The content they say is King, this is true in today’s visual content-driven world. Now businesses look to attracting a larger audience like small children running to see their reflection in the water.
People just can’t resist eye-catching content because great images and videos can be EYE CATCHING! The following tips will help you improve your skills in creating eye-catching content.
- Essential Elements for Eye-catching Content
- 9 ways to Create Eye-Catching Content
- Tools to Create Eye-Catching Designs
- Benefits of Creating Eye-Catching Contents
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest provide an easy and fast way to share information without a lot of text or lengthy explanations. Visuals are entertaining and stimulating to the mind.
Most of all, people like sharing content that is unique and offers a solution to their questions. Here is a survey to confirm this.
According to Forbes, “91% of consumers now prefer interactive and visual content over traditional, text-based or static media.”
If you really want people to share your information, present it as a well-thought-out format that is unique to your brand and what you are offering.
Read Also: Using Skills In 3D Animation To Make Money As A Digital Graphics Artist
A well-designed website incorporates responsive design, SEO, great content and a unified aesthetic to show visitors what your brand is all about. Recently, with users increasingly relying on mobile devices to access all types of content online, the value of arresting imagery can’t be denied. Compelling copy is only part of the puzzle—visitors have to be enticed by interesting images before they read on.
Whether you are prepping a promotional video, photography, informative text, infographics, diagrams or some other form of content, it is of the utmost importance that you grab your intended spectator’s attention immediately. Many professional degrees and career paths focus entirely on understanding how to create this effect.
The above points make it clear that good content is essential if you want to hold the attention of your clients and crush your competitor. However, for your content to achieve the needed objective, it must contain the elements mentioned below.
Essential Elements for Eye-catching Content
Content must be Visible
While subdued, transparent, or minimalized text or graphics can look aesthetically pleasing, it is more fit for the art world than it is for promotional content. Keeping the information you want to deliver large enough for any spectator to see, even at a glance, helps to ensure that your message reaches your audience. Some authorities in the design world call this element the “readable text” rule.
One good rule to follow when planning this is to make the primary image or text takes up at least half of the overall image. For even more effective design, three-fourths can provide a good scale up for increased visibility.
Font choice is also important when considering your content’s visibility. Always go with a font that is simple, and legible, while still maintaining a stylistic flourish. Both Helvetica and Ariel fonts can provide a good option when considering your content’s visibility. Avoid any overly stylized fonts that force the audience to squint their eyes in order to read.
Have a Clear Message
Beyond simple visual visibility, you want the message you are trying to communicate to be crystal clear upon a quick glance. With the sheer amount of advertising and content, we are bombarded with day after day, only the most impactful and clear messages tend to stick.
Due to this, it is important to sit down and find the core of your message before beginning to design your content. This way the style, color choice, text usage, and aesthetics of your content can stem from that message. Doing this will save you hours of frustration, in the long run, so doing this is highly recommended.
For example, if you were creating content meant to communicate the hazards of smoking, you might want to consider what images portray that message the quickest. An image of an infected lung next to a smoker would certainly communicate the message immediately, but more subtle approaches can work just as well.
Most important to avoid is the temptation to base your message in a lengthy sentence. If you want the text to provide the primary visual and impact of your content, follow the same rule as you would when choosing images, and find a short and impactful combination that works with maximum effectiveness.
Using the example of smoking once again, you could use a simple slogan such as “SMOKING KILLS,” and bold capital letters.
Use Consistent and Complementary Colour Scheme
This element can be particularly important when designing web pages and photography intended to have an attention-grabbing effect. By keeping the color choices in your content both consistent and complementary to what you are presenting, you can achieve a larger impact that more quickly communicates your desired ideas.
For attention-grabbing content, complementary colors provide the safest and often most effective color scheme route. Complementary colors are those colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel. When placed next to each other they often create bold and drastic contrasts that naturally draw the eye. This high contrast allows the image to stand out against almost any background, exterior or interior.
Using a complementary color scheme can also give your content the advantage of color association. When your audience sees those colors in the near future, they will likely be drawn back to their memories of the intense contrast that they saw in your content. In this way using a complementary color scheme also helps you increase your content’s visibility.
These elements mentioned above are very important because they can make or break your content’s ability to quickly catch eyes and deliver its message. Also, there are many other elements that can be incorporated into your content to help you lock down that perfect design. Advertising and web design blogs that focus on design can be particularly helpful when researching different approaches.
Read Also: How To Make Money Online With Mobile Marketing
We will now discuss 9 tips that can help you create eye-catching content and some tools that can help you achieve this if your do not presently have a designer.
9 ways to Create Eye-Catching Content
1. Use Visual Aids to Display Information
Charts and graphs give readers a visual sense of the information you include in blog articles and videos. They are easy to read and understand and likely to be shared by other sources, which can lead to quality backlinks that will boost your SEO.
You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create a professional-looking chart—multiple user-friendly software packages are available for making graphs and charts, many of them free.
2. Be timely and relevant
What’s on people’s minds, right at this moment? That’s the question to ask yourself when sitting down to create your images and video.
Take a look for example, at what is trending on your Instagram feed. This will depend on your niche, what your target market is searching for, and what your audience is sharing.
3. Keep it consistent with each social media platform
One of the biggest failings seen in automatic scheduling to multiple channels is that the wrong size of an image or video can disappear off the screen so that one has to scroll down to find it.
Pay attention to the specific size requirements for each website, and adjust your content accordingly. There are plenty of free apps such as Canva, PicMonkey, and Over, which can help you accomplish this quickly and easily.
