Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘a picture tells a thousand words?’ We read into images all the time, whether it’s paintings in a gallery, glossy magazine covers or the carefully selected photos used to boost a brand’s digital content marketing campaign.
And it’s not just videos - according to research from Hubspot, short-form videos have the highest ROI in comparison to other trends like influencer marketing and selling on social media apps. Visual storytelling techniques are valuable tools for businesses trying to engage their audience.
What is visual storytelling?
Visual storytelling is a way of engaging your audience by telling a story with images, videos, and other media. This makes your content more compelling and impactful. In fact, 96% of marketers agree that video has helped improve audience understanding of their product or service.
Remember Wendy’s ‘Where’s the Beef?’ ad? It was the story of an elderly lady trying to find a burger place with actual beef in their burgers. The messaging was clear: ‘at Wendy’s, you’ll never need to ask ‘where’s the beef?’ But, it wasn’t just the story that made this ad successful—the visuals made it stand out, with comedy moments that stuck in people’s memories (for instance, when the elderly lady drove around bends quickly, throwing her passengers around).
Visual storytelling isn’t just used in advertisements. It can be used in your social media, corporate presentations, and more obviously, TV and film. Not only does visual storytelling bring your content to life, but it also makes your information more relatable and easier to understand.
There are a range of different visual storytelling types. These are:
Infographics. These combine images, text, and color with an engaging and easy-to-digest layout. They’re a great way to show off statistics or data without sharing a plain old spreadsheet.
Charts and graphs. These can form part of your data storytelling as they tell the story of financial growth or market share in an easy-to-understand manner for example.
Flowcharts. These guide audiences through your information. You can also make them interactive, for an added level of engagement.
Videos. You can use these in a variety of ways, from tutorials on Youtube to quick comedy shorts on TikTok.
Social media. Adding images and videos to your posts boosts engagement, and makes them stand out among the endless scroll. If you can catch someone’s eye with your visuals, they’re much more likely to stop and read rather than glossing over it.
In presentations, visual storytelling can help engage your audience and improve retention. This makes it especially effective when it comes to marketing strategies for B2B businesses, as you can convey information quickly to the time-conscious audience. In marketing, it can increase customer buy-in while a strong, emotive story can help improve brand loyalty too.
What does visual storytelling bring to the digital narrative?
When done well, visual storytelling can build connections and act as an effective tool in lead generation marketing. It demonstrates the human side of your business that your staff, customer base, and audience can relate to. Some of the benefits include:
Prompting the viewer to feel emotion. Visuals can make your audience feel whatever you want them to feel. Think about how people talk about tearing up at the John Lewis Christmas adverts!
Simplifying the message. You can tap into your audience's intuition and convey messaging that makes sense in easy-to-swallow clips. Plus, this simplicity often makes it more memorable - people don’t have to think back to pages of text, but can recall a single image instead.
Pleasing people. This could be through elegant photography that’s pleasing to the eye, humor, or a catchy hand gesture or facial expression for example.
The ability to transcend language barriers. Telling a story without words can help non-native speakers understand your narrative.
What are the best visual storytelling techniques to engage your audience?
These techniques work well in all types of visual storytelling. Whether it’s advertising, training, presenting, blogging, or more. If you want to engage your audience, here’s what to do.
Plan a structure
Storytelling requires planning. A central theme is important as this includes your key message and should evoke the emotions you want your audience to feel.
Not all of these elements apply to every piece of content, but in general you should consider:
A plot. For long-form or video content, there should be a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Interesting characters. This means thinking about their personality traits, clothing style, mannerisms, and so on.
Engaging locations or aesthetics. Photographing things against a plain white background is simple, but dull - make sure the entire visual is engaging, not just your key points.
Conflict. This doesn’t have to be a big conflict but should convey customer pain points to help them relate to your brand.
Conflict resolution. Ideally, how can your product or service solve the customer's pain point?
Remember to ‘show’ not ‘tell’. Use your images and video to tell the story rather than text and words.
Understand the needs of your audience
Creating effective visual storytelling relies heavily on understanding your audiences’ needs. Take the time to research these before you plan out your content. This could be through surveys, focus groups, or analytics on your CRM data.
Once you understand your prospective customers, you can shape your campaign so that it hits harder. This could involve using real-life customer stories, or directly addressing past complaints. It can also mean following trends that apply to your targeted age groups, or cultural references that might appeal in a particular country.
Think about your imagery
Knowing what type of imagery to use to prompt an audience's reaction is important. In digital presentations, this could be charts and graphs but on social media, it could be images of people, products, or places.
Color can play an important role in imagery. Your brand colors can help with audience recognition, but colors can also help have a psychological impact. For example, blues and grays prompt feelings of sadness, red invokes thoughts of passion or danger, whilst green tends to feel calming.
Using color to reflect your brand can be an effective way of engaging your audience by creating mood and atmosphere.
Make sure the visuals work for the context
Different platforms can offer different opportunities. For instance, Instagram is great for image carousels and short videos whilst TikTok works best for entertaining videos that can be a little longer.
Getting the content right also means taking into account who your target audience is, and ensuring the visual media is relevant, relatable, and appropriate for them. So, if you’re hosting a presentation at a professional conference, you probably don’t want to use the types of imagery and colors that might be found in a kindergarten classroom!
Know what the goals of the campaign are
Understanding what you want the visual storytelling campaign to achieve is an important part of the planning. Is it to make a sale, deepen their understanding, or send them to a lead magnet landing page? Knowing what you want your campaign to achieve will help you determine which platform to use, what type of visuals will be best, and what your CTA should be.
Invest in your own, unique content
Creating your own content means you have control over how you reflect your brand through visual storytelling. Your digital marketing team can tackle customer pain points and demonstrate how your products or services can help people overcome these challenges. Showing this journey can help your brand to resonate with your audience and think of how your brand can help, every time they face relevant problems.
You could even show ‘behind-the-scenes’ imagery. This could give an engaging angle to your content by showing never-seen-before footage such as your production line or quality control to demonstrate the care that goes into making each product.
Make sure the customer experience is positive
Visual storytelling only works well if the customer enjoys the experience. For example, if your campaign is going out via email, make sure images and videos load properly. If your campaign is going to be on social media, make sure your content adheres to the right rules such as video length and music copyright. This reduces the risk of audience frustration or your material being taken down.
Final thoughts
Visual storytelling is a powerful tool. Whether you use it for marketing, training, sales presentations, or general communication, it will boost your audience engagement. It’s particularly useful for enhancing your digital narrative because, in the digital world, it can be difficult to stand out and engage people.
The key takeaways are knowing how to convey your brand, having a clear goal, and a thorough plan. Planning the story and narrative can take time but getting the messaging right can make the difference between a campaign that works and one that misses the mark. Once you have these things in place, it’s time to get creative and have some fun!
Looking to take your visual storytelling and design skills one step further? Consider a UX/UI design course! You’ll learn how to build interfaces that put the user first and create exceptional user experiences.
Author Bio:
David Becker - Growth Marketing Manager
David Becker is a Growth Marketing Manager at Leadfeeder, a powerful website visitor analytics software. He helps drive Leadfeeder’s growth strategies and demand generation with a keen focus on mental health and well-being in the workplace. David excels in creating impactful marketing campaigns, analyzing trends, and boosting customer engagement for the team.
