It is pretty random nowadays that web designers and freelancers get curious when they hear about the recent trends in the graphic design industry. They would always like to invest time and energy in the things that are trending and have the potential to be the next big thing. They never like being behind in the competition and want to become unique from their competitors. In 2014, the most prominent web designing trend was related to typography and interactive website elements. After that, responsive website designs are in extremely high demand.
Nowadays, similar things are said about the benefits of visual storytelling. Many web designers are doing online collaborations about its importance and recognition in the market. They believe that they should use storytelling to elevate their business results. There are numerous trends related to storytelling in the digital world today. This article will guide you about its importance and how you can maximize your business results through it.
What is Visual Storytelling?
Before you know the importance and utilization of storytelling methods, you must understand why visual storytelling has a particular space for web designers today. Storytelling is a message or a series of messages required to communicate a story to the customers. Web designers take help from multimedia and get their point across to the general public. Even though this definition is challenging to explain, it is a pretty straightforward concept. As there is a quote, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, marketing agencies, advertising agencies, and businessmen use different forms of multimedia to increase their brand awareness.
Image taken from Facebook
In today’s day and age, storytelling has become more relevant than ever. The sooner businessmen understand its importance and start creating advertising strategies, the better it is. The different forms of multimedia involved in this process include graphics, infographics, vector art, and multiple types of videos. The objective is to catch customers' attention at first sight and tell them to engage with their brand. If they like the idea, they can use social media to tell their relatives and friends about the brand.
Importance of Visual Storytelling
1. Memorable Content
The best thing about visual storytelling marketing is it makes the content look more impressive and exciting in the eyes of the audience. As they say, “first impression is the last impression”, there is a huge chance that the first impression that your audience gets from your content is a positive one. After all, customers would instead visualize the website content in images and video form rather than plain text. People who watch a video are likely to focus on it for an extended period.
Image taken from YouTube
When you have a blog section, you don’t just write lines in it, or it will bore your readers. There is a reason why you include videos and images as part of your blog so that your readers can maintain their interest in it. Most importantly, people are also using YouTube to spread their word. Apart from videos and images, GIFs have also gained a lot of attraction in recent years. If the website owners want to make an announcement on their website, they tend to use GIFs to create hype within the audience.
2. Engaging Ads
As we have said in the previous point, videos are much more influential and eye-catching than a simple blog. Video marketing has the tendency to attract more viewers because it gives a personalized feeling to the audience. When you go through the tutorial on how to use visual storytelling, you will know that there are many marketing videos to consider. There are marketing videos in which the spokesperson directly interacts and asks questions from the viewer.
If they have an Instagram page, they use Instagram stories to create polls and ask the viewers about their opinions on certain products or innovations. Furthermore, there are videos in which the spokesperson has a storytelling style, which maintains the audience engagement till the end. If the same message is conveyed in simple text, eventually, your viewers will become bored and may even leave feedback in which they tell you to consider your content strategies.
3. Improves Brand Personality
One of the biggest benefits of visual storytelling is that it improves your brand personality. The storytelling method will tell the audience that you are completely up to date with the recent technological advancements. After all, if your website is filled with all the current trends in multimedia, you have the credentials to produce something fantastic in the digital world. Evolving with the technological trends reflects on your brand personality, which allows you to attract a wide range of audiences.
To evolve with the recent trends, you must have a professional website at your disposal. Strikingly enables you to create the website of your dreams without breaking a sweat. Once you customize one of our website templates, you can start adding all the relevant content related to your storyline. However, your content must be readable and understandable to the audience. Otherwise, it would become a meaningless distraction to the public.
4. Message Easy to Understand
When using visual storytelling as part of your business, the biggest talking point revolves around your brand message. The message will be the main element that will set the tone for your brand marketing. You can use infographics to explain a concept or a process within just a few minutes rather than explaining your message through a blog of 1500 words. Videos help you convey a message by grabbing the audience’s attention and explaining the aims and objectives.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
If the same message is delivered to you in the form of text, it is likely that the reader may need to go through the content more than once before actually getting the meaning. You can create a YouTube video to share your brand message and attach it to your Strikingly website. However, you must upload your video on your YouTube channel because Strikingly doesn’t allow you to upload your video directly to the website.
Integrate Storytelling in Your Business
1. Optimize Images and Videos
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
You have to ensure that your images and videos are optimized as per the web. You must include everything on your web pages related to the video and image optimization. In today’s day and age, there is no relevance in creating website content optimized for printing purposes or PDFs. Most of the audience will visualize your marketing content on the internet. When using visual storytelling, you have to optimize everything in the digital form.
2. Responsive Website
Image taken from Strikingly
When you create a website for visual storytelling marketing, you must use a responsive website template. When we talk about a responsive website template, we mean that it should be accessible across both the desktop and the mobile versions. According to many pieces of research worldwide, the number of mobile users has exceeded desktop users in the last decade. Therefore, you must be proactive and not disregard your mobile users. If your website is not mobile-optimized, the texture will not appear properly for mobile users. Strikingly provides our users with a collection of responsive website templates they can customize based on the niche idea.
3. SEO
There is no point in creating wonderful visuals and videos when you don’t have a strong customer base to recognize your hard work. When conducting visual storytelling marketing, you must understand the importance of relevant search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. For those who don’t know, SEO is a way of making your website get recognized by Google. If you have a compilation of strong visuals and implement relevant SEO strategies, there is nothing better than that as a marketing person.
Strikingly provides you with an SEO checklist to take a tour of the entire website from an SEO perspective. The SEO elements involved in the Strikingly SEO checklist include meta-descriptions, meta-tags, titles, images, etc. However, if you upgrade your subscription plan on our platform, it is likely that you will see improved features in the SEO checklist.
Conclusion
Nowadays, everyone is willing to invest a minimal amount of time to do the maximum amount of work. When you become an experienced professional, you will realize that smart work is much more beneficial than hard work. After all, smart work allows you to invest less energy to gain the maximum output. This is exactly the kind of concept visual storytelling marketing has for the digital marketing people. It allows you to spread your message by investing minimal amounts of effort.
To integrate storytelling methods into your website, you must have a quality website that connects all the dots for you. Strikingly is a free website builder that helps you stay relevant in the digital world. Once you complete the registration process on our platform, you will come under a free plan, which allows you to build a basic website within a couple of clicks. If you have problems with the creation of your website, you can collaborate with our Happiness Officers today. So, create the best brand website and improve your credibility as a marketing person.
