The New Visual Workflow Requires a Mastery of New Skills

As Diane AckermanOpens a new window , American poet and essayist, said, “The visual image is a kind of tripwire for emotions.” And when it comes to shopping, emotions have always been in the driver’s seat. This will continue to ring true in a post-pandemic landscape.

But what do brands need to do to harness that emotional connection with consumers? It’s all about visual mastery.

You’ve Mastered the Basics, Now What?

Brands today are taking the necessary steps to automate routine media edits and iterations, but they haven’t yet embraced automation for more advanced transformations. The modern visual workflow involved with routinely uploading videos and images requires an entirely new set of skills. 

According to our dataOpens a new window , most brands embrace the typical, most established visual transformations and automations like cropping and filtering but are slower to adopt emerging innovative capabilities. Today’s content and user experience teams need to continue developing their shared visual mastery to transform images and videos into engaging online experiences without sacrificing load times and bandwidth constraints.

See More: 3 A’s To Transform Your Content Marketing Strategy

Pro tip: Visual needs vary by device, so optimize for each viewing context

The pandemic ignited an explosion in the number of devices, browsers and consumer channels worldwide, along with a unique opportunity for more content sharing across those devices. This growth is providing brands an opportunity to get in front of not only their customers but also those with whom a customer might share a brand’s content. Content sharing among peers feels incredibly personalized, serving as an engaging and emotional touchpoint that a brand may not originally plan for when developing online visual experiences. 

Consumers are savvier than ever when it comes to online shopping. That’s why brands must ensure that every touchpoint is visual-first, no matter where an audience or customer might engage and how tiny the visuals will be when viewed. Given that nearly 80% of smartphone users are now shopping on their mobile devices, according to OuterBoxOpens a new window , there is a big opportunity to cater to customers’ small-screen devices.

Small screens can be powerful, and they can pack a not-so-small punch when it comes to the benefits of increased engagement, conversions, and long-term brand loyalty from content viewed and shared on social media and via messaging apps. In particular, brands should actively prepare for microbrowsers to ensure they are effectively reaching the growing number of online consumers and optimizing digital visuals to entice click-throughs and purchases. Speaking of microbrowsers…

Pro tip: Mind the small-but-mighty microbrowser and the value of peer referrals

Microbrowsers are the miniature previews of site content that display inside discussions in private messaging apps like Slack, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. 

For example, these previews are generated when you send an iMessage to your partner linking to an item on your birthday wish list or send your co-worker a book recommendation via Amazon URL through Slack. With the microbrowser, the retailer’s website automatically generates a relevant thumbnail image or video preview. This helps the consumer see what they’ll discover by clicking on the link and builds a good first impression of the brand, increasing the likelihood of engagement and an eventual purchase.

These microbrowser links provide a huge engagement opportunity that brands, unfortunately, often overlook. Brands should ensure that these preview images or videos are optimally displayed across all chat and messaging apps and the long tail of other screens like handheld game devices and smart appliances.

To attract direct traffic from microbrowsers, brands need to optimize their content with text accompanied by compelling, informative links. Brands should also be intentional about creating versions of images and videos tailored specifically for microbrowser contexts. 

Below are a few best practices to ensure you and your developer teams are making the most of microbrowsers:

• Annotate everything throughout the HTML markup, and limit the title to 10 words and the description to 240 characters.
• Use Open Graph as markup to account for different microbrowsers.
• Select a specific unfurl image that’s visually appealing and compels the recipient to click for more information.
• Use short video “nanostories” for the few microbrowsers that currently display video.

Pro tip: Automate processes and embrace artificial intelligence to do some heavy lifting

Fortunately, most customer brands that use images heavily are saving both time and developer resources by automating the most routine transformations. A full 99% of the brands in our annual State of Visual Media report are performing basic resizing to maintain the width-to-height aspect ratio, even when, for example, a 9:16 photo needs to be displayed as 1:1 square in the Facebook feed. 

Our 2021 study also yielded the following insights:

• 75% of brands ensure images strike the optimal balance between file size and quality. About 69% use automatic format selection transformation, which analyzes the image content and selects the best format to deliver. 
• Cropping transformations, which automatically remove parts of an image to either fit it into a required aspect ratio or highlight a specific image area, are leveraged by 63% of companies analyzed.
• 60% are using transformations that ensure responsiveness, such as the device pixel ratio (DPR), which automatically adjusts the image resolution to the user’s viewing environment.

However, our analysis also found that despite 56% of responding brands being in the media industry, there is still work to be done when it comes to harnessing the power of more advanced transformations. These could include intelligent cropping, where detected faces are placed and displayed optimally within an image, which is used by just 17% of early adopters. 

See More: How Marketers Can Address Inefficiencies Within Content Creation

Pro tip: Even when embracing tech for visual optimization, stay human and be helpful

Above all, remember your audience is made up of real people with everyday lives just like you. They are letting some degree of emotion steer their purchase decisions, so play into that. Earn their trust and repeat business with high-quality content, including captivating thumbnails and well-worded, clear, and concise text devoid of excessive jargon. It pays to include helpful information such as product ratings, prices, availability, and colors. Indirect microbrowser traffic is a golden opportunity for marketers. After all, the more insights a brand has about who is sharing the links through private channels and group chats, the more they can amplify that content and the power of the referral.

Being an expert in visuals in today’s competitive digital landscape requires brands and marketing teams to shake off skepticism of innovations. It also means that brands need to stay sharp and always look for untapped opportunities for expanding their knowledge to ultimately establish themselves as visual masters with a lasting and emotional connection to customers.

How are you transforming your visual content into engaging online experiences for your customers? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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