Resistance is futile. Visual storytelling is fast moving to the core of marketing communications, as PR pros migrate many of their messages to the visual medium from the written word.
During PR News’ Visual Storytelling Workshop Tuesday morning, Becca Colbaugh, senior director of digital content at Saxum, shared some tips and tricks on how communicators can think about visual storytelling more strategically.
“PR has a big challenge [with visual storytelling] but it’s not something we can avoid,” Colbaugh said. “You have to stay on track” and give your audiences what they want, namely pictures that can tell your brand story, she added.
Colbaugh said there are several key ingredients to baking visual storytelling into your overall PR and marketing efforts:
> Valuable: Before you distribute any visual content, what are the brand goals?
> Snackable: Keep the content relatively short and digestable.
> Educational: Distill the message into something that’s relevant to the existing audience and prospects.
> Beautiful: Is there a “cool” factor for the visual?
> Optimize: Bring a “common sense” approach toward optimizing the content, in terms of when you distribute and where.
> Timely: Does the visual content have a tie-in to the zeitgeist? Can the content be pegged in any way to something that’s in the news or generating a lot of buzz?
> Entertainment: Is the content entertaining? Does it have any “star” quality?
What do you think? What elements would you add to the list?
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