Visual marketing does something that a parade of press releases and paragraphs of media coverage cannot: It communicates the intangible essence of your brand and product.
In mere seconds, visual content such as photographs, illustrations, and videos express your brand story and vision. Your target audience should have access to this imagery throughout their entire shopping journey: discovery, conversion, and beyond.
Here’s how to harness the power of visual content in your marketing strategy.
What is visual marketing?
Visual marketing involves using images, videos, and graphics to communicate your brand identity and sell your products or services. It’s part of a marketing strategy, and includes creating social media content, website assets, ads, and in-store imagery to help convert customers.
Why is visual marketing important?
A Frontiers in Psychology study found that people experience more powerful emotional responses to images than to words. By placing visually appealing content at the center of your marketing strategy, you can increase engagement and drive traffic to your ecommerce store.
In buyer surveys conducted by Etsy, 90% of respondents said the quality of photos in a product listing was “extremely important” or “very important” to them when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. A 2025 survey by video production company Wyzowl also found that 82% of marketers say video content has a good return on investment.
Types of visual marketing
Visual marketing assets fall into three primary categories:
Photos
High-quality photographs go a long way in establishing a brand’s legitimacy, setting expectations for product quality and overall customer experience. If you can, produce your own product photography and lifestyle imagery instead of relying on stock images, which can lack creativity and feel inauthentic to viewers.
Static images can be especially powerful when used together with other types of assets, like short video clips:
This Instagram reel from home goods marketplace Goodee captures the essence of the brand through a smattering of photographs and videos. By highlighting travel, photo shoots, partnerships, and close connections with makers, the reel shows the brand’s dedication to discovering the world—exactly what Goodee hopes to inspire in its customers.
Videos
Gen Z consumers increasingly use platforms that favor videos to discover new brands or products, according to Grin’s 2025 survey. These videos may be long-form demo and instructional videos, or short-form clips, shared across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Jenny Lemons, the beloved creator of “food-themed accessories for colorful people,” uses playful footage to highlight the products the brand is known for: food- and ingredient-shaped items made into quirky accessories. Fast paced and brightly colored, the videos and graphics on the brand’s social media communicate their commitment to joyful experiences.
Graphics
Add personality to your website and branded materials and convey your style with illustrations, GIFs, or infographics. You can also use these visual elements to help simplify complex subject matter or data-dense topics for viewers, which is especially valuable if understanding the subject matter is key to appreciating your brand’s mission.
For spice brand Diaspora Spice Co., equity and regenerative farming are primary brand values. To highlight how they do things differently and how their sourcing practices differ from the traditional spice model, the brand goes into detail on its About Us page. The company uses playful graphics and infographics to break up the text-heavy content, which makes the subject feel lighthearted and accessible.
How to use visuals in your marketing strategy
- Audit your current strategy
- Research your target audience
- Lead with stories
- Standardize your visual brand identity
- Design with multiple uses in mind
- Invest in creators and visual marketing tools
- A/B test and iterate
Making sure your visuals pair with your written content to tell a coherent story is part of creating a successful marketing strategy. Here are some steps you can follow:
1. Audit your current marketing strategy
Start by taking stock of your current visual marketing content. Ask yourself:
- How do you currently express your brand identity or products visually?
- How active are you on various platforms?
- What kinds of visual content do you wish you could do more of, or do better?
This exercise might also include conducting an up-to-date SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to better understand your unique position in the competitive landscape. Don’t forget to attach goals to this process. Identifying what you hope to achieve—whether that’s improved brand awareness or increased conversion rates—will inform what you create and prioritize.
For plastic-free cookware company Anyday, this process is baked into its operational strategy, ensuring that the team never gets complacent with its visual approach.
“It is never over,” founder Stephanie Chen says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We have a monthly or quarterly check-in where we scour every part of the website and ask, ’Is this working for us?’”
The Anyday team gathers anecdotal data from consumers to improve its visual strategy.
“For us, it is a balance of gut feel with data,” Stephanie says. “It’s certainly not everything data. If we wanted to A/B test everything, it would just take a long time and we might not always have the traffic to be able to come up with a statistical difference between A and B. But, we also are consumers ourselves and have a gut feel sense of what will resonate based on our qualitative and quantitative customer surveys and talking to consumers.”
2. Research your target audience
Understanding what drives your target audience’s decision-making will help you figure out how to leverage emotion, humor, or information in your visual content. Start by figuring out their preferences, like which social media platforms they tend to use. If they get much of their shopping inspiration from TikTok, for example, prioritize posting short videos to that platform.
3. Lead with stories
Stories trigger emotions, which are powerful drivers of action. When conceiving your visual content, lead with the stories behind your products—stories that inspire you behind the scenes or that will resonate with your target audience.
“Sometimes, you pick up a product, and you can feel the humanity inside of it,” says Goodee founder Byron Peart on Shopify Masters. “I think in the times that we’re in right now, it feels more and more relevant.”
Goodee was built to be a platform where small makers could connect with a larger audience, and it invested in in-house asset creation to highlight those stories.
Rather than asking makers to upload images directly to the site, the brand takes a more personal approach. “We go, and we meet them, hear their stories, then we take our own photos and write our own original text for every single product,” says Byron. “We’re doing it in a human way, and I think that’s what connects to the customer in the end.”
4. Standardize your visual brand identity
Create a cohesive experience across platforms by updating or creating brand guidelines that lay out the correct use of brand colors, typography, imagery, logos, and any other features of visual content.
“What you want to have is an internal-facing document, call it a Brand Bible, that highlights the points that you want to convey,” says Ryan Rouse, the president of plant-based milk brand MALK Organics, on Shopify Masters. “Then you decide how much space you have per channel, or creative asset, for those points.”
