In This Article
Introduction to Visual Marketing
The visual marketing materials you use are the first impression potential customers have of your business.
A cost-effective way to get started is by using free templates to create everything from logos to flyers to social media images.
Building a First Impression for Your New Business
Starting a business?
Building something from the ground up can feel intimidating. Your small business is like an ember and if you want it to ignite, you need to fuel it with an effective marketing strategy.
Even if you have an amazing product or service, without organizing your marketing goals, your startup can burn out before blazing up. If people don’t know about your product, how can they buy it?
Why is Visual Marketing Important?
This is the digital marketing age, and visuals are everything. So, why is visual marketing important? Attention spans are shorter and the competition for our dwindling attention is stiffer than ever, according to study featured on Venture Beat.
How can you stand out from the crowd and grow your startup? An organized
Here are six basic marketing guidelines to help you get started building your brand and promoting your small business.
By the way, one of my favorite visual marketing tools for implementing all of these ideas is PosterMyWall. And in this article, I’m going to show you how I used this digital marketing tool for a variety of marketing materials.
1. Start With Your Why
Before you even think about sharing what you are selling, ask yourself why you are selling it. Why are you selling organic dog food? Sure, maybe your product is clinically proven to be 20% healthier than commercial pet food. But why is that important? Moreover, who is that important to? If you are providing a solution to a problem, don’t just sell your product, sell the answer to the problem.
In this case, instead of selling organic dog food, you are selling the belief that our furry friends deserve to eat as good and healthy as their owners. This is clearly an important point for your target audience. As a brand, it’s important to make clear what you stand for as that is what will attract your audience. By starting with your why, you establish the beliefs that will shape your brand identity.
Then, you can solidify your brand values into imagery and visual marketing graphics for your logo design, mission statement, and marketing materials.
But before you do that, it’s vital to know who you are communicating to, in other words: who is your target audience?
2. Know Your Target Audience And Where They Hang Out
It’s time to crystallize who your product or service is for.
For example, one of the best ways to do this is to segment your market into buyer personas. Examine your target customers and dissect crucial details of their life. Answer specific questions like:
How old are they? Do they live in the city, or in the country? Are they single, or settled down? How much money do they make annually? What are they passionate about? Where do they hang out?
How to Define Your Target Customer in Your Visual Marketing
First, refine your message to best resonate with your target customer. Put your product or service in front of their eyes in the easiest way possible.
Say you own an athletic apparel brand that specializes in yoga leggings. Where are your yogis hanging out? Chances are, they are spending a lot of time on YouTube with their favorite instructor. Consider starting a YouTube channel, or focusing your startup advertising campaign on YouTube video ads.
If the business is local, branded visuals help grab the attention of the locals. With PosterMyWall’s free flyer maker, you’re able to completely customize small business flyers with your branding colors, imagery, fonts and more. Then, you can post these eye-catching flyers at local establishments where your target market hangs out, like local yoga studios and fitness clubs. Take it a step further and put your brand in your future customer’s pocket with flyers with tear-off tabs. This is a great way to cement your brand into the minds of prospective customers and make it easy for them to find you.
But don’t stop there. Repurpose these free flyers into social media graphics. You can resize them to multiple dimensions for free, schedule your posts and auto-publish from one tab with PosterMyWall.
Look at you, you’ve nailed entrepreneurship by working smarter, not harder.
3. Create Hype On Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool because people love to share visual media.
In fact, visual content is shared on social media 40 times more than any other content, according to HubSpot.
This is an amazing opportunity to use engaging visual content to build your brand. How can you use social media as a tool to promote your business?
Here’s an idea, post teaser images of new products prior to their launch date. Create custom graphics that match your branding and put the spotlight on your new product. Additionally, you can market older products into eye-catching graphics and schedule them into your posting rotation.
Social media offers your company the opportunity to combine your brand’s unique narrative with visual content to build an engaged, loyal audience.
Post Visual Content Consistently on Facebook
And the best way to see steady growth is to post consistently on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and any other platforms relative to your target audience.
PosterMyWall makes it easy and affordable for you to use the same design graphics for multiple platforms. Simply resize graphics to the dimensions of each one of your social channels and schedule your posts to auto-publish. Not only will resizing save you precious time, but it creates a consistent and fluid marketing campaign that people will instantly recognize.
As a small business owner, time is one luxury you don’t have. With PosterMyWall’s Premium and Premium Plus plans, you’re able to easily create and schedule social media posts. Rather than taking time every day to post on all your channels, let the creative juices flow and schedule all of your posts for the week in one sitting.
