Visual communication plays an influential role in inbound marketing. Humans are visual creatures. We like to see things before we take someone’s word for it. When we make purchases, we want to know what the product or service does and how it will help us. With visual communication, it becomes possible to show your audience what you offer rather than just telling them. Plus, with visuals in communication, it becomes much easier for your audience to understand what you explain. To learn more about the role of visual communication in the marketing ecosystem, check out a neat infographic our lead copywriter and awesome design team created.
The Role of Visual Communication in the Marketing Ecosystem
Using Visual Communication for Effective Marketing
Visual marketing plays a key role in the success of your brand’s marketing ecosystem.
Understanding the marketing funnel is vital to choosing visual communication formats that will best resonate with your audience during the awareness, consideration and decision parts of the buyer’s journey. Having a thorough understanding of the marketing funnel will also help you pinpoint which types of marketing to invest in — social media ad campaigns, conversion rate optimization (CRO), SEO, PR or other digital marketing efforts.
Awareness Stage: Social Media Ads & PR
Strategies to Use
Social media ad campaigns and PR are crucial in the awareness stage as they allow you to use strategies like infographic marketing, Facebook and LinkedIn targeting, and account-based marketing (ABM) to reach quality leads.
Goals
- Focus on bringing in new leads
- Educate your target audience on a specific problem they have
Visual Formats to Use
- Infographics
- Visual checklists
- Interactive PDFs
- Video marketing
An engaging infographic can help you stand out and get major publications to publish your content for PR purposes.
Potential Results
IGW used Facebook and LinkedIn targeting tools combined with a few ABM lists as part of various social media ad campaigns and the results were phenomenal.
- $10,700 ad spend over 60 days
- Impressions: 293,000
- Clicks: 2,078
- Total leads generated: 352
- Social actions (Likes, Comments, Shares, Saves, Reactions to posts): 304
Explainer video marketing performed exceptionally well as part of the Facebook social media ad campaigns:
- Total number of video plays: 19,769
Consideration Stage: SEO & CRO
Strategies to Use
The consideration stage is where you reach your audience with cornerstone content (blog posts, e-books, video demos, etc.). 70% of buyers return to Google during the consideration stage, making SEO of extreme importance as it ensures the content reaches your intended audience.1 To push leads through the consideration stage, you should apply SEO and CRO strategies to your visual content
Goals
- Educate audience on your product/service
- Educate audience on alternative solutions
Visual Formats to Use
- Blog posts with images
- E-books with visuals
- Visual comparison pieces
- Slideshares
- Explainer videos
- Infographics
- Video demos
Improve the SEO and CRO of an Explainer Video
SEO
- Add Schema markup
- Include title tags, alt tags, and impulse keywords in description tags
- Include its information in a video sitemap on your website
CRO
- Make the video embeddable for sharing purposes
- Use a custom player color that matches your brand’s colors
- Embed it in blog posts, press releases, and email marketing
Potential Results
- Videos in blog content are like jet fuel, skyrocketing inbound links by 300%2
- Optimized images and videos increase audience engagement by 650% 3
Decision Stage: SEO, CRO & Social Media Ads
Goals
- Help audience make a positive purchasing decision with brand-specific content
- Provide in-depth product tutorials
Visual Formats to Use
- Long video tutorials
- Email marketing with links to visual assets
- Social media videos
- Video customer testimonials
- Infographics
Strategies to Use
During the decision stage, you will use SEO, CRO, and social media video ads to convert leads. You can create rich, SEO infographics highlighting technical support of your product, use social retargeting to target leads with social video ads that feature customer testimonials, and leverage customer testimonial videos in email marketing to close the deal.
Potential Results
- Secure a 70% higher chance of converting website visitors by reaching them through a retargeted ad4
- Double conversions with a product video 5
Final Thoughts
As you can see, your entire marketing ecosystem benefits when you use visual assets. Whether you’re targeting your audience in the awareness, consideration or decision stage, there are plenty of visual formats to reach them through. All aspects of the marketing ecosystem integrate with one another, but the key is to know how to use visual assets in conjunction with PR, SEO, CRO, and social media ad campaign tactics. IGW is always here to help you create a marketing ecosystem that drives conversions and fosters long-term customer relationships.
Sources
- www.pardot.com
- www.marketingsherpa.com
- www.medium.com
- www.blog.spiralytics.com
- www.blog.treepodia.com
