Visual Storytelling Tips and Strategies to Build Brand Awareness

When it comes to selling a brand, the visuals are just as important as the copy used. By incorporating the right images or videos, companies can convey the message that they want people to take away from their marketing campaign.

That’s what visual storytelling is. It’s the art of telling people your brand’s story and purpose through visual elements.

Today, we’re sharing with you visual storytelling tips and strategies to help you build better brand awareness.

1. Show How Your Product Can Help the Customer

Business owners tend to invest in visuals that show off their products, especially those that are just starting. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, they often forget to focus on what really matters — telling people how their product can help their customers.

This is the concept behind brand promises. The idea is to showcase the benefits of a product or service. It gives potential customers a reason to be more invested in your company.

So how do you show your product’s benefits?

One way would be showing your products in action. If you’re in the athletic wear industry, then shoot people wearing them while working out. Or if you’re in the healthy food business, then give your audience a glimpse of what they can achieve if they use your product.

Take this example from Nike’s Instagram page. The company doesn’t say anything about its shoes in the post. But the visuals are enough to associate the brand with hip streetwear.

To do all this, you’ll have to know your brand very well. It should be clear to everyone in the company what it is you’re trying to deliver to consumers.

2. Define Your Target Audience

You’ll never be able to come up with a solid branding strategy if you don’t know who your audience is. Not only will knowing your audience help you figure out what visuals you need to present, but it also lets you understand how to position your product.

After you define your audience, you’ll know how to create Instagram hashtags that represent your visuals so that users can connect on a deeper level. At the very least, you’ll get Instagram likes for your efforts.

Coke knows its audience. And using the hashtag #shareacoke, people submitted photos that best represent the brand such as this one. And most entries were on-point when it came to the brand’s message.

Matching your visuals with your target audience also lets your brand become more relatable, especially if you’re positioning yourself as a lifestyle brand. They could even end up becoming brand advocates if you use the right photos and videos.

Aside from market research, there are other ways to determine your target audience. You can look into your competitors to see which type of buyers they tend to attract. There are also tools like Google Analytics that can give you an insight into which customer segments are driving traffic to your site.

3. Look for Design Trends

You’ll need to update the look of your visual assets to keep up with the changing times. As users get exposed to promotional materials, their tastes will change over time. You’ll want your ads to evolve alongside your audience.

To see the latest brand design trends, you need to look no further than social media. There you’ll find a lot of images and videos that feature visual styles that reflect what users want to see these days.

You can also try looking at graphic design platforms like Behance where designers showcase their creations. We suggest curating samples of artworks that speak to you. Find those that appeal to your brand and store them in one place. Figure out how these can convey a story visually.

Looking at recent ads released by prominent advertisers could also clue you in on what people like. They could inspire you to tweak your current visual assets or start a campaign from scratch.

4. Get Inspiration From Movies

Movies are a great source of inspiration. After all, the director and the video editor have to go to work hand-in-hand to effectively tell a story visually. And a lot of times, the groundwork they’ve laid can be applied to visual storytelling for branding and marketing. You might not be working with a live video editor, but you can take advantage of an advanced online video editor tool to apply the same storytelling effects.

So take cues from your favorite movies and apply them to your advertising.

Pay close attention to aspects like color grading, sound design, cinematography, and other design elements. Ads with a cinematic look can set the tone for your brand. And if you set the right tone, you’ll be more captivating to your target audience.

And it doesn’t have to be movies. If you’re into music, you’ll find plenty of inspiration from music videos too. Some could even argue that music videos are ads too — only they’re promoting an artist’s work. So they use the same formula to a certain extent.

You’ll find that watching commercials for other brands can work here as well.

5. Make Your Brand Assets More Cohesive

Visual storytelling doesn’t start and stop with the videos and images you put out. Your brand assets also play a role in telling your product’s story.

The colors you use in your brand logo, for example, will bring out certain emotions. A red product label will not only get your product to stand out on shelves but also invoke feelings of love and strength.

But whichever colors you end up using for your branding, you’ll want to make sure that you use your brand logo across all your digital assets and that your logo presentation remains cohesive across the board.

If you have a digital asset management system in place, you’ll want to go over all of your stored files just to make sure that none of them feel out of place. Ideally, you’ll want to have consistent branding — this includes the use of colors, logos, and font.

The FedEx website and its color scheme are in line with its logo and other visual assets. Once users have it stuck in their heads, it’s hard to associate these colors with anything else.

You want your product packaging, website, and promotional materials to use the same color scheme. That way, your customers will have an easier time remembering your brand and be more aware of your offerings.

6. Tell a Story

Corporate storytelling is a technique used by businesses to deliver their message.

Stories are important because they help establish connections when there are none. It makes your brand more relatable to the average consumer.

By showing people everyday scenarios that they can relate to, you’re able to capture their attention and make them understand your brand better.

There are two ways that you can approach this. You can take it literally. You can take photos of customers who had their lives changed by using your product. This is commonly used in the health and wellness niche but other categories have also experimented with this format.

Or you can tell a more subtle story where the visuals imply a better life for customers that use your product. Some banks will post images of happy people getting their dream car or house. The story being told here is that you too can be happy like them if you get a loan.
 

7. Pay Attention to Your Audio

Visual storytelling, when done through video, will require you to pay close attention to audio quality.

It doesn’t matter how gorgeous your video is if the audio is terrible. So you should take your time and make sure that you’re able to capture great audio while shooting. Or if you’re doing post-production work and laying down voice-overs, make it a point to hire an outstanding promotional voice-over actor. Your customers want to do business with professionals. And having great audio and video is one way to establish that.

And don’t forget about other audio elements like sound effects. Every detail matters when it comes to audio.

8. Play With Contrasting Visuals

When brainstorming visuals for your brand, you can try adding contrasting elements to add some intrigue and draw attention. Imagine someone looking calm while everything around that person falls apart. That imagery stands out — and you can use that to showcase your product.

That image we just described could be used to tell people how good your product is. You can use it for promoting a headphone you’re releasing. Or it could be for a food product that’s so good, you’d be happy to ignore everything else around you.

And you can achieve the same effect through other elements like colors, text, font, and light. For example, here’s Chanel using desaturated product photos stacked on top of highly saturated backgrounds.

Playing with contrasting visuals can get your visuals to pop — thus making each one more memorable than the last. People tend to remember great visuals. So there’s no reason not to try introducing contrast to your work.

Conclusion

As you can see, brands can’t simply operate on the pretense that customers will automatically come for their products.

For this to happen, brands have to make peoplecare first to give them a reason to learn more about their offer.

By following the visual storytelling tips above, you can create a story about your items that will resonate with your target audience. This brings them closer to your products and closer to turning them into customers.