One of the best ways to improve the audience appeal of online content is to include visual elements that support the purpose of the message being conveyed. There are many statistics testifying to the power of visual enhancements in attracting and holding the attention of readers in ways that words alone do not achieve.
Increasingly, enhancements to text-based content include videos, often with transcription notes provided on the page below. In another well-established trend, elaborate full-color infographics have become a mainstay of content created by major digital marketing agencies and online publishers. With all this emphasis on visual media in digital marketing, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you lack the skills, the time, or the resources to produce similar high quality visual elements to accompany your written content. But there’s no need to be discouraged.
When done right, simple visual elements can deliver added impact to the material so that the end user, your intended audience, finds and engages with your message in the ways you want them to. It means taking the time to set up these visuals properly when you add them to your content, but here again the process is simple enough to master. In the end, the combined content will produce a visually pleasing message that supports your content strategy while attracting and engaging your followers, clients, and prospects.
Make Blog Branding Stand Out With a Featured Image
The most common digital content platform continues to be some variation of the blog post, and most blogs are published using one of the many themes and designs based on the WordPress content management system (CMS). WordPress includes an ideal tool for making consistent and efficient use of the branding power of a specially selected image for your particular message and intended audience.
This tool is the Featured Image option, found at the bottom of the right hand side settings on the WordPress blog composition page, below Categories and Tags. Select “Set featured image” to open the image selection process using either your WordPress media library or uploading something new from any other image source. Be sure to use relevant keywords in the title and alternate description fields for the featured image, as for all images.
Choosing a featured image for every blog content page should be a top priority for several reasons. One is that using a consistent image for every post can help establish the ‘face’ of your brand. Another is that if you prefer to use a different image for every post, consistent style and typography details on the featured image can be used to establish that essential brand identity. Yet another reason is that the featured image becomes the default thumbnail illustration that appears wherever the post is shared on social media or other platforms.
Use Consistent Image Formats From Blogs to Social Media
Recognizable branded imaging becomes all the more critical as your branding and media marketing process reaches into the various social media platforms. As different as posts are from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest and elsewhere, you still want the recognizable face of your brand to stand out. This is where a consistent image or style of image presentation becomes so important.
Having this consistent approach will not only save time in the selection and composition of images for every post, but it will increase the brand awareness and marketing influence of each new piece of content. Whether you’re using social media to promote a blog post or a special offer, or creating social content specifically for engagement and sharing, you want your audience to be able to easily recognize the message as coming from you.
Relevance Is the Key Measure of Image Value
Choosing the specific details of image design and presentation can be time-consuming initially. But once those choices have been given strategic consideration and are well-established, the use of them in each new piece of content creation becomes quick and easy to execute.
Consistency, either in the images themselves or the style in which they are presented, will make a big difference in the overall impact of a content marketing program. The images don’t have to be fancy or complicated, but they do have to be relevant to the identity of your brand and message.
Image relevance, consistency, and style of presentation are part of the evaluation that a site audit will include. Whether you outsource content development or produce it in-house, an objective assessment from a top-rated SEO expert is the best place to start. Give Paul a quick call or email and bring your content picture clearly into focus.
