25 Tips to Using Images in Your Business

If you want to distinguish yourself and stand out online, connect with your customers and make your content count, you need to be adding compelling visuals to your content, you need, in short, to say hello to visual marketing. Actually, what you really need to do is not just say hello but give it a big warm hug, welcome it right in to your business and get working to get your customers engaged and involved.

I have put together my top 25 ideas to help you to maximise on the opportunities visual content marketing hold for YOUR business:

1. Create original images – they will bring your brand to life.
2. Re-vamp existing written content with images –take your most popular content and adapt it with compelling visuals to extend its reach and its value.
3. Use Canva or Pic Monkey – really simple but wonderfully effective design tools to create fabulous social media graphics and presentations.
4. Use a Canva for work and magically resize your images meet the different size requirements of each social media platform.
5. Buy images that you can use in different ways – there are lots of great stock image sites including 123f, stockfresh and shutterstock.
6. Take boring data from your spreadsheets and turn it into stunning graphs and charts using Piktochart
7. Show customers how to use your products by creating demonstration videos, you can do this on your phone or iPad and upload them directly into your Facebook Page or to YouTube.
8. Find inspiration and develop your style by creating mood boards on Pinterest.
9. Crowd source visual content; engage fans to create and share images for you Instagram will create you a loyal following! You can also repost others images using
10. Tell your brand’s story in pictures so that customers really connect with it.
11. Use images based around quotes – they are hugely shareable.
12. Use infographics to get your message across in a visually appealing way.
13. Show yourself…  people are immediately attracted to human faces and want to see the real people behind your business.
14. Create a different ‘branded’ look that people will remember – users will remember your product and easily tell it apart from others if you use unique visual images and styling.
15. Use photo albums –you can create albums with hundreds of photos on Facebook and Google+ -great for catalogues or events.
16. Show your products being used in real-life situations, this helps customers to understand better and gives the product more credibility.
17. Add visuals to your email marketing – this will break up the monotony of the text and can include effective visual calls to action.
18. Use images to show potential subscribers what they will get if they sign up to your email list – this makes the offer more tangible and appealing.
19. Share behind-the-scenes moments via photos or videos to launch or promote products – this will create a buzz and humanize your brand.
20. Add a call to action button to social media posts to generate more engagement or leads.
21. Tell a story with animated GIFs- these short clips of images that play on a loop are a great way to engage your fans and show a little brand personality.
22. Create Boards – Pinterest is a great place to build a following and drive your sales, whether or not your business is image-driven. Pin pin pin!
23. Share a screen shot of positive feedback you’ve received (after checking it’s ok to do so with your customer/client first, of course).
24. Share testimonial videos – let your customers do the talking about how great you are!
25. Don’t forget to optimise – people often overlook the value of optimising visual content, but it can increase your content’s visibility on the search engines.

As the emphasis of visuals continues to grow, your business will need to use some serious visual media marketing to stand out online and attract customers. Using my 25 tips should help you to branch out online by connecting, conversing and converting!