Content marketing is a process festooned with different facets, and visual storytelling is one that receives plenty of attention while rarely being handled optimally.
For anyone keen to change their efforts in this area for the better, we’ve put together a few tips on what this involves, and why each approach is worth pursuing.
Harnessing the Power of Infographics
Infographics can elevate your content strategy by making complex data digestible and visually engaging. They’re versatile, effective, user-friendly, and crucially they can convey your intended narrative more effectively than raw data on its own.
Why use infographics?
- Simplify complex information: Break down dense statistics into easy-to-understand visuals.
- Boost engagement: Earn attention with colorful, well-designed graphics that draw readers in.
- Enhance shareability: Compelling infographics are often shared on social media more than text-heavy posts.
What does it take to create effective infographics?
- Know Your Audience: Tailor designs to what resonates with your specific audience demographics.
- Clear Objectives: Define what you want to achieve, whether that’s primarily to educate, to entertain, or to inform. It might be a blend of all three, but knowing the balance of each makes the creation process easier.
- Concise Copy: Use short sentences and bullet points. That way you can let visuals do most of the talking.
Tools like Canva and Piktochart make it easier than ever to craft professional-quality infographics without needing a graphic design degree. This is part of the reason why 67% of marketers in the B2B space use them regularly, and why 49% cite visuals as one of the top considerations in any campaign, as accessibility has improved in recent years.
Creating Interactive Visual Stories
Interactive visual stories engage audiences by making them active participants. More broadly, interactivity in a marketing context takes many forms, with 52% of pros citing emails that include interactive content as the biggest hitter in terms of engagement, while 47% see interactive videos as similarly impactful.
Benefits of Interactive Visuals
- Enhanced Engagement: Users spend more time exploring and interacting with dynamic content.
- Memorable Experiences: People remember interactive stories better than static images or text.
- Data Insights: Track user interactions to gather valuable data on preferences and behaviors.
Elements of a Great Interactive Story
- Clickable Elements: Use hotspots, buttons, or sliders to make key information interactive.
- Dynamic Transitions: Smooth animations between sections keep the flow seamless.
- User Personalization: Offer options for users to customize their experience (e.g., choose paths in a narrative).
Tools like ThingLink and Visme enable creators to add layers of interactivity without coding skills. With platforms like Publuu, you can also enrich your static visuals with an online page-turn flipbook format. You can then use what you’ve learned to apply in other marketing contexts.
So for instance if you’re looking to create tangible products that convey your brand story, you could use a coffee table photo book maker like Mixbook to set this out in an engaging way.
Using AI to Generate Compelling Graphics
More than 90% of marketers are making the most of AI tools, and it’s in a graphic content creation context that they really come into their own, making it faster and more efficient than ever.
Advantages of AI-Generated Graphics
- Speed: Produce high-quality graphics in minutes.
- Customization: Tailor designs with precision based on data inputs.
- Consistency: Maintain brand consistency across all visual content effortlessly.
Top AI Tools for Visual Content
- Canva’s Magic Resize: Automatically adjust dimensions for different platforms.
- Designify: Transform simple photos into stunning visuals using advanced algorithms.
- DALL-E 3: Create unique images from text descriptions, perfect for niche illustrations. You can tap into this courtesy of Microsoft’s Designer platform, which just requires a free account to implement.
Using these tools can save time and resources while still delivering professional-grade visuals. That said, you need to use them carefully to get the desired results.
So just as AI content detectors are useful for filtering out low-quality generative copy, it is still sensible to have a graphic design professional work with AI-sourced graphics to avoid oddities being included in actual campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Visual storytelling must be made into a foundational part of your content strategy. If not, what you put out there will feel disconnected, thus failing to earn that all-important engagement with your audience that’s the entire purpose of this promotional exercise.
Infographics are a good starting point, especially for brands that need to convey data-driven narratives. Interactive stories are also impactful, and can work wonders in a social media context. Meanwhile AI-generated graphics are the newest kid on the block, and bring down barriers that used to keep marketers from creating visuals which are truly bespoke.
While you will still need to adapt and refine all of these approaches over time based on analyzing campaign performance, the simple act of shaking things up will do more to take your output to the next level than anything else.
