Yesterday we joined Hubspot’s exclusive webinar, The Art of Visual Marketing, to hear experts Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick offer their tips for turning visual marketing combined with social media into a definitive asset for businesses. Kawasaki’s 1.4 million Twitter followers speak to his expertise on the subject, so we thought we’d round up some of his tips here, along with a few of our own.
1. Create or Curate Great Content
It all starts with content. If you don’t have great content, you have nothing to share, and social media and marketing is all about sharing. Kawasaki urges businesses to create and share content every single day whether it’s a blog, a video, an infographic, or something else that provides a benefit to your audience, so that when the day comes when you ask them to do something (fill out a form, check out your new website) you have earned the right to ask.
2. Design (Or Find) Great Visuals
Kawasaki shared a secret to great engagement on social media: use an image every single time. Yes, every time: on every post. In his own humble experience (remember: 1.4 million followers) he claims that using an image doubles his engagement more often than not. He recommends Canva as a great tool to design and create attractive marketing images. We’ve had a good experience with PicMonkey. Pick your poison.
3. Optimize Your Visuals
Remember that the images you use should be optimized for where you’re sharing them. Enlarging visuals rather than leaving them thumbnail-sized makes a big difference too. Kawasaki was kind enough to provide the optimal size for images per platform, so we’ll share them here:
- Twitter: 1024 x 512
- Facebook: 940 x 788
- Instagram: 640 x 640
- Pinterest: 735 x 1102
- Google+: Any of the above!
4. Use Some Nifty Tools
Eye Dropper is an open source extension that enables you to pick colors from web pages and grab the color code so that you can match fonts, images, etc. in a nice uniform color selection. Uniformity and pleasing colors are essential to successful visual marketing. Hyperlapse is another tool Kawsaki recommended that enables users to shoot polished time lapse videos that were previously impossible without bulky tripods and expensive equipment. A good video goes a long way, and Hyperlapse is a great way to take a video of lots of faces at events without them being blurred by speed. WordSwag is an app that Fitzpatrick suggested that enables you to add text to your visuals in an easy-to-use app.
5. Use Phone Numbers
One important part of visual marketing that often gets overlooked is the use of phone numbers on web pages and assets. Not only is it a trustmark, but it gives your audience a quick easy way to connect with you if they like your content enough to want to learn more. After all, 61% of customers believe it’s important that a business provide a phone number to call. The eye naturally goes to the upper corner of a site, a blog, or an asset to find a phone number make sure there’s something there when they look.
6. Get Creative With Video and Presentations
Your video itself should be creative, of course, but Kawasaki recommends uploading the file directly to Facebook native rather than pasting in a link from YouTube. The video looks much more attractive in the feed, and even though its views won’t contribute to the view count on YouTube, it takes advantage of viewers who may be on one platform but not the other.
In addition, Kawasaki recommends taking advantage of SlideShare. If you have a particularly long presentation or even a long-form post, create a SlideShare presentation to go with it and take advantage of the audience that watches SlideShare for good content. Plus it gives you another piece of visual marketing content to add to your arsenal to share on other networks. You can’t lose.
Want more tips on improving your content marketing performance? Sign up for our webinar: Eliminate the Biggest Blind Spot in Your Content Marketing ROI Data.