With every facet of startup marketing, it’s crucial to keep your target audience in mind. Analyze the data on their social media activity: What time are they most active? What content are they responding to and engaging with most? Use Insights and Analytics on your social channels to gain vital information about your audience. Then, you can strategically schedule your content to auto-publish during times of peak activity.
4. Become An Authority in Your Niche
One of the best ways to promote your brand is to become a leading expert in your field. Doing so creates trust with your target customers and builds an engaged audience. Why does this work?
When you share your expertise, you build credibility because people believe and trust that the information you’re sharing is legitimate and important to them.
Share Your Smarts
For example, you know the ins and outs of your field better than anyone, and by sharing your insider knowledge, your credibility materializes into a loyal following.
Not only have you established yourself as an authority in your field, but you have a higher chance of converting your following into customers. Even if they don’t translate to direct sales, you’ve generated good faith from brand ambassadors who trust you because of your credibility.
Visual Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
Content marketing is effective because people know that when you share your expert knowledge, they will gain insight and solutions to their problem, which generates goodwill for your brand.
Let’s bring this marketing concept to life.
Do you own a restaurant or bar? Start sharing your favorite recipes on Instagram and Pinterest.
Are you a hairstylist? Post hair tutorials on Instagram with relevant hashtags and promote it with Instagram Story ads.
You might have the same field experience as your competitors. So, why should people choose your brand over theirs? Because you are sharing your expertise and teaching them something they want to learn more about.
Posting content directly to your Facebook and Twitter accounts is easier than ever with PosterMyWall’s social media scheduling feature. Simply connect your social accounts and start posting genuinely useful and relevant content across all your social channels with one click. Learn more about auto-publishing your posts on PosterMyWall here.
Content marketing works because when you share your expert knowledge, it multiplies and blossoms into loyal customers.
5. Get Up To Speed On Video Marketing
Video marketing should be a vital organ of your startup marketing campaign. Why? Because people straight-up love videos.
Remember how Facebook started as a place to share musings with a short status update? What’s dominating your feed now?
Instagram Loves Video Content
Instagram began as an app to share an “instant” picture taken from your camera phone. Now, it’s all about Insta Stories. In fact, 500 million users check Stories every day, according to Instagram’s internal data. These numbers are telling. Especially for businesses, which comprise 1/3 of the most viewed stories on Instagram.
But it doesn’t stop there. Think about viral content. What medium most often goes viral? Why do cat videos and dance challenges spread like wildfire?
There’s something about videos that stick, and even mutate. When it comes to mapping out your small business
Making Video Content is Easy
Making videos is much easier than you think. Instead of creating videos from scratch, convert posters into videos with PosterMyWall. Consider a new restaurant opening up in a trendy neighborhood. Elevate the excitement and hype by converting the menu image into a video with one click, and let the food come to life. Imagine steam rising from a hot bowl of soup, or the metallic glint of a fork as it glides through the shiny icing of a velvety cake. Turn static images into motion to get your viewers’ mouths watering, and ultimately, lining up to get a table at your new restaurant.
You can quickly create custom videos from scratch with PosterMyWall’s free online editor or customize one of thousands of professionally designed video templates.
Simply personalize a template of your choice, add details relevant to your brand, download and go to town sharing it on all your channels.
Video Marketing Content Turns Visitors Into Customers
Videos carry your message out of the physical and into the digital, and are a great way to turn viewers into customers. With video marketing, you put your brand message into motion and it takes on a life of its own. What’s to stop your brand’s video from going viral?
6. Set Up For The Long Haul
In order to go the distance, focus on building quality relationships with your customers. Instead of one-time transactions that don’t foster long-term engagement, incentivize your customers to keep coming back for more.
How can you put this concept into action?
Engage Customers
If a new customer purchases an item from your company, instead of simply thanking them for their purchase, invite them to join a customer rewards program and include a discount voucher or cash reward toward their next purchase.
Offer Customer Rewards
Turn their cart into a revolving door by offering them rewards for their loyalty to your company. PosterMyWall makes it easy for you to promote return business, because you can create branded discount vouchers from professionally designed gift certificate templates.
Ready to kick start your startup?
Visual marketing is an effective strategy to build your brand and engage your target audience.
Yet in the first stages of marketing your startup, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed about content creation. That’s why it helps to have an extensive resource for creative inspiration. At PosterMyWall, thousands of fully customizable and free flyer design templates are at your fingertips.
The first step to growing your small business is to refine your