ENGAGING YOUR AUDIENCE WITH VISUAL CONTENT

Do you want to know how to effectively engage your target market on social media? For any business, the best way to attract your audience and generate leads is through powerful visual content.

Your visual content communicates a story about your business. It gives consumers a reason to stop, think and take action, which could be to like, comment, share, follow or visit your website. Ongoing engaging content will not only help you convert a browsing customer into a purchasing customer, but will give you the power to retain their attention and interest in your brand for the long-term!

Have you heard of Google Doodle? Of course you have! This is a clear example of how visual content is used to gain and retain our attention. Google Doodle changes their landing page everyday, keeping us intrigued and engaged with the company. It’s no surprise that they are so successful in encouraging consumers to use their search engine over their competitors.

Are you wondering how you can implement clever tactics for your brand? Here’s a few helpful tips to improve your content strategy.

1. Your Audience

Behind every great visual is a strong social media strategy. So, you need to evaluate first and foremost your audience! The audience you are targeting should be your ideal client. Analyse your customer in terms of their age, gender, interests, lifestyle, geographic location and behaviour. This will help you create relevant content for your audience. Importantly, monitor their response and actions on your post to make effective improvements to your social media strategy.

2. Identify Your Brand Personality

All companies have a brand identity and way of communicating with their audience online. This makes them unique and helps them to develop competitive advantage. Why? Because you stand out against the pack! Your customers don’t want to be seeing or reading the same content and tone on your page as a similar business. Whether your brand personality is comical, friendly, motivating or serious, make sure what you post aligns with your brand identity.

If you are stuck for ideas on how to create, display or visualise your content to suit your brand, create an inspiration board. You can curate images, words, colours and other content to give you some direction.

3. Eye-catching and quality visuals

Would you trust a brand who has blurry or irrelevant content? Probably not! Whether you are using your mobile phone camera or hiring a professional photographer, good quality images will help grab the attention of your consumer. Consider:

• Image compositions such as rule of thirds, central composition etc to create visually appealing content.

• Colour

• Lighting

• The subject matter

• Does it convey emotion or a tell a story?

Want to be creative with your content? If you are posting quotes or images with words, try using canva to make your posts more aesthetically appealing.

4. Use videos to engage

Did you videos are considered more engaging than images? Videos are a great way to attract consumers as it combines both audio and visual components. Promoting your products or services through videos up to 2 minutes long can increase your engagement.

5. Write an engaging social media copy

Your copy should include four main things: an opening question or statement, description, call-to-action and hashtags. That’s It! Opening with a question can captivate your audiences attention and have them reading your copy. Finish with a call-to-action whether you are asking them to comment, tag or sending them to your website for instance.

Be sure to make it your copy relevant to your post. Usually, something short and straight to the point is more likely to grab the attention of the consumer as opposed to a long paragraph. However, it all comes down to your business and what appeals to your audience. Be creative with your posts and don’t just state the obvious.

6. Selecting Social Media Platforms and adapting content

It’s important to consider what platforms you will be posting your content to reach your audience. You will want to be present and active on platforms used by your target consumer so you have the best opportunity of reaching them.

You should consider how you will adapt content for each platform you’re posting on. You many choose to keep the content relatively consistent or change it up. This will depend on your audience and what platforms they use. For instance, you may not choose to post the same thing on LinkedIn that you would on Instagram because the audience and purpose of the platform is very different. Be mindful of this.

7. Plan Your Content

Keep yourself accountable and organised by using a content planner or social media scheduling app to help you layout your content for the week. You can try:

• Later

• Hootsuite

• Post Planner

• Planoly

• Or keep a hard copy journal or calendar

This will allow you to see how the visuals look alongside each other and gives you a better perspective of your content plan.

Plus, it helps to ensure you have regular content going out!

8. Posting times

Posting your content at peak times will optimise your engagement. However, this is different for every business. Be sure to check out your analytics on your social media platform to see when you audience is most active.

Don’t forgot, have fun with your visual content and enjoy sharing your business with your target market.

Did you like our tips? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.