Are you using images as part of your social media marketing campaign? If not, it’s time to fix your sights on visual social media marketing because image is where it’s at!

Using images to sell products is nothing new, marketers have been doing it for generations, but the last few years have seen a shift towards visual marketing on social media platforms too. With Pinterest now reportedly the second largest driver of traffic to websites in the world, and visual marketing weaving its way across all platforms, I wanted to outline how can you embrace the growth of image sharing and make it work for your business.

What is visual social media marketing?

Quite simply, it’s using images online to communicate visually with your audience to promote your business. These images can be pictures, graphics, photographs of your products, text based images or infographics.

As with any online content, you are going to receive the best engagement and response from something which is helpful, interesting or inspiring to your audience. So before you get creative with the visuals, think about WHO your target audience is; ask yourself what problems or challenges they might have, and decide on how best to present that information to them.

What types of images work best?

Whilst photos of your product may look great and certainly encourage sales, the images that will receive the most shares and response are those that are inherently useful. These are:

• Useful Tips
• How-To lists
• Quotes

Presenting this type of information visually is a very powerful marketing tool, and it’s really very simple to do, with some excellent free tools available online.

To get started, ask yourself the following questions about the information you want to share:

1. What’s the topic?

Choose a topic which would be helpful to your target audience; a step by step guide to making hollandaise sauce or a list of the top 5 mobile apps for businesses for example. Or you might want to share an inspiring thought or quote.  Take a look back through previous posts and blogs for inspiration, ideas and material to re-craft.

2. What’s it FOR?

Consider what you want your viewers to DO with the image: do you want them to share it on Facebook, or to click through to your blog/website for more information? This will determine the style and format of your image.

Now, time to design!

“But I’m not a graphic designer!” I hear you cry. Don’t fear, you don’t need to be a design wizard or illustrator to put together a good image worth sharing.  Thanks to sites such as PicMonkey.com, an online photo editing service, and Canva.com, which offers amazingly simple graphic designs for web and print, anyone can create great images.

How much does it cost?

Some features carry a charge (including images on Canva – but you can upload your own from file or the internet), but there’s a fantastic supply of templates and effects available on both sites for free. Choose the format that will present your information in the most powerful way and encourage people to share or click through as desired.

Create visuals in advance and schedule

It’s a great idea to use a simple template, tweaked for varying content which you can schedule and publish weekly. Delivering regular, helpful, shareable content will increase brand awareness and establish your authority.

So, if you’re not already sharing images on your blog and other platforms, please start now. If it’s right for your brand, get on Instagram and/or Pinterest too. It’s a fact that content with images is more likely to be shared, and it’s predicted that this year the more images content has the more likely it will be shared. So get snapping, get designing, get creating and up the volume of your social media marketing with some vigorous visuals!