We’ve Entered a New Era of Visual Storytelling: What You Need to Know
Visual storytelling has become more competitive than ever before. It’s no longer enough to be a cool video packed with fancy effects or have impactful voices.
If you want to connect with your target audience and reach your goals, you need to develop relatable and easily repeatable visual storytelling that showcases your unique brand vision and identity.
Achieving this requires a highly focused approach that embraces the needs of the modern era of visual storytelling.
This includes:
- Ensuring your brand values are expressed in the content.
- Creating quality content rather than just aiming for quantity.
- Keeping inclusion at the core of your visual storytelling.
In this article, we’ll be looking at what you need to know about design strategy for storytelling content for our future.
Why visual storytelling?
Visual storytelling allows us to share ideas, tell stories and communicate on a deeper level. The human brain craves stories and releases a cocktail of feel-good hormones such as oxytocin and dopamine when we tell or listen to these stories. They make us comfortable and feel connected.
Additionally, over 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. According to a study from MIT, we can process visual images in as little as 13 milliseconds. compared to the extra processing that our brains need to do when we read text.
So, visual storytelling has the upper hand. It captures our attention fast. It transforms complex ideas, difficult information, and even abstract thoughts into clear and friendly communications that make the story more engaging and memorable.
Ensuring the brand value in your story.
If you are about to jump onto “Show don’t tell” tactics, it’s important to hold and consider branding that helps your storytelling content have a more profound impact on your audience, adding what we call a value trigger.
By showing that you have the same core values, ideas and care about the same issues as your audience, they’re more likely to engage with your content. It depends on what you’re saying, but who is saying it.
Adding branding makes people easy to take action. Here’s an example of how that works in the real world…
Imagine that you’re swiping through video clips that look similar. Then suddenly, one seems to grab your attention. It jumps out at you. You forget all the others you’ve swiped past and remember this one, sharing it with friends and telling others about it.
This doesn’t happen because of the impact of the clip or boldness. (unless it’s just another of those viral clips that are soon forgotten.) That storytelling content had branding in some form -whether good or bad taste. That’s why it worked.
The myth of ‘high-quality content’
There’s no doubt that creating good quality content is key to getting audience engagement. However, the matter has become more complex over the past few years.
Thanks to recent advances in technology, it’s easier than ever to create decent quality content with the handy professional camera, easy-to-use editing tools, creative A.I tools and digital templates, most people can create standard quality that appears professional.
If you want to connect with your real audience and build a loyal following, you need to differentiate your storytelling from your competitors with clearly defined branding.
It isn’t about inserting a logo or applying special colours and calling it ‘branding’. Your brand results from your continued action, presence and multiple engagements with people.
By using visual storytelling to show that you share the same values as your target audience, you’ll grow a reliable and lasting relationship with your audience.
Inclusion counts
Inclusion should be considered at every stage of the creative process. By doing research, putting it into design scenarios, building a diverse creative team, reviewing your projects and looking for feedback, you can ensure that everyone is ‘invited’ to the party.
Here are some visual storytelling design factors you should bear in mind:
- Text: Does your text work for all ages, health conditions and environmental limitations?
- Colour: Make sure your colour palette works for diverse scenarios, including personal and environmental conditions?
- Symbols: Can people easily process those meanings? Legible on a small screen?
- Style guide: Does it communicate effectively and encourage interaction with your entire audience, or is it isolating certain people?
Read more on the topic: “How to Implement Inclusive Visual Storytelling.”
Conclusion
If you want your visual storytelling to stand out and be memorable in the competitive world, you need to focus on the three key factors we’ve mentioned above:
- Build brand value for your storytelling content, and be consistent. ‘Show’ your authentic and unique vision.
- Focus on quality than quantity (but do it right!). Quantity becomes relevant when you’ve met the need for quality.
- Keep inclusion at the core of what you do to build thoughtful and lasting relationships with your audience.
