The latest social business trends illustrate that compelling graphics are practically a prerequisite in every site design and as illustrations for every post.
Graphics have always been important. The right images trigger the kind of visceral response that can lead to desired marketing outcomes. Indeed, your first schoolbooks were basically pictures followed by text.
That’s how children learn and retain information quickly and efficiently. Social media marketers can emulate that paradigm to achieve the business objective of maximizing reads, subscriptions, conversions, and sales through such evocative marketing strategies.
Today, as a social media marketer, you can even build corporate websites and business blogs without any coding whatsoever, via turnkey frameworks that use the paradigm of drag-and-drop building blocks or with shrink-wrap themes (design templates) coupled with thousands of plugins that deliver any imaginable feature or functionality to a site with the ease of a paint-by-numbers canvas.
It’s all very visual and science tells us that the human brain likes it this way; when presented with words, we morph them into images. For social media marketing, the takeaway is emotionally potent graphical content and strong visuals are the most effective ways to sell.
The digital quilt becomes complete with the right mix of images and text to create immediacy, impact, emotional response, and, ideally, action.
Since attention spans are running on fumes, social networks that rely on evocative marketing strategies (Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, et al) are ascending while, at the same time, veteran social media influencers are talking about blogging less and throttling back on the length of their posts.
For social media marketers building websites and creating content for companies, evocative marketing strategies elevate visuals with balanced levels of text. If you are trying to cram your site with a fruit salad of keywords to stoke the SEO boiler, your tactic may actually be counterproductive.
Evocative social media marketing techniques create a brand experience by using imagery to create an emotional connection via human sentiments such as family, children, pets, babies, nostalgia, love, sex, career, success, wealth, and relationships.
A fresh new coat of social media marketing ideas might include some of the following approaches and recommendations:
Use Images on Your Site
Blend images and text to create a sales and marketing funnel leading to your conversion or commitment objectives. If your Google Analytics bounce rate is too high, something is amiss with your images, videos, headlines, captions, or textual content.
Remember to optimize your images for the web. Huge image files can slow down your site, and negatively impact user experience and SEO. Use tools to compress images without sacrificing quality, ensuring your site loads quickly and efficiently. Consider using a variety of image formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF) depending on the type of image and its purpose.
Also, ensure your images are accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. Use descriptive alt text for all images, providing context and information for screen readers and other assistive technologies. This improves accessibility and contributes to SEO by providing keywords and textual context to search engines.
Use Images on Your Social Media Channels
Images and videos are key for capturing attention. No one will see your update unless there’s an eye-catching image in it.
Use high-quality visuals that are relevant to your brand and audience. Experiment with different types of visuals, such as infographics, behind-the-scenes photos, user-generated content, and short video clips.
Make sure to market your visual across multiple channels, but also don’t forget to consolidate your assets using tools like Beacons. LinkLab gives you a good explanation of how it works.
Create Presentations
It continues to blow my mind how popular PowerPoint presentations still are. I remember making them in high school for every presentation I had to give to the class. Why is it that we are instructed to use PowerPoint presentations every time we are meant to speak before a crowd? My theory was that most people are just not great speakers, and they need some other means to hold onto their audience’s attention.
But the reality is that people are auditory and visual learners, so having something to look at while a person is reinforcing those points through speech, makes the information stick! So to ensure that your information remains in the minds of your audience, even more, you need to wow them with pretty pictures, fonts, and layouts. It’s the most effective way to keep them coming back for more.
Gamma is an AI-driven app that lets you create presentations and documents. Give it a topic, review the auto-generated outline, and select a theme. The tool will start generating the presentation in real time letting you watch the process.
The tool uses Bing search to find related images but you can also replace them with your own. The tool only supports a PDF export. PowerPoint and Google Slides support is claimed to be coming soon.
You will never produce a deadly dull slide presentation again that relies on a sea of bullet points and plain vanilla bar charts and pie charts.
Think of your next speech or seminar in the context of delivering your message in a cathedral. Don’t project a script; envelope your audience in stained glass.
Create Infographics
Creating infographics is more complex than downloading stock photos and vector graphics. Luckily there are many online software tools for creating infographics, charts, graphs, and data visualizations, or you can design your own with Visme, Venngage, etc.
Infographics are so compelling as a powerful convergence of imagery and text. Content with infographics or images drives more shares and engagement. If you are looking for social media ROI for your business, focus on visualization.
Use Pictures of You and Your Team
Let’s talk about you, and your image. Plus the images of people you work with. There’s plenty of evidence that using interesting, artful photos of people can dramatically impact conversion rates.
Cartoons used as company mascots and other types of vector graphics can help drop your bounce rates, so consider a site strategy leveraging a mosaic of photography and graphic art.
Does your company website or blog use enough photos and graphics? Do you have plans to focus on visuals in your social media marketing as a means of retaining visitors and boosting conversions?
About the Author
Ann Smarty is the co-founder of Smarty.Marketing. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon.
