The How’s and Why’s of Visual Marketing

Hailey Bernhard, digital marketing and operations intern, shares what she learned from watching a session from Content Marketing World 2020. Since 2018, Media Volery has engaged interns for semester-long sessions. Interns have the opportunity to collaborate with our senior staff, work on real projects for our clients, and try their hands at skills from copywriting and video editing to podcast production and social media content. We also encourage our interns to write about their experiences and share what they’ve learned along the way.

Hailey is a junior at the City College of New York, studying Advertising and Public Relations. She is also studying sociology and is passionate about combining the two disciplines in her future career. 

Visual storytelling is all around us. Stacy Adams, head of marketing for VYOND gives a talk about the ever-present ideas of visual marketing, A Deep Dive on Visual Thinking, which she presented in Content Marketing World 2020. Here are some important takeaways that I wanted to share:

We know people enjoy visual media. But why?

Visual media allows the audience to skip the step of creating images in their head and allows them to “turn their brains off” and watch the story. Because they are able to watch this story unfold, the consumer can escape and feel an emotional connection to the work, leaving them something to think about.

As marketers, we need to understand WHY these connections are so important.

By creating visual content that people can connect with, we are able to directly display what we want to showcase without the message becoming skewed or misinterpreted. The connection we create is imperative to success. It is what keeps our brand in mind. By creating a connection through visuals, the audience is able to relive the message through their memory of the visuals. Lastly, it makes concepts that might have been hard to relay clear and more understandable when they are shown in motion.

An example I love is this ad by Nike. They often use the carousel feature on Instagram to display a series of images that combine to tell a story. They have several posts like this, using the images allows people to find or form a connection to the product and the brand.

Now that we understand the why’s, it is crucial we get a clear groundwork of how.

How can marketers make visuals that consumers will absorb? The first step is to follow the outlines of storytelling. These include concepts like a hook, change, and other storytelling tropes, but we do not have all day to tell a story, so we have to think differently.

We need to start by thinking about what we want to convey- then think about the timing. Both the social timing and the time you have allotted to tell the story. Stacy Adams gives a helpful tip that the time you think you need to convey a message is often greater than the time that is really necessary.

A great example of this is Extra Gum. They have had an ongoing campaign in which images are drawn onto gum wrappers to tell a story of a relationship. This campaign has been so successful because it is using storytelling in an innovative way. Not only are we getting the story with the characters, but also the drawings. Memorable ads like these are what foster human contention with a product.

Visual marketing is complex, versatile, and vast but Stacy Adams’ talk gave a great conceptual breakdown that makes this media a bit more manageable.