A Brand Bible provides team members with a checklist for visual marketing assets. It also helps distill how these assets should be used to convey the brand mission, values, and personality anywhere a visual might be seen by a customer (including packaging). That way, when a potential customer catches sight of your brand on social or out in the real world, there’s a throughline to the next piece of your storytelling they encounter.
5. Design with multiple uses in mind
Your visual marketing plan should take into account the algorithmic preferences and styles of the various social media platforms and marketing channels you plan to use.
Vertical video, for example, is key to TikTok and Instagram. If you’re planning on releasing longer content to YouTube, you’ll need to plan a horizontal aspect ratio. You’ll also need splashy stills from your latest marketing campaigns or behind-the-scenes footage from your last content shoot for your Pinterest page.
Wherever possible, repurpose the multimedia content you create. For example, you can use the video footage you captured for your homepage in a series of social media shorts, or incorporate product images into dynamic GIFs or collages.
By strategically repurposing your content, you not only maximize your return on investment from the video’s creation, but also maintain a consistent brand image across multiple platforms.
6. Invest in creators and visual marketing tools
Skilled creators and design professionals can bring your vision to life. If you have the budget, you may want to hire a dedicated content creator or a third-party agency. You can also work with freelance video editors, graphic designers, illustrators, and photographers.
AI-powered video editing software, photo and illustration studios, and free platforms like Canva can also be a cost-effective way to create custom visual content and social media posts at scale. To avoid watering down the unique look and feel of your brand with plug-and-play templates or easy-to-spot generative imagery, customize your results as much as possible.
7. A/B test and iterate
When designing your visual marketing campaign, A/B test your visual content with members of your target audience.
A/B testing involves presenting two variations of a visual asset to a test group to determine which one performs better. For example, you might run a social media A/B test with two different product images: a close-up of the product and another photo showing it in use. The image that drives the most clicks is the winner.
Allow this testing period to inform your style and direction for more expensive projects (like video content) to ensure what you release will help achieve your goals.
Creative ways to approach visual marketing
Brands with the best visual marketing make it look effortless, but good visual marketing ideas require the guts to take risks—and a willingness to get it wrong.
Here are a few best practices from modern iconoclasts who struck a chord with their audiences:
Treat the brand as a character, not a company
“Brands are traditionally built in a very clinical way, where you sit down and you decide the rules that govern it,” says Andy Pearson, vice president of creative for Liquid Death, on Shopify Masters.
Sometimes, he explains, all that does is limit what you can do. “We didn’t have a brand book or any codified sense of what it was,” says Andy. “I realized that was actually the power of what we were doing—letting this thing really be organic. I think that’s why Liquid Death feels so compelling to people.”
The team, who ultimately created a brand known for its funny viral campaigns, decided to approach storytelling through the lens of a character caught in different situations.
“We’re not trying to figure out what marketing thing we could do. We’re just trying to answer the question: what would Liquid Death do?” Andy says. “People are complex and have a lot of different motivations. In the same way, this brand, this character, is built from a bunch of people with all these weird quirks and different sides that we can show when we want, when it makes sense.”
Make your own rules
Most advice about building a successful ecommerce site prioritizes two things: fast load times and low friction, which keep customers on site and moving toward conversion.
Olive oil brand Graza were familiar with the concept. They just chose to ignore it, betting that a striking visual experience would trump playing it safe.
“If something’s working in the marketplace, that means that everyone’s doing it. The end result is homogeneity,” says Graza founder Andrew Benin on Shopify Masters. “Standing out is more difficult, more expensive, and full of risk.”
Ultimately, Graza’s approach was all of those things. “We did a lot of no-nos when we created our site, like a 24-megabyte video on our homepage that slows everything down,” Andrew says. “We took a more expensive route to brand, to production, and photo and video development. We took a riskier approach to best practices—and it worked out for us.”
By ignoring visual marketing trends, the brand created a captivating user experience that drew in customers and drove conversions.
Create static imagery even if video is your hero
Like Graza, men’s apparel brand True Classic bet on placing video on its homepage to catch attention as soon as people land on the site. In about 30 seconds, customers see the product, meet the founders, learn about the brand’s philanthropy initiatives and maybe even have a laugh.
“Whatever we do marketing-wise, I want it to be super authentic,” cofounder Ryan Bartlett says on Shopify Masters. “If we’re living by the ’look good, feel good’ mantra of True Classic, if we can make the ad allow them to feel good, then that’s the best version of an ad that I want for the customer.”
This approach allows the brand to create an emotional connection with its audience through comedy. “Comedy is the ultimate equalizer,” Ryan says. “It’s also the only form of advertising that people are going to share at scale.”
Though they’ve found a successful video strategy, the True Classic team prioritizes static imagery, too.
“It’s not all about video,” says Ryan. “This is kind of old-school thinking, but just a generic picture of a shirt on a static background with the review count works really well. It allows people to connect the dots and go, ‘This might mean something. Clearly a lot of people are buying this. I should go check it out.’”
Even if it’s not the hero of your strategy, dedicate time and effort to creating static images that can be used across many platforms—digital or IRL.
Visual marketing FAQ
What is the meaning of visual marketing?
Visual marketing refers to the strategic use of visual content to market a brand and its products. Visual content can include photos, graphics, illustrations, videos, and charts.
How effective is visual marketing?
The brain can process images incredibly quickly (in about 13 milliseconds, according to an MIT study) and retain the information far better than it can with written content. That makes visual marketing more effective than text-only content, especially on social media platforms where visuals are required for engagement and shares.
What are the disadvantages of visual advertising?
Because visual marketing techniques are so prevalent in the market, it can be difficult for brands to stand out without high-quality content, which is expensive to produce. Too many displays also risk causing visual fatigue that can be off-putting to customers.
