Introduction: Engage and Attract Your Target Audience with Visuals

In today’s world of content overwhelm online, visuals can make all the difference to whether someone looks at your content or not. People love visuals because they have an immediate emotional impact and they’re easy to take in at a glance. No matter what industry you’re in, visual content should be an important component of your content marketing strategy.

In the past, only large companies could afford to invest in visuals. You needed a significant budget in order to hire designers to produce high-quality visuals. But with the tools offered by the internet and PCs, even the smallest business can create stunning, slick, and entertaining visual content that their audience will love.

If you’re just getting started with visual content, you’ll face some challenges and there is much to learn. Visual content can have a great impact on your business, or it can totally flop if not done well. In this course, you’ll learn a step-by-step approach to creating the right type of visuals that will resonate with your audience.

Why Invest in Visual Content?

Visual content consistently outperforms other types of content, so it’s well worth your investment. There are several reasons this type of content works so well:

• Visual content is memorable. People see a photo online and it stays with them. You’re much more likely to remember an image you saw than something you read in an article or blog post.

• You can take in visuals at a glance. When you’re trying to communicate with your audience through words, it takes more time and attention on your audience’s part. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can communicate your message more directly.

• Visuals are highly engaging. Especially with social media, we’re all competing for the eyeballs and brains of our audiences. A good image stands out among all of the other content that comes across your news feed.

• With visuals, you can show rather than tell. You can use an image to convey complex information in a simple way. This is especially the case with infographics, which take various types of data and present them in a visual format.

• Visuals create an emotional connection. You can inspire any type of emotion with the right image. This leads to better engagement and is one of the major reasons people share visual content online at such high rates.

• Visuals are versatile. Unlike text and other types of content, you can use an image virtually anywhere. You can not only share this content on social media, but use it on your website, blog, sales pages, advertisements, banners, print materials, and so on.

• There’s no language barrier. You don’t have to localize images. Wherever your audience is in the world and whatever their language they speak, they can get your message.

• Visuals are excellent for branding. Visual content can help you create a strong, clear brand image.

• There’s a wide variety of different types of content you can make. Visual content isn’t just images and photographs. It can include graphs and diagrams, infographics, quotes, and more.

By the time you complete this course you will be able to:

• Explore the benefits of using visual content in different areas of your business, so that you know what results you can anticipate
• Identify where you can reach your audience with visuals, along with the types of visual content they prefer
• Set prioritized goals for what you want to achieve with your visual content, so that you know where to focus your efforts when creating visuals
• Identify the visual content you will create first, including repurposing content you already have, in order to save time and avoid starting from scratch
• Define how your branding should be incorporated into your visual content to enhance engagement, be memorable, and stay consistently true to your business image
• Create the most effective, eye-catching visual content for your audience
• Protect and publish your content for maximum exposure to your target audience