Visual marketing has been on the rise for several years now, but sas your brand been keeping up with emerging visual marketing trends? Let’s see!
Video Content is Growing in Popularity
This can hardly be considered a recent trend as videos have been growing in popularity for about a decade now. But it has definitely been accelerated by the pandemic which forced more brands to find more ways to connect to their audience.
Wyzowl came out with a special report detailing how brands are increasing their video marketing efforts in response to global lockdowns.
The vast majority of surveyed marketers (91%) think that video has become much more essential for brands in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
This trend impacts all kinds of video content, including webinars, as more than half of brands (53%) are planning to include webinars in their 2021 digital marketing strategy.
When it comes to consumers, videos have become key to increasing ROI and reach:
- 85% of consumers would love to see more video content from brands in 2021.
- Almost 90% of consumers claim that they were convinced to buy a product by watching a brand’s video.
- Consumers are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other form of content.
From explainer to promotional assets, video content is an important asset for a brand’s growth. Innovative tools and apps are being created to allow brands to create an effective visual marketing strategy.
Videoleap by Lightricks is one example of advanced apps that make professional video creation and editing possible for medium and small brands that cannot afford to hire a videographer.
The app comes with a variety of professional video editing features (including keyframe animations, multiple special effects and sounds, text overlays, creative cinematic compositions and more). The app is currently available on both iOS and Android making it easy to access by just about anyone.
Authentic & Ephemeral Content (Stories)
Ephemeral content is any video content that lasts online for 24 hours before disappearing. More often than not that content comes in the form of social media stories (Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories and Snapchat Stories).
Apart from creating a sense of urgency (i.e. “watch now before it disappears”), this content has become especially popular due to its authenticity. Stories tend to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a brand’s or influencer’s life.
More than half (58%) of people surveyed by Instagram claim they became more interested in a brand after seeing it in Instagram Stories.
Broadcast your internal meetings and celebrations, celebrate your company’s milestones and anniversaries, and yes, show your happy customers using your products.
Increasingly Visual SERPs
If search engine optimization is your main marketing goal, visual marketing is as important here. Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) are becoming more and more visual. Searchers get to see related images and videos, visual thumbnails next to related stories, branded logos, and more.
In fact, images are all over search results these days to an extent when it is hard to find organic (non-visual) results any more:
To generate more exposure from search results, creating and optimizing visual content (images and videos) is becoming as important as creating and optimizing text content.
Creating branded visual content to accompany just about any of your marketing campaigns has become more important than ever as your branded visual content is now part of organic search optimization.
Branded visual marketing has become key to SEO visibility.
Tools like Creatopy have started offering advanced visual identity solutions allowing brands to easily create all kinds of visual assets that would all align with the overall brand image.
Shoppable Visual Content
“See something, buy something” is one of the most powerful shopping behaviors out there. How many times did you want to buy something after reading or hearing about it? And how many times did you feel compelled to purchase an item once you saw it?
This trend is obviously most noticeable in the fashion industry where impulse shopping is the most essential driving force behind purchasing decisions.
Instagram was one of the first to allow “Buy this” stickers within brands’s stories and ads:
But the trend doesn’t stop there. Now you can buy just about anything by pointing your camera at it. Google Lens is one of the pioneers when it comes to turning just about any visual content into a shoppable product.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Visuals will come alive with augmented and virtual reality.
Virtual Reality (VR) is about creating a fake but realistic environment where a consumer uses a special device (e.g. a helmet) that makes scenes and objects that appear to be real. One of the older examples of VR used in marketing is Tommy Hilfiger bringing their fashion show to the retail setting
Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual objects on top of the real-world environment. It is quickly becoming more popular in marketing because unlike VR that shuts the real physical world down completely, AR enhances it making it more relatable.
AR also doesn’t require any special device. Consumers are able to use their mobile devices to connect to brands through AR-driven apps.
AR has become especially popular recently when all kinds of brands – from museums to retail stores, used the technology to let their customers access their collections and products from the comfort of their homes.
In-Team Collaboration
With the pandemic forcing so many companies to switch to remote employee management, the question of keeping things organized and effective has become more important than ever.
How to keep your employees motivated and productive when each of them is away from home, probably facing distractions of home-based working on an hourly basis?
This is where the concept of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) came to be. The concept describes the integration of all kinds of communication methods that include voice, video, instant messaging, collaborative apps, etc. in the company’s daily operations.
While previously this integration was something brands might consider, during the pandemic UCC has become a matter of business survival.
According to the annual report by Cisco, nearly 75 percent of businesses are either using a UCC solution or plan to do so within one year.
The UCC trend accounted for the increased use of all kinds of visualization and video tools and methods including virtual whiteboards, educational videos, webinars, live videos, etc.
Increasing video usage, virtual reality, and augmented reality business applications can all improve your team’s collaboration, training, and productivity.
Conclusion
If I needed to pick one industry that really won from the COVID pandemic, that would definitely be visual marketing. In an effort to find new ways to connect to their customers and manage their newly remote employees, brands have turned to visual marketing.
The result is an array of new tools, new exciting trends and innovative technologies. Is your brand part of visual marketing evolution?
