The ability to stand out from the rest is what every business needs most, especially in the very early stages of existence. Though there’s no secret recipe to winning your customer’s heart, there’s visual marketing that helps with boosting engagement and getting more qualified leads.

How visual marketing works: the basics

Social media has grown and turned into a huge commerce discovery platform. Founders and startups need to scale their visual marketing efforts to keep up with the competition. This way, they will be able to transform their on-site journey into a visually engaging process.

Visual marketing is the ability of your brand to use visual elements in a way that makes you different from the crowd. You can experiment with all types of content available, including graphics, stock images, screenshots, infographics, memes/comics, animation, and videos.

1. Stock photography

Some startuppers believe that stock photography is already dead. However, this is a huge misconception. Stock photo libraries have a great collection of high-quality images relevant to the needs of your customers and leads. The crucial thing is to pick them properly.

Choose clearly staged images that don’t sell or promote your product in a direct way. This could make people doubt your reliability.

If you want to incorporate stock photography into your content, follow the guidelines below:

• Use images that are highly relevant to your content & target audience
• Edit the image if needed, but don’t photoshop all the time; use your resources wisely
• Pick high-quality images that have a story to tell (generic content is a waste of time)
• Crop images if needed; this will make them IG or FB-friendly.

2. Graphics

Spend 20% on content creation and 80% on distribution — that’s what the general rule is. For instance, by turning well-known quotations into beautiful graphics, you decrease time and increase the value of your content. Quotations are often liked and shared by users who feel emotionally bound to your startup.

Make quotes visually attractive by playing with fonts, using frames, and creating eye-catching headlines. Video and graphic design tools like Crello can help you here. It has a rich library of beautiful design templates. By using quotes in your social media and blog regularly, you can keep readers coming back for more. Still, this is just a small nugget of success in visual marketing.

3. Screenshots

If you need to augment boring texts with visual instructions or any additional advice, then making a few screenshots will be the best possible way to do it. This is a working solution that is as good as citing a trusted source.

If you want to boost your engagement levels or just make people click a CTA, then creating a screenshot to back up your claims will be worth a shot.

Why is this startup so cool? What makes it different from the rest? How is it better than all the alternatives on the market? Screenshots, if used properly, can help you show answers to these questions and present them to your followers in a clear & concise way.

Lightshot is a great tool for making screenshots and editing them on the fly.

This tool allows you to capture a screen or a part of it at the click of the button, then add the necessary graphic elements, and save a screenshot as a link or a picture. After these simple manipulations, you can use screenshots as a great way to boost your credibility level.

4. Infographics

Data hounds are disrupting literally every industry. This is one of the motivations to make complicated things simple. Research shows that infographics are liked and shared thrice as much compared to any other social media content type.

With that said, consider replacing the hard numbers with what is much easier to process — infographics. This element of visual marketing will help you augment value-packed information with attractive visuals and extensive data.

Humans love data — let them enjoy yours. You don’t even need a graphic designer to turn raw data into an infographic. Many online tools offer infographic templates for free, so you can build one in a matter of a few minutes.

5. Animation

As a famous molecular biologist, John Medina knows that vision is a human’s most important dominant sense. In fact, it takes up to half of all the resources used by our brain. 90% of the information that comes to our brain is visual. That’s why the majority of people are visual learners. Given this, the fact that visual information is 60,000 times faster processed than text seems pretty logical.

For all these reasons, there’s a huge shift towards the use of visual elements in content marketing. Today, Facebook holds well over 4 million live videos every day. This all creates a picture superiority effect. It explains why people remember visuals much better than words.

Aside from using different types of images, incorporate animation & video into your content. Posting photos in motion or animations may help you grab a great deal of interaction with your existing and future clients. Users will engage with in-the-moment pictures or animations that align with your mission and tone of voice.

6. Memes/comics

What is the strongest reaction you can get from users? An emotion! Though methods of making your audience emotional differ, one of the most time-tested ones is using memes. Comics and memes entertain people, creating a tremendous emotional bond through positivity and laughter.

The important thing is to share memes and comics that are relevant to your users. Some startups fail to get the expected reaction by picking a joke that doesn’t resonate with people well enough.

Well, failures happen. You’ll never know which jokes your users will like until you try making them laugh through posting some. Before you incorporate lame jokes into your visual marketing, research memes that are relevant to your industry, business type, and audience.

If you don’t know where to go with research — Reddit and Imgur are great places to start. Tons of memes can be found there.

7. Videos

The scope of video marketing is bigger than ever. More startups use YouTube, Facebook, and their own websites to market video content. They leverage the educative potential of videos to create tutorials, in-depth product descriptions, website wikis, and whatever else.

One of the most recent trends disrupting the video marketing field is incorporating videos into emails. Though the process is much more complex than using ordinary text, the end result is very impressive.

Over to you

As you already see, there’s no magical recipe for beating the competitors in visual marketing. The only way to succeed is by using a test-and-try approach. By breaking the pattern. By challenging the rules. By pitching an innovative visual marketing strategy, aligned with your vision, branding, and tone of voice.

If you test it all out, you’ll realize which elements of visual marketing work best for your startup and why.