Use the Power of Visuals in Your Marketing Strategy
By: Selim Furkan Gul
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Business, Work

Use the Power of Visuals in Your Marketing Strategy

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Best marketers always touch the human senses because people tend to like things they see close as a feeling. Visuals are the best and simplest way to emotionally touch people and get them moving.

Recently, I watched a TedX about emotions in marketing from Camil Roca where he was emphasizing the power of emotions in advertising and the great role they play in creating effective advertising campaigns. He said “ I’m explaining to you that whatever emotions it’s on the right point they can get you through your heart or through your pocket”

For example, the Coca Cola’s “Choose Happiness” promotion in 2015 was a powerful example that encouraged consumers to share happy memories and experiences that make them feel happy that summer.

Since I first heard this marketing method, emotional marketing, it has affected my way of thinking about marketing. I am no longer struggle with useless techniques, I’m completely focused on emotions. I managed that with visuals. Because I know visuals are the best teacher of humans. This made my businesses blew up.

Coca-Cola knows everything about emotional marketing. Also, they’re applying them very well. Before they started this marketing style, only 9 Coca-Cola was sold in their first year. Just 9. But now they’re are selling an estimated 1.9 billion servings a day. You get the point, I think :)

They achieved this success to touch the emotions through happy TV advertising, billboards, sponsored events, etc. They have nurtured multiple marketing methods from planting the seed until they became big oaks. Finally, we have ads that give us a feeling of happiness, relaxation, and satisfaction when we are exposed.

It would be easy for the marketer to just focus on words or numbers and says “Why don’t we bother to convince people by simply giving numbers and proofs? This is easier.”

But inside Coca-Cola, marketers are aware of the power of visuals over emotions. Another example is their campaign which they bring strangers into friends. I think that they thought that such a campaign would also give people an optimistic emotion.

Every visual feel people’s different emotions. Every different emotion triggers people to buy or not. This is the basic formula.

This marketing style will help you touch people’s hearts and lead them to your product or service. Also, Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, said some words about the visuals that mean things to people.

There can be no words without pictures. -Aristotle

Many successful marketer says nearly same things and uses this marketing method. For example, Seth Godin said ““Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell.” Also Joe Chernov has nearly same idea “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.”.

You should focus on yourself. For example, when we see the Apple conference, what are we feeling? What does it make us feel? If you ask me, I feel safe, quality, and premium. Because they give confidence with their all products.

“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” -Steve Jobs

It is possible to touch emotions with sound. But sound likes writing on water. It’s like a temporary effect. Yet, what we see is more permanent for us. Let’s give an example. If I say to you, children are hungry in Africa, what we hear every day. You just hear it. Then if I show you a hungry, skeleton child from Africa. Most probably, since you saw the child, you’re going to connect him/her and you will feel more pity.

That’s the magic of visuals. For the rest, using the sound with visuals is a great emotional marketing strategy. You can absolutely understand this from films.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Takeaway

Using visuals for marketing is a good formula. Using visuals and sounds together is the best. All big companies use this strategy. They’re touching us. Our emotions.

The WWF doesn’t mess around when it comes to speaking about the negative effects of climate change. They’re known for creating emotionally charged images that either provoke anger, fear, or awe, all in hopes of compelling action in their target audience.

To implement these great insights, you can take these steps:

Establish your visual identity: A brand is anything a product/ service is doing and showing, from symbols, name, sound, emotion and others. Think about Nike and you already have a logo in your mind with their “Just do it” or think about McDonald’s and you have the image of the golden arches in your mind. Choose a type of visual content: It doesn’t matter the type of content unless you have an answer for one simple question. The type of content doesn’t matter. Always, but always start with this simple question — What I want people to do after they see this visual? Decide the marketing platform: Now that we know about the brading and what type of content we want to create we need to focus on distribution platforms. The importance of distribution platform is all about where and how you will use your visuals. For example, if you want to promote a blog post on Pinterest, what kind of visual elements you will use there?

Every visual marketing content you create means a new touched heart, feeling. Every new touched heart, feeling means a new customer.