5 visual marketing trends to look out for this year

Photo credit: gregorylee / 123RF Stock Photo.

This article was co-authored by Clarissa Santoso and Carrie Er.

In this digital day and age, what exactly seizes one’s attention? Traditional marketing strategies are no longer the panacea to catching a customer’s eye — they are inundated with boatloads of information.

We plowed through the latest in marketing to bring you five visual trends which are going to be your best bet in capturing attention for your marketplace in 2017. The role of visual in marketing is increasingly indispensable as social media becomes an integral part of our lives.

Videos, videos, and more videos

63 percent of social media is now made up of images while 32 percent come from videos. This percentage is set to escalate in the near future. With 50 percent of internet users watching business-related videos on YouTube at least once a week, videos are quickly becoming the next hottest visual medium for content marketing and is snapping at the heels of images.

This medium also translates to more sales, as shoppers who watch videos are 1.81 times more inclined to purchase than non-viewers. It is not difficult to understand why; there is only so much an image can convey, whereas videos have a way of getting messages across in a concise yet compelling manner — it just ain’t the same with images.

Take for instance the collaboration between famous Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie and Maker Studios, a subsidiary of Disney. Because video content displays greater potential for returns on marketing, legacy companies turn to these influential YouTubers for that extra zest in their otherwise predictable promotional campaigns.

Many companies look to these YouTubers for fresh content that will most likely go viral. The content for these videos can be anything from behind-the-scenes footages to short promotional films, or even self-produced music videos to engage with consumers.

Get moving with GIFs

Photo credit: Giphy.

A moving image can bring your marketplace’s visual content up a notch as it is engaging and animated. If you think about it, the lines between micro video clips and GIFs seem pretty blurred. However, you are in for a shock if you think these two are indistinguishable.

While consistency is key in visual marketing campaigns across various social media platforms, different strokes work for different folks. Twitter took advantage of its edge in this regard as they made retweeting GIFs on their platform easier. This was after they saw how tweets containing GIFs were more retweetable and drove more traffic.

Short and sweet wins the race

Leave no time to waste in capturing that micro-moment with your audience. The magic in winning your audience over lies in impactful yet simple visual content. As we grow accustomed to absorbing information on the go, our short attention spans make us averse to long-winded grandmother stories. Nothing beats a punchy tagline to the finish line.

Remember to compress your visual content into bite-sized pieces without undermining it. Memes are not only a great way to start but an assurance for web traffic too.

Real-time streaming

User-generated content (UGC) makes all the difference