People love visual content. It is engaging and easily digestible. Why are there so many pictures of cats on the Internet? One, a LOT of people like cats. Two, it takes one second to process that cute image. As a manufacturer, visuals are one of the easiest and most engaging forms of content you can produce. And it doesn’t matter if your product isn’t the most glamorous or interesting. Its application is. But I digress. Let’s talk about 4 of the biggest benefits of visual content production for manufacturing companies. We’ll also throw in a few engaging visual content ideas for good measure.
Benefits
1. Establish a Unique Brand Personality and Identity
Your photos, videos, images and infographics all say something about your company. That album of smiling employees on the job says you value people. That video focusing on your R&D says you value innovation. That infographic tracing the developments in your industry says you are knowledgeable, an industry expert. That picture of the racecar your widget goes in says you’re cool.
Create and share visual content that illustrates your company’s unique personality and characteristics. Each piece contributes to your audience’s impression of your brand.
2. Engage Your Audience
Visual content is engaging. It communicates ideas, emotions or stories without being difficult to digest. Images tell a story in a few seconds (Isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?). Video engages multiple senses and easily conveys more complex ideas. Infographics communicate information in a kind of story format; it’s easy to see an introduction, relevant body of information or statistics and the conclusion you should draw from it.
One of the most important things to remember with engagement: Your customers and end consumers are people. And your company is made up of people. It’s easy to forget that from the other side of a computer screen. Many marketers think not in terms of B2B or B2C, but P2P - person to person marketing. This is a simple thought, but keeping it in mind for all of your marketing activities ensures you don’t come across as some distant, ambiguous, unknown corporation.
3. Humanize Your Company
People like to be reminded that your organization, be it a small company or a large corporation, is made up of people like them. People who put a hard day’s work, do a good job, want to help others…and who have interests/activities outside of work. Sharing visual content makes you more likeable and instills a certain degree of trust in your company. Post pictures of your employees working on your products (hopefully smiling), that office birthday party or photos from the tradeshow you attended.
With visuals, or any type of content, you get what you give. For your visual content to engage, it needs to resonate with your audience. Think about your current and ideal potential customers (your buyer personas). What are their problems? What do they do for fun? What is their geographic location? Demographic information? Are they a distributor or end consumer?
If you make cake icing, you might have a Pinterest board full of pictures of interesting ways to decorate using your icing. This would appeal to an end consumer. For your distributors, you might have pictures of your different products or your manufacturing process in action.
Engagement is about creating two-way communication. It’s about response. People may like or share your content. Great! Invite comments and occasional picture/video responses. Going back to the icing example, ask your customers to post their own pictures of the creative decorations they come up with and which product they used to achieve them. This creates a kind of visual content dialogue. If you feel the specific part you manufacture isn’t so interesting, think about its application or end use. A single widget isn’t so interesting, but a rocket ship or a racecar is.
4. Boost Your Search Engine Optimization
Social media hosts your visual content, giving you tons of likes, shares, comments, subscribers and followers. This is a huge boost for your SEO as Google increasingly factors in social media metrics to gauge the relevancy of your content. Social media engagement looks good to Google – it means your content is something that people might find helpful in search results.
On to Posting
Now that you know how visual content can benefit your company, start sharing your own. One of the best things about visual content is that it can be posted and disseminated very quickly via social media. Yes, that video or infographic might take more time to develop. But that picture of an employee’s birthday cake or video of your factory floor? It takes a few seconds to capture and upload with your smartphone. And there are a plethora of channels where you can post visual content. You might post yours on any of these:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Tumblr
Whatever channels your audience frequents, go there and share your visual content.
About Digital Impact Agency
Digital Impact Agency is a creative firm specializing in interactive media and inbound marketing strategies for manufacturing and technology companies, professional service firms (architectural, engineering, construction, legal and consulting), nonprofits and enterprise companies. We are a team of innovative entrepreneurs focused on creating the most strategic and effective communication channels for our clients.
