12 Visual Marketing Trends to Follow This Year

Visual marketing dominates today’s digital marketing space and impacts results. Visual content, including videos, photos, live streams, stills, and gifs, is more relevant than ever and significantly impacts all marketing and digital life areas.

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text, and it takes twice as long to process and recognize words.” Moreover, visuals are memorable and effective, as they help people process, understand and retain more information more quickly. Retention rates reach 65% when the same information is accompanied by a visual. A recent survey showed that over 60% of Internet users today prefer to consume content in visual form.

Visual content can therefore be a potent marketing tool, reinforcing message brand association and awareness and encouraging engagement and shares. For marketers, this makes visual marketing a high priority. That’s why it’s so important that your visual marketing strategy is backed up by visual elements such as videos, images, animated graphics, infographics, and other visual and interactive content forms.

A brand can only do with visual content in today’s increasingly digital world. The more visual elements you use, the more likely your message will reach your customers and be understood.

Visual content changes how consumers interact with brands, enabling more intimate and authentic connections between companies and their audiences in an ever-changing digital world. A consistent visual branding strategy can enable companies to stand out from the competition and drive growth like Never Before. The key to visual marketing success is understanding which emerging trends to watch out for.

So here are 12 of the top visual marketing trends to follow in your marketing strategy in 2023.

What is Visual Marketing?

The use of visual content such as graphics, images, videos, or visual material to market a product or service in marketing is called visual marketing. Visual marketing is part of content marketing, which is part of the marketing organization. Visual marketers can include content creators, brand strategists, corporate communications teams, graphic designers, content strategists, or anyone else who uses, creates, or distributes visual marketing. Visual marketing is essential to brand success simply because we are visual creatures.

An study showed that humans can correctly identify entire images after looking at them for less than 13 milliseconds. Visuals also help us make faster purchasing decisions. 

Below are some of the hottest trends in visual marketing.

12 Top Visual Marketing Trends

1. Video content

The video has become a marketer’s best friend in recent years, as its popularity and effectiveness have shaped the digital landscape. 89% of people say a brand’s video convinced them to buy a product or service. And 91% of people want more videos from brands. As the most popular site for video content, YouTube has become the third most visited website in the world and the second most popular search engine. Creating videos to present on YouTube is a consideration when planning your visual marketing strategy.

2. Short videos

As attention spans decrease, your audience seeks short messages in short-format videos. Users will leave a video if it doesn’t interest them within a few seconds. For marketers and brand owners alike, the prevalence of short-form video content is an increasingly crucial visual marketing trend to pay attention to. The growing popularity of short-form video content – from FB and IG Stories to Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram Reels is changing the game and making video marketing more accessible than ever.

There’s no general agreement on the length of short videos, but it’s generally between 1 and 3 minutes. Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have different length limits: Instagram Stories and Reels have a maximum length of 15 seconds, stream videos are 60 seconds and IGTV videos are 60 minutes. Twitter’s video length max is 140 seconds but they recommend videos be 15 seconds or less.

Consider short videos an opportunity to condense your message and captivate your audience with short phrases. For short, dynamic videos, try out techniques such as close-ups, animated graphics, and colorful charts/infographics. Normal-length videos are best suited to educational or topical content.

Optimize your videos for mobile.

Since mobile is the first screen and dominates the digital world, switching to mobile-optimized video content will remain a top priority for marketers and brands. when creating video content for your audience, keep in mind to resize it vertically rather than horizontally. Social networks and features such as Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status, Medium Series, Messenger Day, Facebook Stories, and Skype Highlights embrace vertical visual content and push their users to create and engage with it more.

3-Le Streaming in Direct

Live video is the next trend in the visual content sector. Live videos are extremely popular with consumers and are known to have a higher viewing time and generate more engagement. Live streaming is a powerful medium because it allows your audience to interact. Consumers want more live videos from the brands they follow.

82% of users would rather see a brand’s live video than a traditional social media post. Whether it’s product announcements, sports events, awards ceremonies, business conferences, or tradeshows, more and more people are watching live streams today.

Major social media platforms have it right, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn, now offer brands and businesses live streaming features. You can engage your audience in real time and use video content to launch powerful two-way conversations by hosting an IG Live, Facebook Live, Twitter Live Q&A session, or even a guest interview. Plus, it’s a great way to attract viewers to your premium content.

