Inbound Marketing Blog

15 September, 2016

The Power of Visual Storytelling

Written by Olivia Beattie

on 15 September, 2016

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Once upon a time, marketing was all about sign spinning and sending coupons in the mail.

Brands are constantly in competition with each other to grab people’s attention, the only problem is, nowadays it’s proving to be a bit more difficult to get a grasp of since the internet became saturated with content, and people’s attention spans have gotten shorter.Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to create a personal connection with your customers through your brand.(A survey in Canada showed the average human’s attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, to a shocking 8 seconds! Goldfish however, are seen to have an attention span of 9 seconds…)

To combat this, more and more marketers are recognising the value of and beginning to turn the page towards Storytelling. Visual Storytelling to be more specific.

Chapter 1: Storytelling in Marketing, Eh?

Although it may sound like a fairytale, visual storytelling is proving to be a much more effective and exciting way of getting your ideas seen  in the dense forest of internet content.

Using visual stories as part of a  marketing strategy  helps customers to really engage with your brand message.  Rather than wasting their time reading through any long, factual documents that they don’t have the time to read or find unfulfilling, hitting them with images is much more powerful. Telling visual stories gives marketers the opportunity to manipulate the reader’s emotions, as well as their thoughts and opinions. After all a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Chapter 2: The Science Behind Storytelling 

Will visual storytelling help speed up customer conversion??

Well, our brains can process visual information 60,000 times faster than we can verbal. 

This might be why videos have been proven to increase click-through rates by up to 300%?

So in theory, Yes. It should speed up your conversion results.

Various studies have shown that content marketing is a lot more effective when images or videos are thrown into the mix. This is because 90% of information that is transmitted to the brain is visual. 

What you can do with visual content online has evolved so much even in the last year, with GIFs, cinemographs and videos being used more and more on social media. How much of the content that you share on social media is visual? If the answer is not a whole lot, then you might be bucking the trend, but not in a good way.

Chapter 3: How to start telling visual stories

Start to think about a brand story in your head, whether this be for a campaign or aimed at a particular persona.Make sure that the story can be  expressed easily to the viewer through visuals and  think about what your target audience will want to see, what their visual sensibilities are. Will they like photographs, graphics or GIFs? Do these methods fit in with your brand style and the story that you’re trying to tell?

A good place to start is to connect your prospects through a more ‘human’ story for your company and its employees. By giving your audience a little glimpse into who is on the other side of the screen using images, or a thread of gifs, you enhance your brand’s story and show your transparency as a company.

Another great thing about creating visual stories is that all of the images or videos that you create for your site will already be social media friendly! So there’s no need to create social media images separately. Instagram’s a good platform for sharing this sort of content.

We live inside our own stories every day, so why wouldn’t we incorporate them into our marketing strategy? People engage with stories about other people rather than just cold corporate logos.

The End: Images are all about emotion

Whilst words appeal to the logical side of customer’s brains, images pull on people’s emotional strings. By having a marketing strategy that appeals to both, you won’t just tell a great brand story, but hook them in, keep them engaged and leave them crying out for a sequel.