Creating Visually Attractive Content for your Small Business

So you have a small business and you want to get started with social media, but you have no background in design or photography? No biggie! In today’s world, all you need is a decent smartphone, access to the internet, and a desire to connect with your target audience. 

Creating visually attractive content that is authentic to your brand and your brand’s story is essential to small businesses using social media. Marketing your content in a specific way that is true to your brand allows you to catch the eye of your target audience, and hopefully gets them to follow you further and eventually become a customer.

To figure out your brand’s visual story, try answering the following questions:

1. What is the goal your content is trying to achieve?

2. Who is your audience and what topics interest them?

3. What problems do you try to resolve?

4. What adjectives would best describe the look and feel you are trying to model?

5. How would you define your brand vision and what makes you unique?

6. Under what terms do you want to show up for in search engines/hashtags?

The content you work with needs to be visually engaging, creative, and aesthetically pleasing in order to achieve the final result of getting people on social channels to stop the scroll and check you out. 

So how do you create those images that people will love?

1. Put your smartphone camera to work and take a picture that reflects the part of your story that you want to tell. The content needs to be relevant to your brand. For instance, if you want to show the camaraderie of your crew, catch them in action having fun, working together.

2. Don’t choose an image that seems too busy

3. Make sure your image is clear and well-lit; never blurry. You can use the photo editing tools on your phone, on Instagram, or any of the choices that we list below to clean up blurry photos or shadows

3. Ask yourself, “How does this picture reflect my brand”?

4. Before posting, always make sure both the picture and the caption aligns with your target audience’s desired style of content

For editing photos, adding text to a picture, using a picture beside a quote, or any other number of text/photo combinations, we recommend these online photo editing apps: 

. Canva (free) (we made the above post using canva - no photo needed)

· Picmonkey.com (free)

· Ipiccy.com (free)

· Pixlr.com (free)

*Keep in mind that text should be large enough so that it’s still readable when the image gets reduced to a preview size on many other social media platforms. 

*Also, you can try including the name of your site in the image to get that brand recognition.

When creating visually attractive content for your brand, the most important thing is that the content is authentic to you - so have fun, be yourself, and give it a try!