Visual storytelling? What’s that?
Often times when asked about the company, representatives immediately dive into product and service details without first telling the listener about the company itself. Why does the company exist? What problems do people have that your product or service solves? And all this information can be difficult to digest, especially if you operate in a complex or highly technical industry.
Starting with the why is an important part of telling your brand story. But it can often be difficult to articulate. That’s where visual storytelling can be really helpful.
Take this simple example of describing a circle – visualize yourself trying to tell someone what a circle looks like by using the textual description: a curved line with every point equal distance from the center. Not the easiest description to follow. Now, think about someone reading a textual description and seeing a picture of a circle right next to it. Bingo! That’s the power of visual storytelling.
Now let’s apply visual storytelling.
Visual storytelling is the passing on of a lot of information through a relatively simple visual aid to help potential customers understand your company’s message. Visuals attract people, and they give your customers a quick and easy way to understand and, perhaps more importantly, remember your message.
You will be able to send your message without the use of any words, or at least using very few, and it can serve as a call to action at the same time. Visual storytelling also allows you to breach language barriers. It gives you the benefit of transmitting your message regardless of what language your prospects speak or their cultural or ethnic backgrounds. It’s an effective marketing tactic that helps your message transform into something that can be entertaining and interesting to your potential customers.
To start, you could begin capturing pictures or video and posting to social media platforms or blogs in a matter of seconds. Show examples of your product being used by customers with a dedicated hashtag to group together photos.
Then, consider a dedicated design team producing large format prints and videos that represent your company’s message.
Using visual content allows brands to encourage greater engagement with their customer. Just look at the statistics:
- 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content marketing for their business, second only to blogging (38%). source
- Even more telling, “when people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.” source
Take a look at why visual storytelling is so important in this infographic by B2B Marketing.
Whether you tell the story through video content or still images, powerful visual storytelling makes your content marketing message more effective.
When designing your own visual storytelling campaign, you should always be able to define the purpose of your visual aid. Know what you want to achieve. Whether it’s to increase your brand awareness or to attract your customers, you can always create visual aids that can perfectly target your ideal audience on your purpose.
Before creating your own visual aids, you should also identify your own strengths. The product or service you offer plays an important role in what type of content will you be most comfortable with in sending your message. You can choose to send your message through images, animations, or videos. Find out the story you want to share with your audience (it has to be one that they want to hear, of course!) in order to find the right type of content you will create.
Through visual storytelling, you can:
- Build a closer connection to your audience – through visual storytelling, you can create videos that speak to your audience. Modern marketing strategies now use live streaming. Live streaming is a great way to showcase your brand as well as show your customers that you are there to help them. It also allows your audience to connect to you which also helps you establish and gain their trust.
- Develop greater awareness and quick grasp of the brand message – visual content allows your message to be seen without having to spend too much time reading through it. This allows your audience to quickly capture your message without them having to think twice if they should read through your message or not.
- Create a better opportunity for content sharing – visual content on social media, such as videos and images, are the most common content that often goes viral. Acquiring that one share on your image or video can increase the opportunities for your message to be seen by more potential customers.
[Related content: 8 Ways Storytelling Can Strengthen Your Brand]
Check out this example of visual storytelling.
The above image shows that there were 7,162 tweets sent in 1 second. This image is from Internet Live Stats, a company that is part of the Real Time Statistics Project. The project was created by developers, researchers, and analysts with the common goal of making statistics available in way that everyone could understand. Through visual storytelling, this image allows people to understand the magnitude of 7,162 tweets.
There are also visual marketing mistakes that you should be aware of, including irrelevant images, overconfidence, and even bad timing.
If your company takes full advantage of events, content, and experiences to visually tell your stories, you’ll have the potential to catch prospective clients’ attention and keep them interested.
This infographic was created by Crestline
How will you be incorporating visual storytelling into your brand messaging? Give us a call at 620-308-6998 or send us a message to find out how we can help.
