Visual content drives sales and makes communication more powerful. In fact, it’s almost impossible for a brand to think about creating promotional content without including visual or graphic elements. Whether visual assets are used to catch an audience’s attention or provide information on a product offer, they do much more than just illustrate. Visuals can help increase conversion, drive sales, and ultimately communicate in a stronger, more effective way. For all these reasons, it is important to invest in visual content creation with an effective workflow. Churning out striking visual content will boost your brand’s promotional strategy significantly.
What are visual assets?
Visual assets are all the visual elements used to create, grow, present, and strengthen a brand’s unique identity. They should define and promote a business or a brand in a consistent way, across all channels, whether it’s a marketing campaign, social media editorial plan, or e-commerce portal. Visual assets include your brand’s logos, illustrations, and images. Learn how to manage them at scale here.
How much time does visual content creation take?
Of course, it all depends on what type of visual content you need to create. One thing is certain, the more organized you and your creative team are, the easier (and faster) it is to create new content and focus on your creative inspiration. For example, if you make good use of BAM or DAM to organize, store, retrieve and distribute your visual assets, the time spent searching and filing material will be reduced to a minimum. When a creative team is well organized, they take less time creating projects and visual designs.
Here are 3 steps to creating visual assets in an effective way:
1. Establish a solid brand visual identity
Just like establishing a strong vision and mission statement, it is important to determine what your brand’s visual identity is all about. What does the brand look like? What visual elements and color palette fit with the brand’s tone of voice and value proposition? Once you and your team establish what your brand looks and sounds like, draft the brand guidelines that’ll help you create consistent material from that point on. Create a visual language that’ll help your audience recognize and understand your brand and its messaging. With a strong visual identity, you’ll save time and money because you won’t have to think about it every time you create a new campaign or new material. Moreover, if the brand’s visual identity has been approved by your brand’s different stakeholders, you’ll also save time getting approval on every single piece of content you develop thereafter. In order words, you’ll develop content in a fast and effective way, with fewer chances of getting long rounds of revisions every time.
2. Create a visual database
Once you’ve established a solid brand identity, the next step is to collect all the visual elements that belong to your brand so that you can use and repurpose them whenever you want. Gather and organize all the images, illustrations, logos, and organize them in a way that’ll make content creation as seamless as possible. Investing in the right image management software can be a huge plus for your creative workflow. For truly seamless and intuitive management and support of a rapidly growing visual collection, a software like BOOM Worksite can definitely help you get organized and make it easier to create visual assets, especially thanks to:
- A central image library to store all content. A cloud-based system not only provides a reliable way of accessing images for branch office staff and home-based workers, but also ensures you can scale up your image library without the problem of running out of storage capacity.
- Fast image search. You can use tags to categorize and organize images. Meanwhile, employees can use filters to narrow search results and quickly isolate those images that are most relevant to their needs.
- Image sharing. Securely distribute images to the people who need them, along with the ability to configure custom permissions to restrict access where necessary.
- Batch conversions. Different web channels and sales platforms have their own technical requirements for image formatting. With BOOM’s worksite, you can convert large volumes of image files in batches, saving you a great deal of time.
- Tracking. Managers can track image uploads and downloads to keep an eye on who is using what images, for what purposes and how often.
Picture this: the next time your brand needs a fresh new banner or poster for a campaign, let your creative team connect to Worksite and access all of the brand’s visual assets. Let the different team members work from the same single source of truth and make content creation that much easier.
3. Invest in tools to facilitate content creation
Of course, creative teams need their basic designing tools such as Illustrator, Figma, and Photoshop, but they can also rely on digital tools that can facilitate their work beyond the creative production aspect of their job. For example, Worksite includes tools that make it possible for anyone to adapt visual assets for social media thanks to intuitive preset formats. From Facebook cover images to Instagram stories, any person with Worksite credentials can crop visuals for social media, without needing the support of a graphic designer. Worksite also makes it easy to share and work on visuals thanks to the workrooms; the digital meeting rooms where designers and stakeholders can collaborate. Inside the workrooms, designers can upload their work, request feedback, or exchange comments with other stakeholders or fellow designers. Not only do the workroom tools make it easier to communicate and streamline workflows, but they ultimately make it possible to churn out content faster and more efficiently.
Interested in testing the Worksite for yourself?
