Marketing is far too important to get wrong. It doesn’t matter what your business does or how big it is, you need to be able to reach out to new customers while reinforcing the value of your brand to existing ones. Visual marketing accounts for the majority of marketing, if there is one marketing form that you need to get right, this is it. Below are 5 tips any business can adopt to make their visual marketing as effective as possible during 2020.

Don’t Be Afraid of Video Content

There are a number of reasons that lots of businesses have been avoiding video content over the last few years. This is largely borne out of what used to be a well-founded worry that video content would put off the growing number of mobile users visiting a business’s website. Anyone who can remember the earliest days of mobile internet can remember when the thought of downloading an entire video of a cellular data network was enough to give you a heart attack. Not only were data allowances not nearly as generous back then, but the cost of downloading data was also astronomical when compared to today.

Businesses today do not have to worry themselves nearly as much about deploying video content. For one thing, as long as you are not auto-playing your videos, an unforgivable crime if there ever was one, users won’t have to incur the associated data cost unless they actually want to watch it. What’s more, producing video content enables you to advertise through more channels. For example, if you don’t have any video content, your advertising opportunities on YouTube will be severely restricted.

Other social media platforms are also embracing video content. Even Twitter, which used to be focused entirely upon text-based messages, now allows users to send tweets containing a variety of media.

Audiences have grown used to video content – it doesn’t elicit the same feelings of dejection or annoyance that it once did. In fact, younger generations of internet users are used to consuming their online content in the form of videos. This might be the most effective medium to reach them through.

Utilise User-Generated Content

An easy way of generating interest in both your business and your next marketing campaign is to encourage your users to take the lead in designing it. Promoting your business with user-generated content doesn’t just save you the time and money of creating that content yourself, it also enables you to engage with your user base in a way that is difficult to achieve otherwise.

User-generated content is not just about its aesthetic qualities. The real power of user-generated marketing is that it gives users an opportunity to convey, in their own words and on their own terms, exactly what it is that they like about your business. Instead of trying to work out how to sell your business to consumers, you can simply ask some of those consumers what about your business appeals to them.

When you have your users generate marketing content for you, you might be surprised by what aspects of your business they are focused on the most. Their input can provide you with some fantastic insight.

Create Your Own Mascot

Any business worth its salt understands the importance of a logo. Without a logo, a brand is incomplete. In fact, with just a name and no logo to go with it, a brand is going nowhere fast. But there is something else that you can add into the equation that might just turbocharge the effectiveness of your branding – a mascot.

Designing a mascot is far from easy, it is even more difficult than coming up with a decent logo for your brand. However, if you are able to come up with a mascot that resonates with your audience, it will give your brand a friendly face. More importantly, your mascot can embody your brand. If you design it the right way, it can convey just as much if not more about your brand than your brand logo does.

Choose the Right Channel

Just like anything else, if you want your visual marketing content to go over well, you need to put it in front of the right audience. Not only this, but you need to make sure that the visual marketing you produce for each different channel is tailored for those channels’ requirements.

For example, if you have a bunch of ads ready to put on Facebook, it is imperative that you ensure they are the right dimensions to display where you want them to. If you don’t take the time to do the basic checks and to make sure that your visual content is going to display properly where you want it to, you might end up wasting your time and money, as well as embarrassing your brand.

Put Your Brand on Display

Any opportunity to put your brand and logo in front of a wider audience is a chance for some easy promotion. You don’t even have to be doing anything – it is enough just to get your name and logo in front of people. This is why product placement works and why big brands are willing to pay so much money just to have their logo appear on the screen for a split second. 

While you obviously don’t want to go overboard and slap your brand logo onto absolutely everything, you should be deploying it where it makes sense to do so. You definitely should not be fearful of putting your logo out there. If you produce any photographic or video content to use in your marketing campaigns, look for opportunities to incorporate your logo into them.

For example, if you are going to be shooting a promotional video, why not have your workers wear branded apparel? You can buy personalised work clothes, from chef’s uniforms to hi visibility workwear, and adorn it with the logo of your choice.

If you get your visual marketing right, everything else will fall into place on its own. Putting your visual marketing at the heart of your overall marketing strategy will pay dividends in the end, especially if you can get your users involved in creating the content.