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5 Strategies in Visual Marketing That Drive Results

Visual marketing is the discipline studying the relationship between an object, the context it is placed in and its relevant image. Representing a disciplinary link between economy, visual perception laws and cognitive psychology, the subject mainly applies to businesses such as fashion and design.
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5 Min Read

IT’S ALL ABOUT VISUAL SEARCH

Remember the famous Jobs quote “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”? It encapsulates everything behind video search perfectly. None of your customers knew they needed it and now your business success might just depend on it.  Soon enough all product searches will start with an image. Therefore, come rain or shine, you have to get on board.

Apart from the industry giants like Google, Amazon, Bing, eBay or Pinterest that introduced visual search a while ago, now there are tons of others who have already successfully launched visual search tools and apps. Just to give you a bit of reference, here’s some good old stats for inspiration:

·         Brands that embraced visual search early on in the game will be able to increase their revenue by 30% in two years’ time.

·         By the end of 2021, the image recognition market is projected to exceed 38 billion USD.

·         Pinterest has over 600 million visual searches on a monthly basis.

To sum up: if you are one of those brands still on the fence with your visual search strategy, get to it! Lay out a road map and start working on improving your visibility. There are a few recommended steps for beginners: start with building an image search into your web inventory, begin advertising on Pinterest and display your images in a way for them to be easily processed by visual applications.

DOOH IS THE VISUAL KING

This year will reassure us of the unquestionable dominance of DOOH advantages in advertising. Having worked in marketing, I’m still always overexcited to see a way of advertising that will be seen with almost absolute certainty unless it is somehow physically blocked. And, last year was a great one for billboard ads, we have seen an impressive amount of DOOH campaigns that drove sales and increased brand awareness. With proper creative content, visual storytelling and advanced tech approach digital-out-of-home can have a true impact on your customer’s lives.

The way you strategize to drive results with DOOH is by carefully choosing the right digital signage software provider. Selecting the right digital signage isn’t a one-step process, though it’ll all be worth it in the end. We have worked with Kit Cast digital signage software for more than two years and they are yet to disappoint. We had a checklist for our perfect DS soft for DOOH, starting with the necessary ability to play interactive content, the ability to seamlessly play most of the content formats, remote upgrading, programmatic sales, and the assurance that we can painlessly grow our network were all of high importance. Though, personally, for us, the deal-breakers were the perfect app to work with our Apple TV devises, beautiful designs and the ability to integrate with other tech solutions.  

NOT ALL SOCIAL PLATFORMS ARE CREATED EQUAL 

They really aren’t. So stop posting the same visual content on all of them. Research and make a plan for what types of visual media you need to create for each platform. Additionally, it is highly recommended when strategizing your visual marketing on SM to boost engagement and drive results to apply common sense rule. The rule is: if you aren’t willing to sit through 20 seconds of introductory video to get to the point, then, most likely, no one else will. The other one is: if Facebook doesn’t limit the length of your videos it doesn’t mean that anyone will sit through your 20-minute masterpiece. Honestly, you can make a book out of these.

There are specific rules based on research and data on visual content for every platform: find them, memories them, use them. Lay out a guide to optimize your visual social content and results will follow.

USE DIGITAL SIGNAGE TO TEST YOUR VISUAL CONTENT

Digital signage is an amazing tool with so many apparent advantages that some get overlooked. DS gives brands the ability to test, analyze, tweak, change or completely replace visual content whenever or wherever.  You can test out the visuals and refine your visual content strategy without spending a dime, which was unimaginable luxury just a short while ago. Bad, unlikable static billboards stayed bad and unlikable for weeks or months. Now we have the ability to improve, compare the success of the different kinds of visual content, pick and choose endless designs and styles thus optimizing visual marketing strategy to perfection.

THINKING VISUAL? THINK HIGH TECH!

Though there have been talks about augmented reality for decades we are only now seeing it in action. And it is awesome! It is projected that by 2022 the AR advertisement revenue will top 2 billion USD. AR advertising is huge now, but, it’ll grow immensely over the next few years. It is currently well represented in social media, the most successful examples being Snapchat and Facebook. AR adoption in retail is unbelievable, more and more retail brands are incorporating augmented reality into their visual marketing strategies. Tourism and hospitality, education, retail industries are all showing amazing results with the use of AR. Augmented reality is surely one of the most exciting new developments in visual marketing and if you aren’t on board yet, you are already late.