How To Create Stand Out Visual Marketing Content
Making content to publish online is the easy part. Creating content that stands out in an overly crowded online space is another story. If you want to create great value for your brand that organically attracts your target audience to your business, this article is for you. There are core content practices that can be commonly experienced on each and every online platform. There is a reason that causes certain pieces of digital content to go viral, even if the person who created a viral piece doesn’t know why or how it got the attention it did! In many ways, our brands reputation is built largely due to the content it shares. When we work to create content in meaningful ways, we can support our brands in creating a memorable experience for people, ultimately helping our businesses become associated with that praise. Within this article, I am going to share my top tips for creating stand out visual marketing content in hopes of helping you enhance your online brand presence in a way that drives business growth.
Stand out Content Starts with a Strong brand
The first thing you need to understand is that visual content naturally improves a user’s experience because it helps humans build a stronger connection with the brand that released the content. Therefore, it’s important to grasp the power of great branding! When we are mindlessly (or intentionally!) scrolling social media, as an example, the content that has an incredibly strong brand presence will naturally stop our scrolling. Whereas repetitive, drab, seen a million times before content will typically be scrolled by without a second thought. Stand out content is the byproduct of a strongly built brand. If you are reading this and you have not yet gone through an intimate brand development process that had you identifying your brand architecture (identity, style, strategy!), then you want to start there before investing time in creating stand out visual marketing content. Trust me, it’ll be worth it because it’ll make your content creation efforts worthwhile!
Prioritize the types of content you want to create and your community wants to consume
There are many visual aids we can use to create stand out content online. From images, photos, and video to reels, carousels, blogs, podcasts, and infographics…the types of content are endless. As you journey into creating stand out content, the first thing you want to do is consider what types of content are your top priority. As well, you want to note what is most enjoyable for you to create. There is no point trying to create stand out content solely based on what’s currently trending, as that may create some results in the present tense but it’s not a long term sustainability driven strategy. You want to take time to get clear on what formats of content you want to create to be used as your visual aids for your marketing. Personally, I like to experiment with many forms of content so to help me identify what I enjoy the most. Then, I compare that to what I see my online community also enjoying! I try to find a common ground between what I enjoy creating and what my audience enjoys consuming. This requires putting in some time to conduct market research and study your community’s behaviors.
Get to know the marketing platforms you are using
When you make visual design a part of your marketing strategy, I guarantee you will see your marketing begin to take off far more than it did without a design prioritization. Though we are visual creatures in many ways, it’s also important to note that even amidst emphasizing the importance of visual design in marketing, we must also keep in mind the importance of accessibility of content. Luckily for you, with each platform there comes varying ways to ensure you are setting up your content for accessibility. This, then, makes it all the more important to take the time to get to know the platforms you are using to create and share your visual marketing content on. As an example, Instagram has several settings that can be incredibly helpful in enhancing the accessibility of your content, such as adding Alt Text, turning on auto-captioning, and so on. Depending on what platform you use to host your website or blog, there will be certain internal settings you can work with to help improve accessibility. It is our responsibility as conscious content creators to learn about the platforms we are marketing on so that we can help our content stand out even more via utilizing accessibility features.
Now that we have covered the first three steps to setting yourself up for creating stand out marketing content, let’s now get a little bit more nitty gritty with the in’s and out’s of creating stellar content online.
Below are my best 7 tips for creating stand out content:
Segment your audience with low volume keywords and long tail keywords: This will help you stand out within the industry you are a part of
Target very specific irritations: We all know the strategy of ‘triggering pain points’ but what I’m saying is to actually remove that language from your mind because it’s not a very ethical approach to marketing (who wants to cause their community pain?!). Instead, get super specific with the exact irritations and frustrations they are facing. Don’t be broad!
Tell relatable stories: We all love a good story, don’t we? That’s because we can see ourselves in them! Great stories are a great way to stand out.
Create new knowledge: One of the most effective ways of creating content that stands out is creating content on new knowledge people haven’t seen/heard before!
Share ideas in a new way: Along with the above, it’s also incredibly effective to take a common ‘norm’ and flip it upside down, sharing it from a new perspective!
Make your content simple and accessible: One of the most important skills for both great content creation and great marketing is becoming great at copywriting. Strengthening your writing skills can help increase your accessibility because it removes the fluff that often causes people to find content confusing or hard to consume!
Prioritize social relevancy: No one likes a brand that goes back to business as usual all the while the world is on fire, am I right? Practicing social responsibility in your content is incredibly important not just to help your content’s lifecycle but also because it’s just part of being a decent human being! People want to support brands that give back and take an interest in the well being of people as well as the planet.
Get great at formatting and design 101: Lastly, a huge aspect of great content comes down to literal design frameworks. Below I will be speaking more to this point!
I encourage you to consider which out of the above 8 tips feel most interesting or important to you to explore more. Once you decide, go into researcher mode and begin learning how to apply that tip! Have questions or need help doing so? You can always reach out.
Know who you are creating for
When aiming to create stand out marketing content, it’s essential to know who you are designing your content for. Understanding your audience persona’s and considering the community you are creating content for is a non-negotiable part of creating great content online. If you have not gone through a deep dive customer experience or user persona activity, now is the time. If you have not conducted market research or it has been quite a long time since you have, now is the time to establish a continual market research workflow so that you can never run out of great copy and marketing ideas again! It’s critical to understand that your online community can help you create epic content, all you have to do is become a great question asker and listener! One of my favorite things to do is utilize online engagement tools specifically for social media to help me gather market research on the regular. We are lucky that we live in a time that allows us to no longer have to cold call folks or sit in a room running test groups in order to get wonderful data to help us better understand the people we want to serve. Utilize the features and functions that many online platforms now have readily available to help you learn about your target market! Then, apply what you learn into your content!
As we come toward the end of this article, the final bit of guidance I want to leave you with relates to the importance of design basics when creating stand out content.
Below is a list of the most important creative basics that you want to master and apply into the ways in which you design your content.
Focal points
Color pairing
Font pairing
Design alignment and balance
Inclusion and representation
Accessibility functions
SEO optimization
Shape usage
Hierarchies
Golden ratios
Use of repetition
Use of white space and padding
Texture usage
Contrast
Rule of thirds
Proportions and scale
Perspective
Scroll through the above list and make note of any design philosophies that you may not be familiar with and begin learning how to apply them into your content designs! This list also acts as a great resource to audit current content to ensure that you are designing in a way that can help your content get the epic reach and engagement you want. Finally, there are some great tools and softwares out there to help you enhance to overall design as well as ‘look’ of your visual content.
Here are some of my favorite platforms that I use on the regular when designing content:
Adobe Suite (Specifically Illustrator and InDesign)
Canva (For quick projects and client co-working)
Lightroom (for Photo editing
I hope this article helps you grasp the complexity that goes into creating stand out content because, well, creating fantastic content does take work! The work is well worth it, though. If you apply these tips into your content creation methods, you could easily begin to be able to start creating less content that is of much higher quality and also creates much stronger results for you. One of the biggest issues I see in the world of online marketing to date is that people are trying to create far too much content that is of mediocre caliber instead of taking the time to learn how to create strongly designed content. Take it from me, creating less content with more intention will always pay off more in the long run.
Until next time…
Natalie Brite
