5 HOT VISUAL STORY TACTICS
It is a myth that an image would tell more than a thousand words, but an image is definitely the place in your brain where your story may last forever. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t make visualization part of your strategy: turn your texts into videos, drawings, photographs, presentations or animated gifs and let your stories live their new lives on different platforms.
Infographic from Marenthe.com
1. Turn To Your Best Content For Re-packaging
If something works as a blog post or an article, it will probably work in a visual format. It just has to be tailored to fit a new style. You can take your most popular posts and create a whole series of visuals from one story, to go on multiple platforms.
A single blog post can make several infographics, a tutorial, a video or a slideshow. You will widen your audience this way, if you customize the content for the platforms.
2. Use cartoons
We know that social media posts with cartoons are among the best scoring ones if it comes to sharing. We also know that we can't just use any image we find on the web; we need to respect the creator’s copyright. Luckily there are many awesome creative minds who would love you to use their work (of course with credits) or under a simple agreement like Creative Commons. But watch out, there is a lot of second class work around, so better involve a specialist like an art director for advice.
3. Video is the #1 traffic driver
Videos are successful as a part of digital strategies aimed at generating traffic. But they are not easy-to-use. On a page they need contextual elements to increase engagement.
Make sure to add links to internal content to reduce bounce rates: if the source link gets changed, your video is lost and leads to an error page. Also create on-page engagement tools like comments and “read more” links to keep users involved. Video's are the hardest of them all to get for close to nothing or free. It would take you too long searching for a quality fit with your brand identity and strategy, and you will end up with a pile of weird films. So produce them yourself.
4. Everybody loves infographics
Visualisation of data takes precedent over text-heavy stimuli. The eyes are an extension of the brain and very well activated by easy-to-understand visual data.
As almost all sensory information will be filtered out by the brain, it is useful to create a lasting visual impression. The trick that does it is to enlarge unusual details, that make fuzzy information understandable, in a distinctive style.
5. Do not forget audio!
We are not just talking eye candy. We are talking about visual impulses like buttons and deeplinks as well; experiencing your stories in available formats. And audio definitely is a way to get people involved. You might not know that there are tons of free audio files available on the net to illustrate your story. From church bells, to street sounds (great to put under a studio interview) or Chinese opera, it's all there. Use 'm up!