People are like magpies. They see a nice, shiny thing and they want it. When it comes to inbound lead generation, visual content marketing presents your offering in the shiniest terms possible.
When it comes to the imagery and videos you use on social media, you’ll want to make sure that your creations have a consistent ‘voice’. That doesn’t mean you can’t be playful - just avoid creating or sharing too many visuals that are unrelated to what you’re trying to sell.
For example, you wouldn’t follow a clothing company because you wanted to see funny memes or cat videos all day. You’d be more likely to want to learn about things such as new products or promotional sales (actually, scrap that, could everyone share more memes please?)
Try to refresh your imagery as often as possible though. There’s nothing worse than seeing the same advert over and over again, so it’s best to have a library of assets to hand, with photos, illustrations and infographics that you can share. These all help your visual content build a bigger picture of your product or service.
However, the best way to keep people interested is often with video:
“4x as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.” (source)
People are busier than ever. They want video content that's simple, to the point and contains some kind of takeaway or insight. Basically, try and get people interested enough to visit your website and hopefully get in touch, or better yet make a purchase.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures.
This leads us onto arguably the most important piece of visual content in the inbound lead generation process; your website or landing page. By the time your potential customer has reached this point, they’ll hopefully already be at least a little bit familiar with your brand. Your site should be easy to navigate and the icons and imagery of your site should be as slick and natural feeling as possible.
Read more: Inbound lead generation
Building a strategy focused on testing your visual content will get you the best results. With something like Hubspot you can get granular by using A/B testing. Try out as many different visual assets as possible. Play with the UI of your site. Try different typefaces, iconography, layouts and colours, then measure and adjust accordingly. You’d be surprised how much doing something simple like changing the colour of a button or changing the length of a video can affect your overall inbound lead generation.
It’s up to you to decide on what type of imagery to use, but remember that everything you put out is helping to build a bigger picture of what it is that you do and what your brand stands for.