How important are visuals to a business and its brand reputation? How important is it to pick the right visuals for your business and your intended tone and messaging?
The short answer: very important. But first, let’s take a little deeper dive into why.
Anecdotally, I think anyone can remember an occasion where our first impression of a business/brand was established by something we saw. Whether that was an advertisement on TV, a storefront display you walked by, or countless other examples.
That impression often lasts and is the first thing that comes to mind when someone references that brand. This underscores the importance of selecting the right visuals to align with your brand.
Scientifically, this idea that visuals used by businesses tend to leave the longest lasting and most impactful impression can be explained through a couple of key data points.
Research shows that 90% of information transmitted to our brains is visual, and further to this point, our brains actually process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
Visuals hold immense marketing value to businesses of all sizes and industries. But how can those brands ensure their chosen visuals boost their interaction with the right messaging and tone?
How to boost your business using visuals
As businesses look to leverage visuals to grow the business, they must ensure any. All visuals they employ serve four essential purposes: help your business stand out from the crowd, be in line with your intended messaging, resonates with your intended audience, and finally, align with the current trends of the day, when possible.
First, it is absolutely essential that any messaging used in your visuals — whether it is actual text-based messaging or more rooted in visual implications — is in line with the message you intend to send to consumers and the overall tone and message of your brand.
Yes, picking the flashiest and most attention-grabbing visuals can definitely get the attention of many consumers. But what’s the point if those visuals draw consumers in without actually communicating your brand’s intended messaging?
Not only could you be wasting your marketing budget, but it could have a pretty profound impact on the overall brand image of your business. Marketing industry research shows 71% of companies agree that inconsistent brand presentation often leads to customer confusion, damaging brand reputation and image.
With your messaging finely tuned and tailored to your brand and its intended brand image, the next area you will want to address is picking visuals to help your business stand out from your competitors.
Selecting attention-grabbing and visually stimulating visuals will guarantee a long-lasting impression in the minds of the consumers you wish to attract.
Reinforce Your Brand Image
Beyond simply picking the visuals that stand out the most — which is essential — you can also use this as an opportunity to reinforce your brand’s image and message through a visual component, like a signature color scheme.
If you do not already have a signature brand color, establishing one is powerfully recommended, as research shows that leveraging a signature color scheme can increase your brand recognition by 80%.
The last two critical aspects of boosting your business with visuals — ensuring you are resonating with the right audience and leveraging any trends of the day when possible — are pretty closely tied together, at least in terms of a technological solution.
But let’s first touch on the importance of these two aspects before we dive into the technology available today that directly addresses these critical issues in a way that could change your brand’s marketing efforts now and far into the future.
Attracting the right audience with the trends of today
First, you must ensure your visuals resonate with the right audience. Yes, you can have attention-grabbing visuals tailored to precisely the messaging your business wants to communicate. Still, if the visuals you chose do not resonate with the right audience, all those efforts are for naught.
In the past, ensuring your visuals resonate with the right audience would require a dedicated market research team, which is often expensive, time-consuming, and simply not feasible for businesses of a smaller size.
Quite similarly, for businesses aiming to align their marketing efforts with the most current trends — visual or otherwise — the old school methods of engaging with the public and conducting market research are quickly becoming outdated and becoming too expensive and time-consuming for businesses of all sizes.
Using Modern Solutions
So what modern solutions to this problem exist for today’s businesses at an affordable price and with the flexibility and scalability needed in today’s business landscape?
Today, technologies are available to shortcut this process and revolutionize how businesses stay in tune with their preferred consumer audience and the trends that will resonate with the consumers of the day, which we will dive into shortly.
Leveraging technology to resonate with your audience
As mentioned, ensuring their visuals resonate with the right audience is two of the biggest challenges for those looking to boost their business. The other is ensuring those visuals leverage the trends consumers are paying attention to.
These issues have challenged businesses and their visual design teams for decades. The consequences of not aligning visuals with the right audience or trends — whether visuals on your actual products or visuals used in your marketing campaigns — can be immense.
Failing to align with these critical aspects could leave you with large amounts of inventory that consumers have no interest in, or even worse, having dumped your entire marketing budget into a campaign whose visuals are not resonating with the right consumers and leaving you with no budget left over to pivot your visuals for a renewed marketing effort.
Keep Your Business in Tune With its Intended Audience
In the past, without the technologies available today, attempting to keep your business in tune with its intended audience while using the current trends of the day was a burdensome, time-consuming, and expensive task.
For businesses who could afford it, these efforts most often fell into hiring a market research team. Still, this strategy is not viable for companies of all sizes, as the costs associated with employing a market research team can be pretty significant and untenable for smaller businesses.
Keep Your Business in Tune With Current Trends
For other businesses with less available capital, staying in touch with their audience and the trends of the day requires the business owner and their staff to remain personally immersed in the market and its trends; looking to engage with existing customers to ensure their needs are being met or meeting potential new customers at industry events to get a sense of what your intended audience is looking for from your brand.
For one thing, the latter strategy lacks accuracy, and both of these strategies lack the agility, flexibility, and scalability required by many businesses in today’s modern landscape.
So how can these businesses leverage technology to shortcut these processes?
Scalable and affordable data-driven design engines
In today’s modern age, technology plays a crucial role in helping businesses ensure their visuals are aligned with their intended audience and the most recent trends.
One key area of technology that is ripe to be leveraged by today’s brands as they look to boost their business with visuals is the modern and innovative data-driven design engines available on the market.
Use the Right Data-Driven Design Engine
The right data-driven design engine (try Vexels dot com) — powered by the analysis of your target audience through various aspects like global trends, search trends, download transactions, and subscriber requests — will allow businesses to leverage increased visibility and insight into their market and its trends to enable them to pinpoint the exact visuals that will resonate with their audience and succeed at aligning with the trends of today.
Not only does the right data-driven design engine truly guarantee your business is leveraging the right visuals for its products, services, and marketing efforts, but it also does so while providing significant savings in terms of both budget spent and hours allocated and the scalability and flexibility needed in today’s business landscape.
Conclusion
With today’s technology available to them, businesses of all types and sizes can leverage the power of visuals to boost their business with more impact than ever before.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by RODNAE Productions; Pexels; Thank you!
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