Four steps to using visual communication

During our early childhood education years, we learnt about the different types of communication such as verbal, non-verbal and written. However, in this digital day and age, we live our lives on our phones, computers and tablets all connected to the WIFI; we are increasingly processing information differently than our parents and grandparents. The result being a more visual world than before; with that in mind, brands should not ignore the power of visual communication in the workplace as it relates to communications with staff as well as with consumers.

Visual communication can be an effective way to effectively convey a message, hence understanding this communication approach can help your brand implement certain visual techniques in your branding and advertising campaigns as well as your internal messaging strategies.

For clarity, visual communication refers to using videos, images and graphs to convey an idea or a message. Elements include: illustration, data visualization, animation and interactivity. The type of visual communication you use depends heavily on your target audience and your brand goals. Added to that, is the mode of communication your audience typically uses and interact swith e.g., is it your website or social media page?

Below are a few steps to using visual communication:

• What is the goal of your communication? – Are you communicating internally or externally? Are you making comparisons e.g., you may engage in a visual communication strategy to make a comparison between two products or two systems and as such you may use visual tools such as photographs, graphs or even pie charts to uncover the differences or similarities.

Are there changes you wish to highlight? Visual aids can indicate changes over a period of time or across a season e.g., highlight your sales trends over the past quarter and compare it to last year during the same time period! This helps your team to understand which periods yielded the highest revenue and profits.

•  Develop a consistent visual brand – It’s critical to cultivate a consistent, recognizable brand and that any visual content developed aligns with your overall brand imagery. This includes all aspects of your social media posts and flyers among other things; they should align with the company image. This includes but is not limited to: colour scheme, headers and footers as well as integrating your brand’s logo across all documents or using icons across your visual content.

•  Translate written to visual – This is something I am currently working on as it relates to our weekly articles. You can translate notes or write ups into visual content such as images and videos e.g., you may have written information about your onboarding procedures or strategy, why not transform this into visual content that is easy for your intended audience to understand and remember? You can also use your notes to create a video script for an explainer video!

• How are you communicating with your team? Just as you communicate visually on social media with your customers, you can do the same when communicating with your manager or your executives or shareholders e.g. let’s say you receive feedback on an idea or upcoming project or perhaps you attended a training session and you then need to share what you have learnt with your colleagues after the training is completed; consider turning that information into a visual presentation or graphic so that everyone canunderstand as opposed to just speaking infront of your colleagues or sending an email with information

l Candice Sealey is the Founder & Principal Consultant at Ignite! a Full-service Marketing & PR Consultancy that helps businesses/brands to stand out and communicate the right message to the right people at the right time through Strategy, Marketing, Media services and Design solutions.

She is also a freelance content writer, advertising copywriter, voiceover talent, media personality. Follow us on FB & IG @igniteresults Phone:784-432-2223. Email: igniteresults@gmail.com