Launching a successful marketing campaign requires a good number of activities where the information is promoted by the means of visuals, text, and audio. Comic storytelling is the newest addition to your marketing campaigns, giving you an edge over competitors, writes Naveen Gattu, COO, Gramener.
Great marketing should be made up of a basket full of initiatives to showcase your brand to potential customers. Whether the campaigns are driven by emails, newsletters, blogs, or social media posts, imagery must be an integral part of it. Images act as eye candy that breaks up monotonous blocks of text, so why not take them one step further and add visual comic storytelling to get your audience even more intrigued.Â
Long story short, visuals are engaging, stories are interesting, and comics are humorous. By combining all of them, you can create a compelling comic narrative to pique your customers’ interest in your marketing initiatives. Comic generators that are available online or offline can help you create comic conversations to use for this purpose.
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How Comic Storytelling Adds Value to Your Marketing Campaigns
A marketer’s target is to generate organic leads and drive revenue through multiple marketing activities. Let’s list a few commonly used initiatives and see if comic strips could be of any help.
1. Comics for email campaigns
59% of B2B marketers say that email is their most effective channelOpens a new window in terms of revenue generation.
By taking a pain point related to your targeted audience and creating a comic strip, comic storytelling could act as a catalyst for your email campaigns. It’s a great way to draw attention to add a CTA that offers a solution. For example, you might be targeting a hospital client through an email campaign as you’re selling a data-driven solution that gives insights about the revenue generation of various departments.
The strip speaks insights. It is enough to pique the interest of your audience with similar problems, making it significantly more likely for them to approach you for solutions.
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2. Comics for product manuals and e-books
Comics are not just meant to tell stories of superheroes saving the world. They have also emerged in business domains as powerful solutions to visually communicate information. As a marketer, you might be using case studies, e-books, product manuals, and white papers to tell your product’s story.
A great example that tells a product story via comics is Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome ComicOpens a new window . A printed comic for journalists and bloggers, the Google Chrome Comic explains the inner workings of the Google Chrome browser when it was launched. If comics is a good enough marketing tool for Google, just think what they could do for you.
3. Comics for social media
By introducing comics, you can break the conventional barrier of relying only on descriptions for better click-through rates on social media. It’s important to remember that we are hardwired to consume and remember visuals much better than text. A simple comic would stand out amidst a feed of stock images and hardcore business visuals, increasing the chances of higher click-through rates on your post.
Below is an example of a comic strip that shows the interest of fashionistas in the annual met gala. Amidst all the social media posts of celebrities posing for the camera, this comic strip lightens the mood of the user scrolling through the feed.
4. Comic for blogs
- Infographics? Check.Â
- Catchy headlines? Check.
- Impressive quotations from famous people? Check.
- Backlinks to popular websites? Check.
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But, did you know a 15 second ruleOpens a new window defines the bounce rate of your web page or blog? It essentially determines that if you haven’t engaged the site visitor for 15 seconds, then you probably aren’t going to.Â
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So, how can you engage your audience for longer than that? Likely, not from lines of hard-to-read text. And while infographics help, they are increasingly becoming an unoriginal “go-to†solution. Comics are an out-of-the-box option that audiences won’t expect in the first place, making them more likely to dedicate their time reading, observing, and enjoying it, reducing the bounce rate on your page. Even better if your comics come in multiple formats, such as the GIF below.
How to Create Effective Comics for Marketing Campaigns
The internet is scarce of comic storytelling tools. Moreover, many graphic novel creation tools require registration or payment to download or publish the final content.
However, we mustn’t forget the power of the open source. ComicGen is an open source comic creation tool that has multiple characters, poses, and expressions. All you have to do is select any character, choose the relevant pose and expression, and take a screenshot to develop your own comic strip in MS PowerPoint. Following the steps below, you can easily create a comic strip in minutes:
- Develop a story outline and select the panels
- Pick characters from ComicGen
- Take screenshots of supporting poses and emotions
- Crop the prop/pose/emotion which you are going to highlight
- Arrange all these in a PowerPoint slide
- Select a comic font and add the supporting text
- Add a speech bubble on top of the text and arrange accordingly
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Besides using comics in core marketing campaigns, comic presentations for internal communication in your organization can be a highly engaging approach too. Comics have the power to lighten the mood in serious board-room meetings, quarterly update meetups, invitation emails, and even celebration emails.
Driving the Relativity Factor
It’s no secret that people engage more with visuals than they do with text, especially ones with the relatability factor. So, with it now clear that comics are far from reserved just for kids, you can put them to use no matter what the marketing campaign.