Image Curation: The Secret Ingredient for Engagement

How your digital brand’s visual choices can attract new customers, build-up brand loyalty and boost online traffic.

Introduction to the Business of Attention-Grabbing

The online business market is essentially an epic battle for users’ attention. Grab an ideal user’s attention long enough and you have yourself a potential client and a successful online brand. 

With narrowing global attention spans and short-lasting online trends, it has never been more important for digital brands to create meaningful connections between their products and clients. 

Have you ever stumbled upon a great photo on Instagram and ended up scrolling through every single picture available on the poster’s profile account? 

Ever wondered what exactly fascinates you and captures your attention for so long when it comes to your favorite online brands? 

The simple answer to both questions is a process called image curation. 

What is Image Curation?

Image curation is the strategic search and collection of still or moving visuals that enable online entrepreneurs to develop their brand’s style and establish an attractive online presence.  

The job of a successful image curator, performed in-house or through an outsourced advertising agency, is to find and use the most appropriate photo and video content for your brand’s needs.   

In a world saturated with visual content, image curation is a crucial process for any online business that aims to stand out from the crowd and captivate and retain customers. 

In this article, we will showcase the 5 pillars of image curation to ensure your visual content choices resonate with your brand’s target audience. 

Selection

Great images are results of meticulous visual selection. Choosing what elements to include or exclude from a frame, in order to make visual sense, is what pro photographers do best. Image curators apply the same logic of meaningful visual selection to digital brand platforms.  

The first and most important step for effective image curation is to be thoughtful and strategically selective with your digital brand’s visual presentation. Make sure there is a clear reason for every image you ultimately choose to include within your brand’s digital environment.  

Define your core business goals in order to help you choose images and visual themes that align with your brand’s tone, or establish the atmosphere and lifestyle you would like clients to associate your products and services with.    

Sifting through vast media libraries in order to locate the most appropriate visuals for your digital brand can be time-consuming, but is absolutely essential for your online brand’s identity and long-term user engagement.

Relevance

As there are infinite opportunities for producing and sharing images in today’s online world, staying relevant with your brand’s visual choices is a decisive step for attracting your intended online customers. 

Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should publish any and every photo that looks good to you. While countless images can be amazingly eye-catching, they do not always necessarily translate into a positive impact for your brand.

Take the time to carefully select images that are relevant to your brand’s identity, products, services and lifestyle. Think about what your ideal users and prospective customers really care about and make sure you relate those concerns through images.  

Do we really need to see yet another beautiful photo of Manhattan’s skyline if you are selling camping gear in the state of New York? Aim to stay visually relevant and to promote only core brand identity. 

Engagement

Engagement refers to how, when and where users or clients interact with your brand’s digital content. Clicks, likes, shares, retweets and comments are all examples of users engaging with online content. 

Curated visual elements are no longer just novelty additions aiming to catch users’ attention. They have gradually become core sale-driving components of any successful brand engagement strategy.

Consider that vision overpowers all other senses and how you only remember 10% of information you hear after 3 days, as opposed to 65% when a relevant image accompanies the information. 

The more you manage to stimulate your brand’s user interaction through image curation, the more likely that user engagement will eventually result in boosted sales, brand loyalty and long-term clients. 

Uniformity

Another key goal of the image curation process is to maintain your brand’s visual uniformity. Visual consistency is exactly what makes some brands more recognizable and memorable to clients than others. 

By making sure that all of your brand’s visual content can be easily identified as uniquely yours, you can create a consistent brand style that separates you from the crowd and encourages brand loyalty. 

Visual uniformity can be achieved through photo filters, design layouts, specific lighting and colors, or even by using the same type of photo orientation – portrait or landscape – across all digital platforms. 

While a drunken night’s blurry group selfie may be a fun memory for you and your colleagues, it might also be visually inconsistent within a brand account selling wedding dresses through professional wedding photography.  

Traffic-Boosting

There is no doubt that stunning, relevant and consistent visuals are great traffic-boosters for any digital brand which aims to drive-up sales and to establish and maintain a unique online presence. 

It is important to note that tweets with photos get retweeted on average 35% more than tweets without photos, and similarly Facebook posts with photos receive 120% more engagement than those without. 

Before you even begin spending time and company resources on creating new visual content for your brand, you should try to discover exactly what type of visual content your users engage with the most. 

Begin by studying engagement data for each digital platform your brand is active on, and continue by isolating and analyzing the most successful visual content in terms of reach and user engagement.  

At Bocasay, optimizing digital engagement is our area of expertise. Our dedicated teams of developers help digital brands reach their full potential around the world. 

Do you want to establish an attractive online presence for your own digital brand? Get in touch to find out how we can help you.