There's an easy way to market your products and differentiate yourself from competitors.
Engage your customers with graphics.
Use them to visually communicate what your brand is all about and convince them to take action.
Graphics allow you to manipulate imagery, elements, and content into compelling formats you can use to tell your brand story.
They can help you clearly communicate product or service benefits and the reason why customers should believe in your brand.
What's more?
You can use them to shape perceptions, build brand identity, gain market share, and boost conversions.
And guess what?
According to a study by Venngage, original graphics are the best type of visuals marketers use to reach their goals.
Image via Venngage
So, do you use graphics in your marketing strategy?
And if you do, do the graphics help you engage customers and potential buyers?
If they don't, this post lists tactics you can use to engage your customers with graphics.
But first, let’s take a look at the types of graphics you can create to boost engagement.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
As previously mentioned, graphics enable you to communicate your brand’s purpose, products, and why a customer should choose you over your competitors.
You might argue that text can achieve the same.
However, incorporating graphics increases the chances that your audience will remember your brand.
For example, if you consistently leverage certain visual elements in all your graphics, your audience can associate your brand with them irrespective of the channel on which they see those graphics.
But what kind of graphics can you create to engage your customers?
Graphics you can leverage to increase engagement across all marketing channels include:
When you create these graphics, you should ensure consistency in them so that your customers can recognize them with ease.
You must also make sure that these graphics have elements that can catch the attention of your customers. This can help you engage them well.
But how exactly can you do that?
Use the tactics mentioned below.
Including well-designed graphics in your marketing strategy can help you stand out on your audience's screens and grab their attention.
However, the trick to enjoying all the benefits graphics can offer lies in knowing how to utilize them fully.
In this post, we will examine how you can engage your customers with graphics and get them to act the way you want.
Read on to discover simple tactics.
Want to engage your customers with graphics and have them take action?
Have that as a goal for each graphic you create.
Determining goals gives you direction and something to work towards.
It ensures you understand your expectations and aspirations, thus increasing the accuracy of the proposed elements you wish to include in your designs.
What’s more?
It makes it easy to track whether your graphics deliver expected results. You can identify the different engagement metrics that help you measure the effectiveness of your graphics.
For example, this graphic has one objective and prompts the target audience to take a specific action – get a free $5 gift card by scanning the QR code. This makes the graphic engaging too.
Image via Sprout Social
It will be hard to engage your customers with graphics if you don't understand who they are, what they care about, their values or beliefs, and why they would need your products.
And the more information you can find about them, the better equipped you will be to engage your customers with graphics that meet their needs.
But how can you go about it?
Start by identifying whom the designs are for so that you can include elements that they find appealing.
These include elements such as typography, colors, and images.
For example, if your target audience is B2B clients, then you may want to give your graphics a corporate feel with serif fonts to engage them. If you're designing graphics for social media posts, using an image enhancer to improve the image quality to 4K can be very beneficial.
Alternatively, if your target audience is kids, you can leverage cartoon-style fonts that make your designs fun. To simplify this process, you can leverage a tool like Colorcinch that can easily cartoonize your images to make them appealing for kids.
On the other hand, color influences emotions and moods, and you should identify or use those that match your brand colors.
However, besides ensuring your brand colors appear in each design, you need to include colors that drive action in your campaigns.
For example, using red in your sales designs can communicate passion or excitement, create a sense of urgency, or encourage users to participate.
Not convinced if color can drive engagement?
Well, HubSpot did an experiment where they tested a green and red call to action (CTA). Everything else on the pages remained the same, with the only difference being the color of the buttons.
Image via HubSpot
And the result?
The red button got 21% more clicks than the green button!
So, yes, you can engage your customers with graphics if you use the right colors.
Not sure what colors you should use for your designs?
You could choose to hire a skilled graphic designer who can take care of it all. However, if that doesn’t seem feasible, you could always upskill yourself by enrolling for a digital media course and learn how to do it yourself.
This way, you can learn what it takes to become a graphic designer and elements you should leverage to create graphics that communicate your brand story effectively.
To engage your customers with graphics, you need to adjust them according to the platforms you use.
Why?
Each platform has different dimensions for graphics and a varied audience too. As a result, it will be hard for one graphic to span every platform and drive engagement effectively.
So, how do you create graphics that engage for each platform?
You need to understand the unique workings of each platform, then adjust your graphics depending on the rules and users who use it.
For instance, if you’re planning to engage customers on Instagram or Facebook, you could choose to create light, humorous, informal, and bright designs.
On the other hand, LinkedIn is a more professional platform. As a result, you could consider using conservative and formal designs on it.
What about email?
Yes, you can make your email designs engaging by including interactive features to engage your customers.
For example, adding animation, hotspots, dynamic content, etc., can help your cause. Note how the below email contains graphics that make it more engaging.
Image via Really Good Emails
However, creating and sending out emails in bulk is no mean deal. You would need an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or other alternative email platforms to do so. Without them, it wouldn’t be possible to manage your email campaigns well.
For example, with Mailchimp, you can insert animated GIFs into campaigns, embed quizzes or polls, etc.
Different platforms have preferred image dimensions, and to engage your customers with visuals, you need to learn what these image and video specifications are.
This way, you can create sensational designs that are clearly visible and communicate your message effectively.
