Visual content can make or break your digital marketing campaign. It has the unique power to cut through the noise of social media and get to the heart of a consumer’s attention.
Nowadays, going viral is the objective of most digital marketing campaigns, and engaging imagery—namely pictures, videos, infographics, and other visually engaging designs—should help you achieve this.
The current digital landscape may be saturated with content already. However, the demand for it is nowhere near slowing down, and making your campaign go viral is not an unrealistic goal. Let’s find out more about the significance of photo-driven content in digital marketing campaigns and the important role it has to play in optimising yours for virality.
What Makes A Marketing Campaign Go Viral?
When conceptualising and creating a digital marketing campaign, it’s important to understand the various components that can contribute to it going viral. These are as follows:
- Shareability: The content must be easy to share for maximum virality and reach.
- Emotional resonance: Must stir up an emotion in the consumer.
- Creativity: Unique, authentic, and creative content that indicates originality is a must.
- Simplicity: Easy to digest for a vast pool of consumers.
All four of these factors have something in common: they all tie in perfectly with high-quality visual content. Studies across the board indicate that visual content, primarily photos and videos, is the most likely to be shared and resonate with audiences on an emotional level.
This content is also simple in the sense that it can reach a wider audience than text and it’s highly shareable for all of the above reasons and more. It’s these factors that make photo content such a compelling vehicle for driving viral digital marketing campaigns.
Creating Viral Marketing Campaigns With Photography: Strategies And Best Practices
Having a concrete idea of how to develop a viral-prone digital marketing campaign is just the first step in a long creative process of producing and sharing its content.
- Stay on topic with relevant imagery
One of the most important points to keep in mind when producing and selecting images for your campaign is that they are relevant to both your brand and its audience.
If the visuals aren’t relevant to the audience, they won’t take notice of them, much less feel compelled to share them. Avoid using images that appear generic or clichéd, as this is only likely to put consumers off and steer them in a different direction.
Instead, pay close attention to the audience demographic you are targeting and aim to combine their interests with the overarching aesthetic or mission of your campaign. If you can produce photos that are both relevant and original, you are off to a great start.
- Lean into visual storytelling
Visual storytelling is the art of expressing a particular story or narrative through visual content. It’s a form of conversion that has existed since the dawn of time, and humans have not stopped finding ways to integrate it into their culture. We just do it a little differently now.
You can lean into visual storytelling by relying less on text and complex explanations about your campaign and using the shapes, figures, colours, and flow of the images to convey your message. This is a more engaging way to reel in visual interest and increase the likelihood of people hitting the share button.
- Employ tried-and-tested design principles
Photography may be its own kettle of fish, but that doesn’t mean you can’t apply other visual design principles to it in the hopes of elevating its impact. In fact, we recommend it.
Design principles are used to guide all kinds of creative visual content, from online photography portfolios to Instagram grids. Some examples of popular design principles include the following:
- Balancing the visual weight of elements
- Arranging elements based on significance and relevance
- Aligning elements along a common center or angle
- Using contrast to make distinctions between shapes, colours, and textures
- Grouping related elements together
These are all long standing principles of visual design and composition that people have been using for decades to optimise and elevate the images and artworks they produce. By applying them to your photo content, you can increase their visual appeal and engagement.
- Don’t forget about resolution
In the midst of considering all the visual and design-related elements of your marketing campaign, it can sometimes be easy to forget their basic components, such as resolution.
High-resolution images are absolutely crucial for gaining traction with an audience and motivating people within it to share your content on their page. If the quality is bad, people simply won’t want to be associated with it, and that is not conducive to a viral campaign. Just remember to balance quality with load time. Your files should also be optimised for quick loading, or your audience will lose interest and move on.
- Measure the success of your campaigns
Every campaign, viral or not, can provide useful insights into what works and what doesn’t. Every time you release more content into the wild online world, you experiment with different concepts, content styles, and strategies, all of which can tell you something interesting (and hopefully new to you) about your audience.
By measuring the success of your campaigns as they rise and fall, you can compile a reservoir of relevant data that helps you prime all future projects for viral success.
Wrapping Up
Going viral is one of the best ways to get your campaign out there and ensure that your website, products, and services get the attention they deserve.
In this day and age, a photo-driven campaign is widely considered one of—if not the—most effective ways to attract viral activity online. With its shareability, emotional resonance, visual originality, and simplicity of consumption, photography is the kind of content you can use to really drive a viral digital marketing campaign home.
By maintaining brand relevance, embracing visual storytelling, applying proven design principles, and asking for audience feedback, you can help your campaign reach viral status and push your brand into a stratosphere of success.
