6 important tips to help develop your brand's visual story

Stories help human brains to compress and store information

And as most of us are visual learners, visual storytelling is an efficient tool for brands to make us remember their messages or act in a specific way. Having more than 10 years of experience in image distribution, here Depositphotos share their hints on how to communicate your brand story with visuals.

About a visual-driven generation

Generation Z (Zoomers) consists of people who were born in the 2000s and grew up with internet-connected gadgets in their hands. They are also called ‘certified digital natives’ or ‘visual-driven generation’ because they comprehend the world mostly through digital tools.

Although Gen Zs are still quite young, they already have a great impact on digital marketing, forming almost half of all internet users globally. When it comes to marketing numbers, surveys show that Generation Z made up 40% of consumers in 2020. This means that brands need to adapt to the needs and habits of the majority of their target audience.

Why does visual storytelling work?

Visuals are far more effective in terms of communication. On average, humans remember only 10% of text information. At the same time, we can remember over 65% of the information that was shown to us. In practice, this means that a text without the right visuals is extremely ineffective in cases where a person needs to deeply understand something new.

Storytelling makes your content engaging regardless of the project. Consumers can build connections between images, empathize with the heroes and associate themselves with a character.

A study has shown that engaging colored visual content has 80% more chances to be consumed by internet users than bold text. At the same time, users are 85% more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it (which is the most obvious form of storytelling).

Visual storytelling for brands

Visual storytelling is about enhancing your brand communication and building a holistic brand image. The approach can be used at different stages of communication. At the basic level, you can integrate a visual narrative in a single ad.

At a higher level is the account of your brand on social networks. On Facebook and Instagram, you can integrate storytelling elements into Feed, Stories, IGTV, and Filters.

The advanced storytelling level is brand communication. In this case, you need to position the brand as a person with its own character, emotional baggage and, of course, personal history. Keep in mind that your hero shouldn’t be perfect, otherwise it will not be realistic.

Here are our top six tips for developing your brand's visual story:

1. Choose your aim

Decide on why you need to communicate your message, what CTAs it may include, who is your target audience, what metrics you can use to estimate results. Visual storytelling works well but needs a lot of effort. Find out if benefits outweigh the cost.

2. Find your tools

Storytelling can be implemented at different communication levels including a single product commercial, seasonal campaign, SMM strategy, or brand narration in general. Which case is yours? Having answered the question, list platforms and tools you can use considering your budget. It can be stock images with custom captions, animation, videos, gifs, face filters, online games, etc.

3. Put emotions first

Branding is not about selling goods but about selling emotions and making customers feel satisfied. Storytelling works similarly. Think of the action you need from users and come up with emotions you need to provoke in their hearts to make the probability of this action higher. Do you need users to become scared? Pleased? Relaxed?

4. Create a hero

The main character of your brand story should be as human-like as possible: realistic and relevant. By relevant we mean a character that users could reasonably associate themselves with.

5. Think of possible conflicts and build a story structure

If you don’t have a conflict, you don’t have a story. To find out what conflict can be outlined in your brand story, analyze your character. What is its deepest fear? A spectacular and believable conflict will arise the moment you make your hero collide with its opponent (who is the embodiment of his fear). Your hero may win or die. You decide.

6. Turn your story into a visual story

Find images and a visual style that reveals the essence of each element of your story. A little hint: a structural element is an event that changes something in history. If you are working on a video or Instagram Stories, create a structured selection of ‘frames’ (in cinematographic, it is called a storyboard).

Visual storytelling examples

In 2020, Gap used their models as brand faces on Instagram. Some of models have artistic or charity backgrounds, some of them just describe their lifestyle and talk about their favorite Gap clothes.

In 2015, Slack (the online collaboration hub) created a huge PR campaign out of a single banner. The Slack homepage banner said that the Stack app was used even by those who put robots on Mars.

In 2018, the Gucci Beauty Instagram account has launched a gorgeous AR filter that allowed users to create renaissance and baroque-period self-portraits. The tool stimulated user-generated content production.