Putting Visual Marketing to Work for You

• Choose colors wisely: Be intentional about the colors you choose to represent your business, as this will impact sales.
• Replace words with visuals: Wherever possible use visuals to share your message and tell your story.
• Paint the town: Make sure your logo, colors, and visuals are an integral part of your marketing communication. Your visual assets need to become synonymous with the perception of your organization to improve recognition.

Some examples of how business use visual are MailChimp, which features a mailman monkey and DropBox, which relies on childlike illustrations to differentiate themselves from other storage services. The best news is that you don’t need a huge budget or team to get started with visual marketing. There are a wide variety of resources for a low or no cost. Infographics

• Piktochart Infographic Creator. This is a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) infographic creator for free. It has themes and graphics.
• Visual.ly. Develop infographics and connect to social media accounts--free! Access Google Analytics through the site to track the effectiveness of your creations (or even create infographics from your website's Google Analytics report).

* By the way, Slideshare announced yesterday that users can now easily upload, view, embed and share include optimized infographics.

Video

• Wideo. Sign up for a free account. This service allows anyone to create animated videos and Common Craft-style videos online by dragging and dropping elements into place in the Wideo editor then setting the sequence of animations. Stock elements include text, cartoons, and drawings. You can also upload your own images and audio files to use in your videos.
• Pixorial. Video creation and editing tools are laid out in an intuitive and free user interface. You can upload pictures and raw video footage then organize that media into the sequence in which you want it to appear and insert transitions between elements by selecting them from the transitions gallery. Soundtracks can be selected from the Pixorial gallery or you can upload your own audio files.

Animation