And guess what, if you are not familiar with the requirements for each platform, you can leverage design tools like Canva that give you pre-sized templates designed for each.
Image via Canva
Next, ensure your designs load properly on both desktop and mobile devices. They should fit well on each device and be clearly legible.
What's more?
In cases where users experience slow connections, make it fun for them to wait for your pages to load.
What does this mean?
Design graphics that display and engage your customers as they wait for the page to load.
For example, Teamline, the project management app from Slack, greets users with quotes or nice words as they wait for tasks to load.
It also shows a skeleton bar where the current task shows up as the screen pre-populates. Doing this then helps engage their customers, triggers their curiosity, and builds momentum.
Image via Teamline
Then finally, to ensure images load fast, leverage compression tools likeTinyImage. Such a tool would help you reduce your image sizes while keeping the quality intact.
Doing this ensures that images you upload on different devices load properly, remain clear, and communicate your messages effectively.
It also improves their look, thus increasing the chances that your audience engages with them.
Compared to raw data or plain text, graphics make your content digestible, shareable, and enjoyable.
And the easier it is for your audience to interact with your content, the more they will keep coming back to it.
What's more?
If you engage your customers with graphics on your website, it can lead to more social shares, comments, conversions, etc.
But how can you engage your customers with graphics on your website?
Image via BarkPost
Using one type of graphic for each of your posts can bore your audience or make your social feeds dull.
For this reason, you need to engage your customers with graphics that make your website and social feeds entertaining.
Some of the graphics you can leverage include:
But note that despite the need to use various types of graphics, you also need to make them visually appealing.
Engage your customers with graphics that evoke their emotions, memories, experiences, etc.
Secondly, make your graphics relatable so that your audience can enjoy interacting with them, feel inspired to engage, and share them.
What's the one advertisement or post you remember fondly?
Did it make you sad, happy, or is it like a catchy song you can’t get out of your head?
Good graphics can appeal to human emotions and influence your customers to behave in a certain way.
And if you want to engage your customers with graphics, you need to ensure they present your message compellingly and reach people in different ways.
They should always elicit some kind of emotion from your audience so that they can feel compelled to share.
And guess what?
It's easy to integrate emotion into your graphics if you leverage available design tools and technologies.
You can combine stunning visuals, a powerful voiceover, and music to build a story that makes people happy, scared, excited, or sympathetic.
You can also integrate technology, including 360-degree photos and videos, augmented reality, 3D, kinetic typography, and virtual reality.
All this then works together to build a narrative your audience can relate to and feel compelled to take action.
Best of all?
You can use them for various tasks, including educating your audience, delivering messages, breaking down complex information, etc.
For example, you can leverage emotional graphics to create:
For an intriguing example, check out this 3-minute motion graphic that explains how Bitcoin works. It uses graphics to explain a complex issue in a simple way and helps engage the customers.
Image via Vimeo
Another crucial tip when trying to engage your customers with graphics is to ensure you remain consistent with your branding.
What does this entail?
Have a single theme to align with all your designs or your brand identity. For example, the fonts you use, color schemes, campaign layouts, etc.
They should be similar across graphics you create or share.
But why should you do this?
Being consistent not only reflects your professionalism but also makes it possible for your customers to recognize your brand from any platform.
Additionally, doing this ensures each campaign you create blends seamlessly, grows familiarity with customers, and boosts engagement.
Take, for example, Dollar Shave Club's consistent use of the same graphics, colors, and typography.
Their customers would instantly recognize their visuals from any social platform or website on which they see them. At the same time, they’re designed such that they engage them well too.
Image via Dollar Shave Club
And guess what?
Having a consistent theme can help your brand stand out while also impacting whether or not customers eventually buy from you.
It also acts as a reflection of your brand, and if it's inconsistent, disconnected, or inaccurately reflects your brand, it stops telling your brand story.
This then makes it hard for you to establish connections with those you want to reach. It also makes it hard to inspire interactions or engagement with any of your designs.
Luckily, by remaining consistent, you can establish relationships, improve your brand experience, and supercharge your lead generation efforts.
Customers today either skim or scroll through their social feeds until they find something that catches their eye.
But there lies the problem.
You may have a beautiful design that stops them on their tracks, but if they can't read the text at a glance, they'll keep scrolling.
It also means that they may not engage, and if they do, their comments may be negative.
So how do you prevent negative reactions and inspire engagement?
Engage your customers with graphics by making your text easily scannable. This means using easy-to-read font types, sizes, and colors.
Most importantly, avoid cluttering your graphics with too many elements.
There should be some white space between all elements to make your graphics easy on the eyes. Doing this also makes your graphics readable and easily digestible.
For example, check out how REESE'S from the HERSHEY’s uses readable text that you can digest even without clicking on individual images. This can help engage their customers.
Image via Instagram
It's easy to engage your customers with graphics, especially if you become creative, use the right tools, and evoke emotions. Doing this makes it easy for your customers to get familiar with your designs, recognize, and engage with them.
However, in the quest for engagement, don’t compromise on quality. Always produce eye-catching graphics that cater to the needs of your audience.
Do you have any questions on how you can engage your customers with graphics? Comment below, and we can offer more tips and tactics you can leverage.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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