We are all visual animals. Our eyes find it much easier to stimulate an image in our brains than texts.
You may recall this from your own experience when you are out grocery shopping: signs that show the product’s photo are catchier than a simple placard with the name of the product written on it. In studies, content with images has increased the view rate by a whopping 94%. Research also suggests that visual content is more memorable than textual content.
No wonder, then, that marketers invest so much in visual marketing.
So what is Visual Marketing? And how can it help you sell more books?
What Is Visual Marketing?
In simple terms, visual marketing is all about using visual content that attracts and engages the target audience. Visual content can be any videos, images, GIFs, etc. that you use to convey your promotional messages.
As people’s attention span is decreasing, more brands are using virtual marketing as a major social media marketing strategy to catch more people’s attention over textual content and make the promotional campaigns more memorable.
So how can you enhance your visual marketing strategies by using them for your social media marketing?
How Visual Marketing Influences The Success Of Social Media Marketing
1. Create A Branded Social Media Presence
Whenever a possible reader comes across your social media profile, it is the visual element that creates the first impression of your feed. So, it is crucial to make your social media profile branded to make your brand more recognizable.
Start by using your author brand logo as your profile picture. If you are on Facebook, create a branded cover photo to catch the visitors’ attention. You can include there a mockup with all your book titles or similar info, as in the example below:
To take things to the next level, you can also put your author logo on every social media post you create. It would work as a copyright tag and make it easy for your target audience to recognize you whenever they explore something similar to your brand.
2. Use Visual Graphics For Text
Just because we are talking about visual marketing, it doesn’t mean we can’t include textual content. After all, you can’t convey your message just by using images. That’s when graphics come to your rescue.
Use tools like Canva that provide millions of templates, fonts, colors, themes, and graphics to make your textual content as attractive as the visual content.
Use bullet points, short and easy-to-understand texts on the image so that visitors can understand them with just one glance. Eye-catching graphics and funky fonts ensure a maximum readability rate. This can be particularly useful with sales and promos:
3. Improve Your Post Quality
The quality of your posts is something that you can not ignore, especially when you want to focus on visual marketing. Many authors have ignored this and suffered the consequences.
Use apps like VSCO that are dedicated to improving the quality of pictures and making them look more aesthetic with the filters and image moderation features they provide.
If possible, invest in good-quality cameras or hire good photographers to create quality posts for your social media. Or you can simply invest in a smartphone that has a good camera quality, and then you are good to go! Just keep the aesthetics in mind.
4. Use In-built Platform Features
Before investing in something else, explore the social media handles and the features they provide to enhance your visual marketing experience.
Lately, social media platforms have been evolving in a certain way to provide more promotional opportunities to brands. For example, Instagram now provides content formats like reels, stories, IGTV, and Instagram live. And Facebook provides Facebook live, stories, and 360-degree post formats to give a completely new experience to the users.
You get so many fun ways to present your visual content on social media, so make the most of it and enjoy the benefits they bring in!
5. Create Memes On Trending Topics
Social media users feed upon trendy meme material. They love reposting these memes and share them with their friends and followers.
Make use of this opportunity and create visual content inspired by trendy memes. When you do so, be assured of more shares on social media for your posts, exposing your brand to a new audience.
There are free meme creator apps available on Play Store and App Store. Download them are create some fun meme content worth sharing!
6. The Visual Part Of Book Marketing
Gone are the days when people would advise you not to judge a book by its cover. Lately, printing houses are investing in creating visually appealing book covers as much as they invest in good writers.
The dominance of social media has not left book marketing behind. Many printing houses like Penguin and Harper Collins have started utilizing social media to spread the word about their authors’ books by creating book cover launches.
Not just that, but they have also started creating social media posts using templates matching the book covers’ fonts and colors to give an insight into what the book holds for the keen readers. It has become a perfect visual and book marketing blend that has helped many authors increase their book sales.
Over To You
Visual marketing can be influential for your social media marketing strategy. Incorporate it into the rest of your book marketing strategies by keeping the above ideas in mind. Use them in your next social media marketing strategy and see how they help create the perfect social media presence for you as more people start recognizing your author brand.
Going to bookmark this and study it when I have time–it looks very worthwhile!
Glad you think so, John! The gist of it is, use more images and less text in your social media when promoting your books 🙂
Great post, Nicholas. I love these tips and certainly see some areas to improve. Time is always a factor, but once started, I imagine it’s not too bad to keep going. 🙂
Some people find it fun, actually. I used to be one of them 😉