The Most Common Tips For Creating Visual Contents

Published by Color Experts International January 13, 2023

1. Conformity of Branding

When designing visuals for your content marketing, one thing you must take care that all your visuals need to be consistent with your brand identity and style guide. Every visual component on all your media should be complementary to the overall marketing strategy and brand appearance of the company. These include your brand colors, logo usage, font styles, and other guidelines used. Brand recognition takes a lot of consistent effort and costs a fortune, so it is not a wise idea to spoil it suddenly by using visual content that does not fit with your brand message.

2. Use Your Logo

If you are planning to share your visuals through social media channels, it is better to add your logo to the design. For example, if you share your post on Pinterest, it is possible that it will be repinned. Without a logo, it is much more likely that your post will lose its identity. Additionally, pins with a logo perform better than others.

Good branding should be noticeable but not obtrusive to the viewer’s eye. Ideally, you should put your logo on a corner or on the outer frame of the visuals. If the color of the logo is not matching with other components, you may use a greyscale version of the logo.

The purpose of social media posts is to be seen by the audience. Furthermore, if you create them well, you can have shared them further with your contacts to be seen by their contacts. This is the true leveraging power of social media. So make sure you do not forget your logo.

3. Collect Images From The Right Sources

It is always advisable to use your own custom images and videos for content marketing if you can manage to do so. You can use a professional service for this. However, if you can not manage your own images, you may choose to collect them from stock photo sites. But you must check the terms and conditions for use of such images. There are thousands of downloadable images in the stock collections, though the price may vary on a case-by-case basis. You may find completely copyright-free images, while for some others you either have to pay or accredit the main authors.

4. Use Right Image Size and Format

It does not really matter from where you collect your images, it is advisable that you get the maximum resolution available. Each social media channels have different requirements regarding size, aspect ratio, and format. If you use a low-resolution image, it is not possible to increase the size or aspect ratio later, if needed.

Unless your visuals are rendered by a professional company, you will have to edit the images yourself and make sure that they meet the specifications of the social media concerned. If the original image is too small, then making it bigger will appear blurry. If the aspect ratio is not correct, then it can look flattened or stretched when it is uploaded. These problems can make your business look unprofessional, so it is highly advisable to avoid these flaws.

5. Follow Graphic Design Basics

If you want to create appealing visual content, it is important that you stick to graphic design basics as much as possible. Sure, there are no hard and fast rules about graphic designs. But there are some basic principles that need to be followed. Once you know the rules, it is even possible to break them when required.

Some basic principles of graphic design:

There should be enough negative or white space. Visuals without any negative space look cluttered and are hard to follow. This distracts the viewers from the intended message rather than attracting them.
The colors you use should be complementary to each other. Also, they must be tuned to your branding guidelines. But you also make sure that the colors are not disruptions to the eyes.
Select your font size, weight, and spacing carefully. While these should resonate with brand image, you can also change these sometimes for better readability. Great user experience and engagement are the main goals for any visual content.

6. Use Videos

Instead of using only still images for your content marketing strategies, you can also incorporate videos into your marketing campaigns. Videos create more engagement and retention from the viewers, thereby increasing more opportunities for business. Marketers who use videos say that it increases revenue by 49% faster per year compared to their competitors who do not use it. With the advancement of technology, it is also possible to add clickable links to the videos. These links can drive the visitors to a landing page, and also the viewers are provided with options to choose what happens next. These practices are good for engagement as it puts the viewers in the control.

7. Use animated GIFs

More than 95 million posts are shared only on Instagram each day, so adding a little animation to your posts can give you a great advantage over others. GIFs and animated videos are a great way to add some movements and narratives to your visual content. Videos can range from high-quality IGTV films to subtle photo animations i.e. cinematographs.

8. SEO Optimization

Your visual content should also be optimized for search engine optimization (SEO). A lot of people search for images through different search engines. Though google bot can not read info from the images, it can read the image alt texts to learn what the image is about. Pinterest may be the most important social media when comes to image optimization for SEO. Like other search engines, you should use the right keywords in the descriptions and alt texts. On Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms use hashtags, geotags, and rich captions for better results.

9. Use Alt Text

Whenever possible, take full advantage of alt-text descriptions. Alt-texts are extremely important for your images. According to WebAIM, inappropriate alt-texts are the most problematic for proper web accessibility.

Alt-text is important mainly for two reasons. First, it provides information to those who need it, such as the visually impaired. Alt-text should be short and to the point but must provide enough information so that search engine bots can understand the context of the image.

Second, alt-text is extremely important for image SEO optimization. Search engines such as Google place a lot of significance on the use of proper alt-texts as they can not read the information from the image directly.

10. Look for Diversity

Not to mention, creative works are always rewarded by visitors by likes, comments, shares, and sales. They have the potential to attract customers too. Therefore, you should put emphasis on your presentations. Keep in mind, any specific customer segments you are going to target. You should represent your visuals depending on the preferences of the customers based on their culture and geography. All your creative content, regardless of the platform on which it is going to be shared, should be appropriate and inclusive.

Conclusion

Creative visuals are the key to success in the online marketing world, and social media is the perfect platform for these specific tasks. Attractive visuals increase the engagement of the visitor and eventually create more business opportunities.

There are many ways content marketers can work with visuals to draw the audience’s attention, show off the brand’s personality, and make content more digestible and engaging. In this article, we have shared the most common tips for creating better visual content for your business. The rest is unto you to explore more and find your own ways.