5 Overlooked Ways to Leverage Existing Content for Visual Marketing

You can’t ignore the power of visuals, not anymore. In today’s crowded marketplace, visuals are considered one of the most compelling types of content.

According to research by Columbia University and the French Canadian institute, 59 percent of the links shared on Twitter have never been clicked on! Clearly, click-baiting doesn’t work anymore. You need to connect with your audience in a more powerful manner, and visuals can do that for you.

Which post would you click on, the version with the image, or the one without?

What is Visual Marketing?

Ask Google what visual marketing means, and this is what you will be told.

5 Reasons to Invest in Visual Marketing

1. An average user has the attention span of 8 seconds, visual content can increase it by about 82 percent.

2. Content that includes an image can increase your impressions by 94 percent.

3. Colored visuals can increase the willingness of a person to read your content by 80 percent.

4. Articles with images every para or so are likely to get shared 2X as many times as other articles.

5. People remember only 10 percent of the information they hear 3 days later, but 65 percent of the information paired with an image when asked after 3 days.

How to Leverage Existing Content for Visual Marketing Efforts

Not everyone is gifted with design acumen, but that isn’t really an issue. With the tools and resources available today, you can quickly put together powerful content for your marketing purposes.

1. Mix in a GIF or two when scheduling your content

There are over 10 copyright free GIF resources that you can use. In fact, you can even schedule GIFs using social media scheduling solutions, content curation software, or on Twitter, when tweeting. It is a GIPHY world, pun intended.

What is so exciting about a GIF? Well, when used in the right context, they can shoot up your engagement levels. Most of them with a hint of humor and are a great way to break the ice or connect with your social media audience.

Take a look at this fun example of visual marketing. The corgi is a nice way to make an audience warm-up to you.

Even when you are having conversations on social media, use GIFs where you can. When someone says something nice, you can go AWWW on a GIF. There are some super funny ones for ‘agree’ and ‘dance’ as well. What matters is how you use them.

2. Choose clever blog covers from copyright free visual resources

Have you used the search tools under Google’s image search? If you set the search to ‘Labeled for reuse’, every image that is returned on that search is yours to use. Feel free to use them, but always credit your source. It is important to acknowledge people’s work and effort, especially when you are using their content for your purposes.

Additionally, you can also source content from one of many copyright free visual resources like PexelS.

How do you search, when looking for a blog cover? Your search terms will decide how effective your blog turn out to be. Use emotion and action words when conducting your search. Look at this post for instance, it emphasizes fear. Emotions are a sure shot means of connecting with your audience.

3. Re-purpose an old blog post as a SlideShare

After spending hours creating each blog post, you should make sure to get proportional returns from it. Say you have already covered social media promotions and email marketing promotions, what more can you do with the post?

Most people ignore platforms like SlideShare because they aren’t mainstream. That is a mistake. SlideShare has about 70 million unique monthly visitors. It provides a unique and brilliant solution for marketing.

Suggested read – How to use SlideShare for marketing.

Some presentations on there have over a 100,000 views. There is no reason why yours shouldn’t. Also, turning a blog post into a presentation will barely take you any time. So you should definitely make it a part of your content marketing process.

SlideShare has a title, description and meta tags section, so you can also optimize everything you post on the platform for search.

4. Source powerful infographics from listing directories

Infographics get shared 3X more than all other types of content. That fact isn’t very surprising because infographics are the perfect mix of concept and data, visually represented. Unfortunately, they are hard to make. Fortunately, you don’t have to make them.

There are several infographic repositories on the internet. They have been created to help people get their infographics noticed and shared. These are infographics waiting for you to share them.

Considering that there are multiple repositories, there is a good chance that you will find an infographic that is exactly suitable for your content or niche. Find and use them, but again, credit your source. Just look at how great they look on social media posts!

5. Convert building blocks into the perfect visual

If none of the resources on this post have what you need, you can always create your own visual, but don’t do it from scratch. There are visual apps and resources that offer pre-designed templates and icons that you can work with to quickly put together the concept you have in mind.

Pick an image editor, like Canva, that is easy to use. So many of them now offer a drag and drop interface, making your work very much simple and effortless.

For design inspiration, you can look at design blogs, or do a Google search to see how others have represented what you want to create.

Visuals are too effective to ignore. If you can’t create them, there are a 100 ways in which you can source them, or assemble them to really make a difference to your marketing efforts. All you really require is the right visual tools and resources, and an idea of how you can place what you find in context. Begin applying this tactic today, you will get better at it over time. With consistent pursuit, you may even transform your marketing results.

File Cabinet Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "5 Overlooked Ways to Leverage Existing Content for Visual Marketing" was first published on Small Business Trends