As mentioned earlier, without a visual content marketing strategy, you are as good as lost. You are simply shooting blind arrows in the air. That is why visual content marketing is more than just adding photos and creatives to your blog and social media posts.
A visual content marketing strategy gives you a specific direction to head towards — the desired goal to reach. This way, you know what your audience wants and how you can deliver content that sparks the desired actions from them.
Let’s look at the different steps involved in creating a winning visual content marketing strategy.
1. Start With Objectives and Goals
What are your business objectives and goals? These include both short-term and long-term goals. What goals do you intend to achieve using visual content marketing? List them out.
For example, your goals can be to increase sales for your eCommerce store, or it can be more specific, like generating leads for a specific product that you are planning to launch in the near future.
2. Conduct Thorough Research on Audience and Competitors
The next step is research. There are two parts to this. First, research your target audience and come up with ideal customer personas for every audience segment you want to target.
The next step is to research your competitors. Understanding what platforms they use, how they go about promotions, what types of visual content work best for them, and which ones don’t — all this can be super-helpful for you to come up with a visual content marketing strategy for your business.
3. Decide on Visual Content Marketing Channels
Based on audience and competitor research, the next step would be to find the distribution mediums where you want to promote your visual content. These may include channels owned by you such as your website, blog, email, etc.
You can also use paid mediums such as sponsored posts and social media advertising as a part of your visual content marketing strategy. You can go even further and make use of influencers as a distribution channel for your visual content.
4. Decide on the Types of Visual Content
Based on your business goals, audience research, and distribution mediums, start thinking about the formats of visual content that you want to produce and promote. This step is tricky and may take some time.
The visual content formats that you want to produce also depend on your budget. For example, producing animated GIFs costs much less than producing a long-form YouTube video, and either one of them can fetch you better results than the other.
5. Brainstorm Visual Content Ideas For Every Customer Journey Stage
After you decide on the visual content formats, you can start brainstorming ideas for each of these formats. This is a highly creative process and you can include inputs from your entire team.
Ensure that the ideas that you come up with are either evergreen or trendy, and appealing to your audience. But, also make sure that you do not lose out on authenticity in creating any piece. Staying unique is what will make you stand out from the crowd.
6. Create a Visual Content Marketing Calendar
Now you have all the visual content ideas brainstormed. Next, create an editorial content calendar.
This should ideally include different visual content types, the goal behind each one, distribution medium, personas you want to target, and the CTA for every piece of visual content that you publish.
Creating a visual content marketing calendar will help you stay on track with your strategy. Being consistent is one of the key aspects in helping you win the visual content marketing game.
7. Start Producing and Distributing Your Visual Content
Now, you can finally start producing and distributing the visual content as planned based on the content calendar. As mentioned before, always prioritize quality over quantity. And, make sure to take the help of the right tools and skilled people to produce the highest quality visual content.
8. Track Metrics and Make Improvements
Finally, it is important to track visual content marketing metrics and make necessary amendments to your strategy. The metrics that you track totally depend on your goals and objectives.
For example, the metrics that you track can be lead generation rate, conversion rate, website traffic, social media engagement, etc.
Measure the set KPIs each month and pivot your visual content marketing strategy based on these to achieve the highest possible ROI over time.