4-Infographics

Infographics are an effective form of visual marketing for brands as they help you share data more compellingly, allowing your audience to understand in a more prosperous, more engaging way. To create an infographic, consider what information it could summarize or present dynamically and innovatively. Although getting the information into an infographic may seem tricky, using the right tools will ensure it’s easier than you think.

learn More:13 Best Online Graphic Design Tools for All Skill Levels

5. Gamified Visual Content

Gamification is infusing graphics, text, and game-like mechanisms into entities or activities to encourage user interaction. Especially present on the visual platform Instagram, this new trend in visual content marketing can take many forms. It can involve clicking a button, dragging an icon across the screen, moving to the next page, or taking a fun online quiz. Gamification of visual content is an excellent way to add video elements that can improve your engagement indicators.

The more interactive your content, the easier it is to keep site visitors on the page for an extended period. Gamification encourages your viewers to stay attentive to your content and gives them a sense of purpose as if they were working towards a desirable outcome. Brands can use this trend to qualify leads in a humorous way to encourage users to like, comment and share this content with their friends, thus extending the organic reach of their visual content on social media.

6-Animation

Cartoons, illustrations, and other animated content formats help to relax viewers and prepare them for your content. While the content may have a serious tone, the irresistible way it’s presented creates a relaxed mood in viewers’ minds. In brief, viewers today appreciate visual content presented in animated form. The cost of creating an animated video position is considerable, requiring hiring a qualified animator or freelancer. Still, it will pay for itself in audience loyalty and expansion gains.

7. Animated GIF

GIFs and memes are an essential part of any social media marketing strategy. A GIF is an image file that allows you to present animated images, giving the impression that the image moves. GIFs offer a new way of capturing your viewers’ attention and can have a significant emotional impact. Using funny content in eye-catching GIFs helps to get shared wildly and boost your users’ engagement.

8. Ephemeral Visual Content

Ephemeral visual content, known under the stories format on social media platforms, is a video or photo that lasts only 24 hours, and after that, it disappears permanently from your page. Stories come with mobile engagement in mind and can effectively provide information, quick tips, and behind-the-scenes insights into professional life and help inform users’ purchasing decisions.

The fast-paced nature of the Stories format means you need to showcase your brand in seconds and capture attention to make the most significant impression on users. Instagram exploits the feature very well when creating authentic content and publishing it quickly, but other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Telegram also use this new visual marketing feature.

9- Visual Organic Search

Visual discovery is the next trend. Pinterest has become a key player in organic search and discovery. Pinterest is one of the most compelling content marketing platforms, offering brands and marketers a visual search and discovery engine to reach new audiences. Pinterest generates 3.8 times more sales than other platforms, and 87% of pinners have purchased a product through Pinterest.

Pinterest users can instantly view photos, particularly similar ones to those they’re already interested in, and can also click on an item, to find out online where they can purchase that item. Pinterest’s “lens” function uses image recognition to find objects like the one featured in a photo taken by the user.

The key to standing out on Pinterest is using beautiful visuals and keyword research based on popular search terms to inspire and engage pinners for your brand.

10. Shoppable Visual Content

As social media users increasingly turn to social media to discover and research purchases, shoppable visual content has become increasingly important on social media. Shoppable content helps increase customer conversion rates by making it quicker to go from discovery to purchase without adding an item to a shopping cart or through an entire checkout process. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube are all currently using this feature.

 Instagram’s features for “shoppable” posts (purchase stickers on Instagram Stories and product tags in News Feed posts) allow users to click directly on a video and purchase the products advertised or featured in the ad. As a result, conversion rates for shoppable video ads begin to surpass those of traditional ads.

11. Augmented and Virtual Reality

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are interactive technologies that have expanded how various forms of content appeal to and stimulate our senses, offering exciting opportunities for brands and businesses. Virtual reality involves using a set of devices to create an entirely new visual and auditory environment, which is completely realistic and reacts to user input, such as movement.

Conversely, augmented reality involves modifying the user’s natural environment by adding realistic but virtual elements. These immersive technologies enable companies to surprise and delight customers innovatively through visual content marketing. For example, clothing and accessory brands using augmented reality allow customers to virtually try on items to ensure their fit and appearance, even before setting foot in a physical store.

Augmented reality applications are generally used with a mobile device. The device’s camera maps the environment, allowing the user to drag and drop new items at will.

12. 3D Design

Brands increasingly use 3D designers to create high-quality images and enhance imaginative visual storytelling. With CGI, designers, creatives, and marketers can create surreal, fantastical spaces and backgrounds for their advertising campaigns that would otherwise prove too costly or simply impossible and insert digitally captured images into them.

Conclusion

Visual marketing plays an essential role in all types of marketing, from search engine optimization (SEO) to social media. Trends such as short videos on social media, live streams, and animated content are just some ways you can use visual elements in your visual marketing strategy. To succeed in visual marketing today, employing a mix of different types and exploring more creative horizons is a good strategy for reaching more of your customers.