The importance of data visualization is undeniable as it is necessary to visualize data to better communicate it to your audience. Not everyone can understand what you mean just by reading text. There are many types of data visualization which means everyone will find something that works best for them. Hence, here’s everything you should know about using data in visual marketing and how to use visualization data correctly.
What Is Visual Marketing?
Visual marketing is a type of marketing that primarily relies on visuals rather than text to convey its message. Most of the time, visual marketing is a part of any regular offline or online marketing campaign. But when you dedicate more time to visual marketing, your focus shifts to the visuals you use making your marketing and promotional materials more appealing to your audience.
Visual marketing usually includes the use of images, photography, illustrations, drawings, infographics, diagrams, presentations, mental maps, videos, animations, GIFs, and more. A lot of the time, the visuals you use will still contain some kind of text, but that doesn’t diminish their effectiveness. Visual marketing can be used for the same purposes as any other type of marketing (i.e. improve brand awareness, increase sales, etc.)
Types of Visual Marketing Content
As mentioned above, there are many different types of content used in visual marketing. Before we get into the details about how to use this content, it’s important to understand what each type can be used for and when it is most effective:
- Photography: One of the most common types of content, photography can be used to support something you are talking about in an article or post. On the other hand, photography can be used to accompany pretty much any kind of content – from ads to social media posts to product descriptions.
- Illustrations: Illustrations and infographics are a trendy type of content that is effective for use in visual marketing. Using templates for infographics from Wepik can help you create infographics quickly, allowing you to focus on creating an engaging message that will resonate with your audience.
- Drawings: Paintings and drawings, especially traditional ones, are best used in offline marketing. That being said, they can be used in online marketing just as much as digital illustrations.
- Infographics: Infographics have become a trendy type of content only recently. But their popularity is deserved as they are perfect for explaining complicated concepts to audiences in a simple way.
- Presentations: Presentations are not very common in marketing, but they can be used to present surveys and studies that you have conducted. Research findings can be a powerful tool in marketing campaigns as they present facts that can persuade some segments of your audience faster than emotions would.
- Mental Maps: Like infographics, mental maps are great for explaining complicated concepts. But unlike infographics, mental maps are not very widely used. Nevertheless, they could be useful when accompanying an article or a presentation.
- Diagrams: Diagrams, pie charts, bar charts, tables – all of these are usually used in articles and social media posts. But they can actually be used with any type of content as long as you need to present some statistics visually.
- Videos: Videos are some of the most demanding types of content to create, but they are also the ones that get the most attention. Moreover, they can deliver data more dynamically than articles or blog posts.
- Animations: Animations are pretty much the same as videos except that they require more work to look good and a particular skill set to be able to create them at all.
- GIFs: Usually, GIFs are just short bits cut out of longer videos that don’t have any sound but may contain text. GIFs are best used for humour or to convey certain emotions or situations. In other words, it’s best to use them within an article or post, but not as the primary visual content of the piece.
#1 Gather and Analyze Data
The first thing you need to when getting started with visual marketing is to gather and analyze data. This can be anything from customer data to market research. As long as it is the data you want to use in your campaigns, it’s the one you want to collect, analyze, and organize.
As Michael Russel from the custom writing reviews site Online Writers Rating notes, “Perhaps one of the worst data visualization examples is when you have the data you want to use, but you didn’t prepare it in any way. If it’s not categorized or organized, how do you expect to visualize and present it coherently?”
#2 Prepare A Content Plan
Once the data is ready, you will need to prepare a content plan. As with any other type of marketing, visual marketing requires you to plan your campaigns. Hence, you need to have a content plan with guidelines for the quality and format of your content.
What are the quality standards for every type of content you will be using? What will be the format of your articles, posts, ads, etc.? How often will you be posting your content or what will be the process of your campaigns?
#3 Visualize Your Data
The next thing you should do is visualize your data. In other words, you need to transfer your data to a visual medium and create an outline for your future content. Indeed, you aren’t creating it just yet – you are only planning. If you plan to use different types of visual content, make sure that you create an outline for each of them.
#4 Create Your Content
Now that you have your outlines ready, you will need to create your content while using these outlines and the visualized data. In some cases, you might not have the opportunity to create the content yourself which is when you can either hire a specialist to create it for you or find existing free-to-use content online and alter it to your liking. For example, you can use Splento to find high-quality photography to support your content.
#5 Publish Your Content
As mentioned above, you will need to stick to a particular schedule while publishing your content (the one that you created as a part of your content plan). If you are publishing the same content on multiple platforms, make sure to coordinate your actions. In addition to that, using the right hashtags, keywords, and meta descriptions will help you optimize your content for search engines.
#6 Track Performance
Last but not least, even after the content has been published, you still need to track its performance. If you see that something works, use it again in the future. If you see that something doesn’t work, experiment with it and improve it to increase its effectiveness. Tracking performance is crucial for understanding how successful your visual marketing campaigns are.
Final Thoughts
All in all, using data in visual marketing will definitely bring many benefits to you and will help you educate and persuade your audience much better. Use the tips in this article to create your own visual marketing plan and start visualizing data better.
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