In recent times, the rapid evolution of social media has reshaped quite a few conventions, and marketing is no different. Social media marketing, is rapidly coming out of the fringes and taking center stage in the integrated marketing strategy of various brands across the world. In fact, according to Hubspot, social media now produces more than double the marketing leads obtained from conventional sources like telemarketing, trade shows, PPC and direct mail.
Therefore, the chances of engaging a prospective customer on internet are far higher. This is why brands are focusing more on their social media presence and making efforts to stand out. One of the chief ways of standing out in the social media noise is by utilization of personalized, branded graphics. Here are some of the reasons why you should focus on presenting a customized, uniform image on social media websites:
1. Visuals and brand awareness go together
You can integrate your company’s aesthetic in your online presence by the use of custom graphics. This will immensely improve brand awareness and ensure that your social posts and blogs are recognizable in a cascading array of tweets and status updates.
2. Images are potential goldmines of SEO
What many businesses fail to understand is that images are as important to SEO as strategically placed keyword in the body of the text. You can utilize image descriptions and anchor tags to include pertinent keywords which will then result in more hits as image data is crawled by search engines. Therefore when maintaining a company blog, be certain to include as many viable images as possible.
3. Personalized images offer better results than stock photos
With the exposure the current crop of social media users has, it is no surprise that they respond more favorably to authenticity and creativity. In fact, in a study by Quick Sprout, it was found that posts with proprietary images received three times as many social media shares than those involving stock photos.
4. Custom graphics show that you care
While many companies relegate social media marketing to in-house divisions, those who invest in how they are perceived on social media stand to gain a lot more. This is so because professionally designed and unique social media graphics show potential customers that you care. That you are not just another player on the block but rather a serious one.
5. First impressions matter
Nowhere is the adage of first impression is the last impression truer than in the cutthroat world of social media marketing. Here users are constantly bombarded with information and marketers are trying to go one up over one another to attract the most attention. Using customized, brand images in this scenario can present a great way to spark interest and encourage exploration.
6. Custom graphics can help define your social media strategy
While there is variety of ways that you can use custom graphics in your social media posts, like gifs, infographics and memes, it is imperative that you measure results. Using analytics tools like MOZ Pro, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and Buffer, you can single out a style or pattern that elicits the most responses from users. You can then follow it as a standard procedure to ensure that you provide consistent, shareable content.
7. People are much more likely to respond to visual content
Social media users scroll through their feeds in small bursts; most of which don’t exceed beyond 2 to 3 minutes. Therefore they don’t have much time to read the text shared in your post’s body. This places increased emphasis on using a cohesive visual branding strategy which makes brand recall easier. So, using custom images is a great way to stand out and push for user interaction.
8. Customized graphics link offline and online advertising
To present a singular view of things, you can take the custom graphics you utilize for your social media accounts and extend it to your physical presence. Pamphlets, business-cards, flyers and banners are just a few items where you can seamlessly link physical and non-physical ways to further your brand image to present a more well-rounded view.
9. Design and the emotions they elicit are linked
Customized images are not only great at catching attention, nowadays marketers can utilize subtle design changes in them to control user emotions and induce a specific response from them. Modifying typography, colors or space are some of the main ways in which this can be achieved. For instance, it was found in a study that people find some fonts more authoritative than others. Baskerville is currently regarded as the most believable font.
In conclusion, customized visuals are a great way to fuel engagement on social media and thus can help further your brand’s image by uniqueness and consistency.