Once you’ve gathered your data from the last module, it’s time to start planning your visual content strategy.

Start by setting goals for your visual content. Define where you’ll use it, where you’ll focus your efforts, and what results you expect to get from it.

Examples of goals might be:

• Increase engagement with your audience
• Grow your online audience
• Drive traffic to your website
• Increase sales

Make goals specific, citing numbers wherever possible. Instead of just defining your goal as “To grow my online audience,” set a target and a deadline for achieving that target, such as, “Grow my audience by 100 each month.” This helps you to reach your goals and assess whether you’ve achieved the goal or not. If you just set the goal “To grow my online audience,” how do you know if you’ve done that? Your goals should be specific and measurable.

You may also define your goal in terms of how it fits into your overall strategy. For example, your visual content itself may not increase sales. But it may help you build a relationship with your audience and give them a reason to check out your website, where you’ll then promote products and increase sales.

Identify the Types of Visuals You’ll Create

Identify what visuals you’ll create. This should include the type of content and the topics you’ll cover. Types of visual content include:

• Simple images. This could be an image you create yourself that is designed to resonate with your audience. It has some kind of meaning for them or elicits a certain emotional reaction.

• Image with Quote. This is an inspirational quote with a related image. The quote gives your audience something further to resonate with beyond just the image.

• Images for Blog Post. Blog posts and text-based articles need images in order to make them more fun to read and to make your blog stand out (text only is dull).

• An infographic is a visual that usually displays some kind of factual information. It takes informational content or data and puts it together so it can be taken in at a glance. An infographic could also present text information, such as “how to” tips. Infographics get a great deal of engagement on social media and other sites online.

• Graphs and Diagrams. This is an illustration that takes a simple piece of data and visualizes it in a graph, diagram, or flowchart. It’s like a simpler version of an infographic. Whereas an infographic takes a variety of data, this would take just one bit, such as a particular statistic or fact.

• Video creation is outside the scope of this course, but you can incorporate short videos into your visual content strategy if you have the means to produce and publish video.

• A GIF is a visual that shows a short scene repeating over and over again. These are easy to produce and publish and don’t take a great deal of memory.

• A cinemagraph is a GIF where just one part of the image moves. Cinemagraphs are currently growing in popularity. They’re unique because they combine the still image and GIF moving image.

• A meme is an image with words that’s usually humorous. The key to a good meme is that its sentiment is something the audience can relate to. They might say something like, “That moment when you realize…”

• Calls to Action. Images can be used as a visual call to action. Visual calls to action produce higher conversions than text-based calls to action. You can use these to get people to sign up for your list, share content (“Share if you agree”), and so on.

• This is an interactive slideshow that presents information in a logical sequence and in a visual way. People can click each slide to move on to the next one.

• A slider is an image where you click on it and it “slides” to another image. These are great for showing before and after, showing comparisons, offering quiz questions, or telling a joke (the second image is the punchline).

• Visual Quizzes. The quizzes people take on social media are a form of visual content.

• Cartoons and Comics. You can create simple comics that communicate your ideas. These work best when they’re humorous.

• A screenshot is a still image of your computer screen. These are especially useful when you have something you can show the audience how to do.

• Many ad networks and platforms, including Facebook, allow you to create or add visuals to your advertisements.

Leveraging Existing Content

Before you start creating new content, you should look at your existing content to see if there’s anything you can use. Go back over the content you’ve created until now and look for visuals. Perform an inventory and identify content that you can use. Include here content that could be edited or brushed up. You might have something a little outdated that a simple edit or cropping could make current.

As you inventory your existing content, refer to the data you’ve collected about your target audience and their tastes. Test each piece of content against this data and ask yourself, “Is this something that will resonate with my audience?” For those that you answer yes, add them to your visual content strategy. For those that won’t resonate, see if there are changes you could make to make it relevant. Changes include things like updating information, shifting focus, adding content, changing the tone, and so on.

Repurposing Old Content

You should also consider repurposing other content into visual content. Repurposing means taking old content and making major changes to the content or format so that you have a totally new piece of content.

A common example of repurposing is to take a piece of text content and turn it into something visual. There are many ways this can be done include:

• Taking a “tips” article and turning it into an infographic. Each tip is summarized in a short sentence and represented visually.
• Extracting the most cogent points from an article and turning them into quotes, each with an accompanying relevant image.
• Turning an article into a slideshow presentation. Each major point gets its own slide and the wording is pared down and summarized.

Any type of content can potentially be repurposed into any other. A few other examples of the things you can do include:

• Taking screenshots of a video and adding text to create visuals.
• Turning an eBook into a long interactive slideshow presentation.
• Identifying the most salient points of a podcast interview and turning them into an infographic.

From the examples above, you can see the versatility and time-saving ability of repurposing old content as compared to creating new content.

Developing Your Content Creation Plan

Hopefully at this point, you have a good deal of old content you can use as-is, brush up, or repurpose to create new content. This will save you a great deal of time and work. Now, it’s time to decide what further content you’ll create.

Use the data you’ve collected on the topics and types of content your audience likes to create your visual content strategy. Brainstorm a list of ideas for your visual content. The ideas don’t have to be fully formed. In the next few modules, you’ll learn methods to enhance your visual content to make it more engaging, and then we’ll discuss tools you can use to create this content.