How to Create Effective Visual Content – The Golden Recipe

It’s virtually impossible to find an online business these days without any visual content for marketing and business purposes.

However, as there are too many types of visuals, the main concern is how to create high quality work consistently.
This article provides you a golden recipe for visual content production with 3 key elements.

Visual content is effective when it can signify the brand, be optimized for search and have a long life cycle.

It’s virtually impossible to find an online business these days without any visual content for marketing and business purposes.
However, as there are too many types of visuals, the main concern is how to create high quality work consistently.

This article provides you with a golden recipe for visual content production with 3 key elements.

Visual content is effective when it can signify the brand, be optimized for search and have a long life cycle.

How to create visual content

Before production, make sure you have a sound visual content strategy and a detailed process

In short, prior to creation, answer these 6W questions:

Who? Who is your target audience? Who implements the process? Do you have an experienced internal team or is it better to outsource?
Why? What is the main purpose of these visuals or this campaign?
When?/How long? When do you need these visuals to be published and for how long?
Where? Where will you post them? Is it an owned, paid or earned media? Are they all ready? Is this the first time you post visuals on that channel?
What? What is the key message you want your visuals to convey? Which types of visual content do you want to go for?
How? How is the creation process? How about the tools? Think far as you will need to edit your visuals sooner or later.

Visual content production

The good news: You don’t have to answer all 6Ws every single time because they should be covered in your overall plan.
But if you don’t have a plan in place, you will need to run a lot of research and testing. That’s why many businesses choose to outsource the whole process to a trusted digital marketing agency to save their resources on this expert-needed matter.

How to Create Effective Visual Content: First, Consistency

This is the first part of our golden recipe, also one of 3 best practices mentioned in the article “The Overview of Visual Content”.

What’s most difficult in creating visual content is not how to create the most memorable or beautiful visuals, but how to maintain both variety and brand identity at the same time.

Highly consistent visuals will help greatly when your business wants to build a new, separate brand. At least based on how they “look”, people will not associate the new brand with existing ones.

Question 1: How to Maintain Consistency?

Content: Follow closely your overall strategy. If you don’t have enough time, consider repurposing old articles to ensure message consistency first. Just make sure to update data and statistics.
Style: Follow the brand guideline. Remember, there are certain types of visuals that don’t suit your brand image. Don’t try to use all types for increased variety at the cost of brand identity.
Channel. Make sure the quality is high within and across channels, and the tone and style is adapted to the main target audience of each.

Note: Be extra careful when it comes to using images on the Internet as copyright is a big issue. If possible, creating your own visuals that feature your people will be best.

Creating visual content

Question 2: Consistency = Less Creativity?

No. Consistency and creativity is not mutually exclusive. Creativity helps you express the same brand value or message in different (maybe even unimaginable) ways. Consistency isn’t just about the color or the logo. It is the spirit of the brand. You don’t want users to look at your creative visuals and say: “Oh this is cool! Must be from Brand X!”, and you are Brand Y.

Question 3: Consistency = No User Generated Content?

This is not true. User generated content (UGC) is a highly recommended practice. UCG helps us ‘economize’ production effort and appeal to more users by being authentic.
It’s true that we can’t control 100% UCG, but we can stimulate it by running a campaign with our rules. As these campaigns are on social media, keep it simple for the participants.
According to Forbes, one way for brands to “democratize creativity” is enabling people to create content with their provided tools and platforms.

How to Create Effective Visual Content: Second, SEO

No matter how beautiful your visuals are, if no one can find them, they are as valuable as a 404 page.

Though visuals can be created for a certain campaign, most of the time, visual content should contribute to your available content base. For example, how-to videos have a longer life cycle as people will search for it from time to time. And once it is search-related, SEO can’t be neglected.

How to create visuals

How Visuals Help SEO

Reduce bounce rate: Most online users are skimmers instead of readers. Visualized information will increase their desire to read as they are more pleasant to the eye.
Increase time on site or dwell time: Visuals are more fatigue-resistant than text. So as long as your visuals are appealing, visitors will spend more time on your site.
Improve rankings: Do you know that video helps improve Google rankings? Also, visual content improves user experience, which is one more reason for Google to give you a better ranking.
Boost page authority: This is thanks to the increased number of backlinks – a big part of off page SEO. As long as your site features great content, others will want to link with you.

How to Optimize Visuals for Search

If you insert images into articles, the images must be relevant and helpful to the story. It means they should help users understand and digest the information more easily instead of just looking good.
Implement onpage SEO by optimizing titles, descriptions, HTML tags (including image alt text).
Optimize off-site search. If people want to search for video, they usually go for YouTube or Google Videos instead of just Google. So optimize your video based on the rules of these channels.

how to create best visuals

All in all, always consider search optimization before any creation process.
Though our current search engines aren’t able to “read” visuals yet, Google’s machine learning is already on the way. And when that day comes (likely to be much sooner than you thought), you will feel much relieved that you have search-optimized all visual content from the beginning.

How to Create Effective Visual Content: Third, Time-Resistance

In other words, your visuals should be evergreen.
This is the challenge to all types of content. And because visuals usually take more resources to create than articles, consider these two questions carefully before proceeding.

Trendy Or Not Trendy?

This is about both the topic and presentation style. But the former should follow the overall plan, so we will just focus on the latter here.
The answer lies in your brand identity.
If you are a B2B company with a focus on providing serious, informative content, gamification may be a risky decision.
But if your B2C company offers products for younger generations, a detailed infographic about your research and development process may not be as effective as a funny meme.

Less Is More?

A recommended practice from Content Marketing Institute is to “give your imagery room to breathe”.

Being swarmed over by visuals (no matter how stunning) is just not a good experience. And your site may take more time to load.
In short, prioritize quality over quantity, but do it with moderation.
Don’t wait to reach 100% perfection to publish it. Time is too valuable to be used up this way. And if you want to post your visual content on social media, speed is a key factor.

Being swarmed over by visuals (no matter how stunning) is just not a good experience. And your site may take more time to load.
In short, prioritize quality over quantity, but do it with moderation.
Don’t wait to reach 100% perfection to publish it. Time is too valuable to be used up this way. And if you want to post your visual content on social media, speed is a key factor.

creating beautiful visual content

Food for thought: “It looks stunning! So… what’s next?”
One common mistake when creating visual content is forgetting the CTA (call-to-action).
The ultimate goal of a piece of marketing content is to make the audience (re)act, most of the time by clicking the CTA button and get converted.
Some say it’s better to design your CTA first, then the visual to highlight the CTA.

Learn more: The benefits of infographic design for businesses.

Conclusion

Visual content is as complicated as it’s effective. Online users consume a lot of visual information every day, so it’s harder and harder to make great visuals that capture their attention.
An increasing level of visual production and consumption is certain in the future. So make it a sustainable strategy rather than a reaction with 3 keys: consistency, search optimization and time-resistance.
With expansive experience in various content marketing projects across industries, On Digitals is proud to be your partner on this challenging mission. Contact us today for free consultancy on the most suitable solutions tailored to your needs.