Top 10 Visual Content Marketing Trends in 2021

Today’s marketing is not the same as 5 years ago – or only one year ago. The pandemic has turned the world on its head but the truth is that for some time we have trended towards this end.

COVID just hit a quick button.

In a curious situation, our overall mental health and our approach to, interact with and shop from businesses have been influenced by measures of quarantining and social dissociation on public health.

To put it simply, society is:

• Craving more attractive brand interactions than previously.
• Taking a new level of brand confidence and ethics.
• More focus on small enterprises and sustainable development.

It’s a very different consumer base from the one we’ve seen before. The question is, how does visual content marketing effect these trends?

Related: 5 Basic Online Marketing Tactics for Driving Traffic to Your Website

Visual Content Is An Authentic Connections Between Brands and Consumers

The Edelman Trust barometer shows that 70% feel that it is now more crucial to trust a brand than it used to be.

In particular, video content allows marketers a unique opportunity to communicate with their viewers (nearly) face-to-face.

In this age of social dissociation, it fills an emptiness that is a major reason that 91% of marketers believe video for companies in view of the pandemic is increasingly significant.

Here are some of the video and other trends in visual content marketing to look at in particular:

1. Authentic Content & Stories Drive Audience Engagement

The individuals behind the brand want consumers to see.

This might take the form of:

• The CEO talks about the roots of the company.
• A glance back at the CX team so that people can face the representative they spoke to over the phone.
• Or blog posts showing the people who produce the items, and not just the products.

Use Instagram storylines, rollers and even video shorts to show your brand on this side. Make yourself consistent and you will see that (in a good way).

The fancy “flower” of stylish photographers and perfectly-arranged models and commercial pictures are less important today’s audiences. You want to see the true individual.

Instead, talk directly to the consumers who wish to see genuine efforts to connect more personally to the human level with gimmicks and sales pitches to highlight your brand.

Be open, vulnerable and fearless to communicate your views.

Related: How to Make a Career in Advertising and Marketing in 2021

2. Convert Your Lists Into Visual Graphics

Converting your lists into pictures will offer the benefit of providing visual interest while pulling apart the most relevant information from a text block that will most probably be overwritten without digging into it.

In reality, pictures are handled 60,000 times faster than text by human brains. Our brains are built for visual processing.

Navigate your commitment and enhance your on-site viewing duration by adding extra content for your reused content to visual graphics.

3. Optimize Your Custom Branded Visuals for Google Images

In addition to strengthening you as an authority inside your niche, you are creating your own statistics, graphs, and visual concepts.

If all images you are uploading with an alt tag are optimized correctly, the graphics in Google Search and Images can then be indexed to them. Publishers that can pick them up and connect to you can also find them.

The photographs and graphics for your brand assets can even be optimized so that all your content-formats – not only some, but all – are shown in Google pictures.

Google is like a system called Dewey Decimal. Feed it with the appropriate information and you rank everywhere for every small piece of graphic content you publish.

For example, let’s say you have a podcast. If you optimize each podcast episode with correlating website content that includes graphics and visuals, your podcast can show up in Google Images.

Related: 20 Best Website Monetization Platforms for Publishers to Make Money Online

4. Livestream Video Content

I said this before, but I’ll say it again because it’s so crucial, because people walk away from highly polished, highly edited, real stuff.

In comparison to previously recorded videos, the same is true of live video streaming.

Livestreaming gives a feeling of instantaneity that makes the audience more connected when events occur in real time, particularly with the development of virtual events.

Users can typically make comments and directly communicate with the host(s), thus enhancing their involvement.

It is not surprising that live videos usually double the number of pre-recorded videos with these advantages being taken into account.

5. Gamified Interactive Visual Content

This kind of extremely engaging content is very common in social media tales, but must not be confined to Instagram and Facebook.

The main feature of this visual material is to encourage your audience to interact directly, whether it’s placing a favorite outfit, playing “this” or that online, playing a bingo, playing “choose your own adventure,” or a number of other possibilities.

Essentially, you invite your audience to offer their views or to play certain kinds of “game.”

6. Bite-Sized TikTok-Style Videos

The content must be rapid and up to date yet it is still engaging with regular TikTok video lengths up to one minute.

The appetite of the consumer for the content style is a while!

The second most installed non-gaming app with around 62 million downloads that month alone was TikTok in January 2021. The popular trend is also jumping on other social media sites (see at you, Instagram Reels).

What is so amazing about this type of visual content?

Most of the videos are funny, sweet and not too serious. They talk to the audience and rapidly get their idea through.

7. Shoppable Visual Content

The direct purchase of things from social media was originally a unique concept, but it quickly became a routine. 18.3% of Facebook users completed an acquisition right on the platform in 2020.

Corporate technologies, such as shopping stickers and product tags, were used to tighten social media canals.

However, the social media is not limited to shoppable visual content.

Companies may directly adding shop links to their digital catalogs and lookbooks, blog entries, and almost anywhere else.

Related: Top 100+ Free Search Engine Submission Sites List 2021

8. Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content, normally within a 24-hour span, is accessible temporarily before it vanishes. You know ephemeral material if you are familiar with the stories about Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook.

This content is so short-lived that it gives people an urgent feeling. It is especially good when it comes to content provided by users that need not concern itself with matching brand esthetics because it will not stick on permanent display.

Instagram has reported that 58% of people became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it featured in stories, so there’s something to be said about the power of ephemeral content, especially when it’s shoppable.

9. Animations and Gifs

For a long, this kind of graphic content has been popular and probably continues to trend.

Gifs and animations can be used to show a step in a photo, to heat up an image, or to give a funny or enjoying spin to your material, in different ways.

For almost anything that you can think of, you have a gif or animation out there.

10. 360° Visuals

The audience delights in the capacity to “visit” a place and manipulate what it sees through a finger slide or a mouse drag, which makes content ordinarily flat more attractive and evokes interest.

From an e-commerce point of view, products can be demonstrated from any angle to give a better understanding of what they buy and to increase the online shopping experience in general.

For this type of content there are several opportunities.

Visual Content Is Changing the Way Consumers Interact With Brands

• Authenticity.
• Engagement.
• Trustworthiness.

That’s what the current consumer wants. Visual material on all platforms and channels evolves to fulfill these objectives and to improve public perception and communication with companies.

The companies that match these criteria will not only survive but flourish on the post-COVID market.