4. Make your message unique
Try to share information that no one else has yet thought of or explored that your community is still asking about.
Just make sure it’s highly relevant to your target viewers. Topics that are on everyone’s mind are wonderful – just as long as you give them your own new “twist.”
If you make a “True or False” post, for example, make sure you include both true and false examples. You don’t need to try to be too clever – people may turn away without even choosing to ‘like’ or comment on what you have shared.
Remember, it’s the contrast element that people like the most.
5. Share your posts and videos
This doesn’t mean just one posting on your Instagram account as you sit back and wait for your content to go viral.
Share it specifically with influential people in your niche who are inside your network pointing out how this could be beneficial to their audience base as well.
Pinterest is another great place to provide more leverage for your image and video on specific, targeted boards that are relevant to your niche.
Other social networks to cross-promote your content on are Twitter, SlideShare, Snapchat, Reddit, etc..
Keep an eye out for cues and opportunities to share your visuals again. And after a few weeks is a decent interval for another general share.
6. Take Your Own Photos
Although stock photos are still the most used variety of visual content, they ultimately don’t say anything specific about your brand or leave viewers with much of an impression. This is why you should take the initiative when it comes to the imagery displayed on your website.
You don’t need to hire a photographer to get excellent images—most smartphones are capable of taking professional-quality photos. Candid pictures of your workspace and customers will create an instant personal connection with viewers, humanizing your brand and helping your site stand out.
7. Include Memes
If you are familiar with social media, you’ve probably run across a meme—usually, a photo shared with a funny caption. Memes like “Success Kid” and “Evil Kermit” are instantly recognizable to viewers and carry a lot of cultural caches, making them ideally suited to social media marketing.
However, you should use them sparingly and only when a humorous tone fits the message you are trying to convey. The repetitive nature of memes also means they saturate the landscape fairly quickly, so be sure your memes are still relevant when you share them.
8. Optimize for mobile
Create your graphics and video for mobile users, and then promote them with a call-to-action that takes them to a sales page or website. Keep in mind that these can also be chosen as promoted posts for later, which will increase your followers and engagement far more than organic content will.
9. Include share buttons on your website
Make sure you include prominent sharing buttons with your blog posts that can easily be shared and include simple headlines and hashtags. It’s important to ensure the plugins that you use for these are up-to-date if you are using WordPress, and include your name and Twitter handle.
But what if you have some eye-catching designs in mind but you do not presently have a designer to help you out? Below are some tools you can easily make use of.
Tools to Create Eye-Catching Designs
Canva
A firm favorite for a few years now, Canva lets users create social images, blog covers, banner ads, and a whole host of other visuals completely free of charge. There are options to pay for added features and assets.
And in 2015, the company launched Canva for Work as an affordable platform for managing consistent, professional-looking branded documents.
Pexels
There’s little as off-putting as bad stock photography. Overused images of people in headsets staring at computer screens or suited men around a boardroom table are incredibly inauthentic.
But we need stock photos of some kind from time to time. And we don’t always have the budget to spend big bucks on photos to accompany every blog post, particularly if we’re posting several times a day.
Read Also: How to Build Your Customer List and Get Your Business Off the Ground
This is where Pexels comes in. Here, you can find genuinely great looking stock photos to use completely freely (without attribution). No catches.
Piktochart
Infographics and reports are made a whole lot easier with Piktochart. It’s essentially a drag and drop infographic creator. If you have an eye for design, you can start with a blank canvas. On the other hand, if (like me) you have a somewhat lacking creative eye, you can use a template.
Flaticons
Essentially the Pexels of icons, Flaticons is home to 2,500 free icons and has the functionality to allow users to create their own as well.
These are incredibly handy for infographics, presentations, and reports.
The process of creating eye-catching content is an on-going learning process, especially as social networks evolve and audience preferences change. You can start by creating and improving your graphics as you go along, and pay attention to which images or videos get the most response.
Also, Pay attention to user feedback and don’t be afraid to make adjustments, including the frequency of making posts.
Benefits of Creating Eye-Catching Contents
It gives you a Competitive Advantage
Think about it, which company would you prefer to use, the one who puts out plain adverts you just scroll past or the one who puts out eye-catching and engaging content? I already know what the answer is – the one who puts out eye-catching and engaging content.
It improves how you show up in Google search
When your customers use Google to look for information about whatever it is they need or want to know, the top hits in their search results will include the companies that frequently post relevant and engaging content about that subject. And if they happen to be looking for something related to your business, you 100% want to be among those results.
Frequently creating and posting excellent content puts your page in front of the right audience at the moment when the interest they’re searching for aligns with the services you provide. You can’t ask for a better opportunity than to be discovered by the perfect customer at the very instant they’re looking for what you offer.
It increases Online Traffic
We all know by now, one of the most important things when operating online is getting people to view your website. The more views your website gets, the more leads you generate, which means the more revenue your company could generate.
Good Content promotes Good SEO
When writing or creating digital content the last thing you want to do is see it as a chore. If this content is unique and eye-catching it makes it more enjoyable to create. It also promotes good SEO, this will help you reach the first result on a google search, again increasing your traffic/outreach.
Expands your Business without Huge Advertisement
If you want to expand your business without having to create and then pay for boosted advertisement then unique and eye-catching digital content will do this organically. This means you won’t need to pay for any sort of boost, your content will gain enough views without the need for this. Therefore unique and eye-catching digital content will save your business money on advertising in the long run.
