If you can use not only your sense of sight but any or all of the other four senses in your remembrances, then as these pieces of information are all stored in different parts of the brain, you have many more chances of bringing the information back to mind when it is needed.
Every association is a help.
Give yourself enough TIME to store the information Especially when you are new to the game, it takes time to make the necessary associations and visualisations. This can be very difficult at a party for instance where you meet several new people in quick succession. Once you have got into your routine for remembering names and making quick associations, it definitely gets easier, but to begin with you may have to withdraw a little from the socialising to get your thoughts sorted out. Making notes later can be very useful. Repetition is vital to the memory process, and when we were young we did a great deal of this with multiplication tables and spellings, with the result that many of these things learnt long ago are second nature.