we’ve missed the boat on? These answers will inform the focal point of your strategy when you come to define its boundaries. Identify the top pieces of content from the past several months or years in terms of your marketing goals.

8. Choose visual marketing tools and conduct team training sessions.

Almost a quarter (24%) of content marketers report that their biggest challenge is design and visual content⁠. Creating effective brand designs takes time and is often a collaborative effort among marketing teams.

Choose visual marketing tools that offer:

• Real-time collaboration⁠

• Folders and storage⁠

• Templates⁠

More to come on the specifics of visual marketing tools. A key part of this phase in the content strategy process is making sure that your team is comfortable with the platforms you choose and on board with making them part of the day-to-day routine.

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