Visual Campaign - Crafting Effective Visual Communication Strategies

A visual campaign is a marketing campaign that relies on the visual representation of your brand story or marketing strategy. Visual campaigns can help catch your audience’s attention in a crowded marketing channel, such as a social media feed with many different elements competing for users’ attention. Effective and well-designed visual campaigns can help you convey information quickly and make your brand story more engaging.

Learn about the components of visual marketing and discover some strategies you can use to design more visually appealing campaigns.

What is a visual campaign?

A visual campaign is a marketing strategy that relies on visuals to help convey meaning and information to your audience. You can use a variety of visuals, such as images, videos, and infographics, across marketing channels like email and social media to capture attention and quickly communicate key messages from your advertising.

Why are visual marketing campaigns important?

Visual marketing campaigns are important because your audience relates to images in a different way than they relate to text. Human brains can extract meaning from pictures they see, which they can complete much faster than reading text describing the same scene. A marketing visual allows you to use that power to give your audience impressions of your brand, which they can connect through your logo, color scheme, or other branded materials that make your campaigns recognizable.

Visuals can also have an emotional impact. You may be able to recall old advertisements you’ve seen for nonprofits raising money to house abandoned animals or feed hungry children. That’s because visual marketing can emotionally impact an audience and leave a lasting impression that’s hard to achieve with text alone.

Because humans can remember images better than text, your audience will be more likely to remember your marketing message after they’ve stopped looking at your ad or post.

Types of visual campaigns

You can use visual imagery to enhance marketing campaigns like affiliate marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing:

• Affiliate marketing focuses on selling products and services on behalf of other people.

• Content marketing refers to a strategy that uses helpful content, such as blog posts or free reports, to help brands extend their reach.

• The strategy for email and social media marketing refers to how you will reach customers through email or social media accounts.

In all of these campaigns, you can use images to convey information in a way that people are more likely to see, process, and retain.

Types of visual content

Beyond static images, you can use certain types of visual content to bring your campaign to life. Consider implementing:

• Videos

• Infographics

• Memes

• Presentations

• Screenshots

• Graphs or charts

• Mind maps

• Checklists

Key components of a visual communication strategy

A successful visual campaign has several key components. Explore common design principles used in successful campaigns and consider the marketing components that can drive results, like a goal, a call-to-action, and your logo or branding.

Design principles

Compelling and engaging design requires typography, color theory, image selection, composition, alignment, and balance.

• Typography: The font or typefaces you choose

• Color theory: The colors you select and how they tell a story together

• Image selection: The actual images you include in your marketing campaign

• Composition: The way you arrange the elements on the page 

• Alignment: The way that images and text line up with one another

• Balance: The concept that no single design element overpowers any other

You’ll also need to understand the components of an effective marketing strategy to ensure your visual campaign helps you meet your goals. The elements of a marketing strategy include:

• Target audience: You need to know who you want to reach with your message.

• Goal: What is the campaign's purpose, or what do you want the target audience to do?

• Call to action: You'll need to encourage your audience to take action, whether it’s to sign up for your email list, visit your website, or make a purchase.

• Logo: A marketing campaign will need a logo or a similar branded material so your audience can easily associate you with the campaign. 

• Visual assets: Your campaigns should incorporate images, videos, or infographics that help clearly communicate your message.

Best practices for creating visual campaigns

To start creating effective visual marketing campaigns that support your business goals, explore these best practices for developing a strong visual strategy.

• Understand your target audience. If you understand your target audience, you can design more effectively. For example, certain visual aspects and designs might make different demographics feel differently. A nostalgic reference for an audience over 50 will not evoke the same emotional response as a reference for an audience under 20.

• Maintain brand consistency. Take the time to understand your brand and messaging, then ensure your visual campaign aligns accordingly. If your company has a fun, irreverent, and youthful tone, you'll be better served with playful graphics and fun colors than a serious chart. Likewise, it’s good practice to select a few key brand colors and fonts and stick with them. Visual consistency can help make your graphics more professional-looking and help people associate those fonts and colors with your brand.

• Use a variety of visual content. You can make your content strategy even more engaging by offering different types of visuals, which can help keep your content fresh and help you tell more complex stories about your brand and your products. 

• Use A/B testing. You can use methods like A/B testing to assess the effectiveness of your visual communication. In this method, you take two versions of an ad, serve them to your audience, and measure which visuals have better engagement or drive more traffic to your website. You can also use this with other types of marketing, such as email marketing, and you can use it to measure different marketing metrics, including click-through rate, conversions, or interactions.

Who uses visual campaigns?

If you’d like to explore a career where you can create visual campaigns, consider these three potential careers: marketing specialist, graphic designer, and social media manager. Explore these careers, including their average salary and job outlook in the US. 

Marketing specialist

Average salary in the US (Glassdoor): $60,596 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2023 to 2033): 8 percent [2]

As a marketing specialist, you will help develop marketing campaigns, including your brand message, marketing channels, target audience, and other aspects of a marketing strategy. In this role, you will conduct research to better understand your brand and your customers’ pain points so you can create a well-rounded strategy to present your company as the solution.

Graphic designer

Average salary in the US (Glassdoor): $57,357 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2023 to 2033): 2 percent [4]

As a graphic designer, you’ll create visuals that effectively communicate the message your marketing team or clients want to convey. You will use visual design principles to create illustrations, logos, and layouts. In this role, you may specialize in a particular kind of graphic design, such as product packaging or social media visuals, or in an industry that relies on graphic design, such as marketing, landscaping, industrial design, or interior design.

Social media manager

Average salary in the US (Glassdoor): $59,763 [5]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2023 to 2033): 8 percent [2]

As a social media manager, you will oversee your company or clients' social profiles and accounts. You will create a tailored social media strategy for each channel your company uses and create, schedule, and monitor social media posts. In this role, you may also spend time measuring the performance of your campaign using social media metrics.

Learn more about visual marketing with Coursera

A visual campaign can help you quickly connect with your audience in a way they’re more likely to remember. If you want to learn more about using compelling visuals that get noticed, consider a course on Coursera to help you begin. Enroll in the Google Digital Marketing & E-Commerce Professional Certificate to learn to attract and engage customers through digital marketing channels like search and email, and measure marketing performance through analytics and present insights.