Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos and Social Media to Market Your Business

Do you use visuals to market your business?

Are you wondering how you can tell a story with visuals?

To learn how your business can benefit from visual storytelling, I interview Ekaterina Walter for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Ekaterina Walter, chief marketing officer at Branderati and author of Think Like Zuck. Her newest book is called The Power of Visual Storytelling.

Ekaterina shares why storytelling is important for your business.

You'll discover how to get started, the type of visuals that work and brands that do it well.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Visual Storytelling
How did you fall into visual storytelling?

Ekaterina explains how her job at Intel for the last 5 years was building social business, and it was during her final 3 years there that she started to notice the perfect shift to visual storytelling. So for her, visual storytelling was a natural progression.

Several years ago, she started to look at the data and usage of visuals versus the usage of just text and links. This led to her first blog post on Fast Company, called The Rise of Visual Social Media.

You'll hear why this particular article led Ekaterina to write more on this subject.

Ekaterina believes that the reason why visuals are so well-received is that we are moving into a world that is inundated with information. There are filters that allow us to stand out from the noise. One of them, in Ekaterina's view, is visual marketing and visual storytelling.

Listen to the show to find out what term Ekaterina uses for the world we are moving into.

What is visual storytelling and why should marketers consider it for their business?

The way that visual storytelling is defined in Ekaterina's new book, The Power of Visual Storytelling, is the use of images, video, infographics and potentially presentations and other visuals in social media.

The use of visuals on social media platforms can help you craft a graphic story around your brand's key values and offerings. It helps show who you are as a brand and makes consumers want to connect with you.

With the rise of millennials (digital natives and the younger generation), it's essential that they not only know what you offer or how useful a product is, but also how they can be part of the movement and fit within that tribe. It's what visual storytelling allows you to do. It's how you reach that emotional connection with your customers.

Recently, Jason Miller of LinkedIn created a widely shared infographic titled, A Well-Balanced Blog.

The reason why this type of content works is that it's simple thinking. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. About 93% of all communication is nonverbal.

You'll hear an example of how you can gather a story from an image, rather than a word on its own. The emotional connection is critical.

Studies show that blog posts with visuals drive up to 180% more engagement than those without. This means that a visual image can allow people to digest your content, then decide if they want to continue to read the article.

The amount of information that is produced every 48 hours is the same amount that was produced from the beginning of time up until 2003. Every year, our attention span becomes shorter. Now it's about 3-8 seconds. Therefore you need to grab people's attention immediately.

Sephora is a great example of a brand that uses images very well.