Ty Swartz (00:00.962)
All right, everybody, I am Ty Schwartz, and I am back here with Snap Lens. And we are going to finish up our talk about visual design. Today we're going to talk about visual design and why it's so important today in today's social media. And it's something that I talk with students about on a regular basis. And I think it's very important that we discuss it, because we talk about the basics of visual design. But you know what, really,

What's the practical application? So when I look at visual designs, I think it's crucial that in today's social media landscape, you're getting bombarded with so many different things. And one of the things that we have to pay attention to is how are we going to get the attention of our customers? And that's honestly, that's the purpose of marketing. And that's what I love about visual design, photography, videography is...

I'm creating something that somebody is going to pay attention to, and I want them to pay attention to it. So how am I going to do some attention grabbing when it comes to visual design? Because there's so much stuff out there, you have to make things that are visually appealing in your designs, and they have to stand out. And you have to capture somebody's attention quickly. I do believe it's Neil, I'm sorry, Neil. Eric Qualman.

He wrote socialnomics and he's very, very straightforward with our audiences nowadays have about a seven second attention span if we get that. And I think the more bombarded we get with visual designs coming from, you know, Instagram, Facebook, you know, X and every other social media platform that there is, we are looking at losing our ability for attention. And in

What's going to happen is as we lose our attention spans, we have to do something that grabs the attention within seconds. I mean, if you think about how you scroll through Instagram, you really a lot of times only stop on images or video that compel you have some type of emotional connection for you. You're not just looking at every single image. You're scrolling and stopping when something impacts you. And that's how we make connections as humans.

Ty Swartz (02:17.166)
But also, we're creating brand identity and recognition. So we have to have consistent visual designs. And it helps us build in our brands. And it reinforces our brands. Just the colors, just the shapes. When users constantly see our brand colors, our fonts, and imageries across various platforms, they begin to associate those visuals with our brands. And.

which aids in our marketing, it aids in our brand recognition, and it also helps us with recall. Because in the world of marketing, we have to have seven to 10 touch points with a client before they're thinking about maybe I should purchase or maybe I should do something with this company. And that's what we have to do is we have to create that natural brand recognition because it's very, very, very expensive to constantly get a new customer.

you know, some statistics show me that's around $35 to $50 per new customer. Well, if your regular products aren't costing as much, you're spending more on getting customers than the customers bring it into you. So you have to be very cautious on how you're not only marketing, but how are you placing your visual designs out there so your clients will pick up those visuals and naturally attribute those visuals to you.

But also when it comes to communication, we want to use visuals to communicate our complex messages. Sometimes we have super complex messages, but we have to create something visually that's effective, and it's more effective than text alone. So our infographics, our charts, our images can all convey information very quickly, and we can make it memorable. And by doing that, we're making our ideal clients

relate to our brands, but they're also going to share something that's intriguing or interesting to them on their social media, which we're starting to build our brand champions. And that's where we are. Our goal is a lot of times is to get regular people to talk about and support and endorse our brands is because that's what other people trust. They trust their friends and they trust their associates. And so by creating marketing that people want to share,

Ty Swartz (04:42.286)
It also naturally helps build out our brand. But we also want to figure out how can we have some type of emotional connection with our clients or our potential customers. So we want to create high quality visual content. And that has the power to invoke emotions and create connections with our audience. Whether it's through captivating imagery or well designed graphics, visuals can help invoke feelings that resonate with viewers.

and it's going to foster a deep connection with our brand. And they're going to remember that the next time they see a brand logo, they're going to see brand content, messaging that we put out. They're going to relate that human connection, that emotional connection that we have with them. But how are we making this shareable? We want to make it shareable by making it compelling. We want to make our content compelling so it's more likely it's going to be shared by users on social media.

But people also are more inclined to share that content when it's visually appealing entertaining or informative Leading a lot of times to increased exposure and engagement and that's what I talk a lot of that is inbound marketing Because we're not you know outbound marketing is where you're gonna pay for it You're gonna you're gonna push stuff out but inbound map marketing is where we're creating things and it's naturally occurring

where people are talking about our platform, people are talking about our brand. And so we want that natural communication because it's not forced, it's honest. And that's the transparency we want to have with our clients. But it also gives us a competitive advantage. A lot of companies tend to overlook the importance of visual design because they're like, oh, well, it's just clients. But you know what? People want to relate. In a crowded digital landscape,

Businesses and individuals need to differentiate themselves from competitors. So by investing in visually stunning content, it sets us apart and positions us as professionals. We're innovative, we're trustworthy. Our entity in the eyes of your audience, they trust us a little bit more. They recognize that we have something that other companies aren't doing because we're focused on that impactful visual design.

Ty Swartz (07:02.36)
Something else is mobilized optimization. So if you are creating stuff, I mean, I have a tendency, everything I make is 300 DPI. And I want to make sure that if I know that I'm going to make it for the computer, I'm making an RGB. But a lot of times, I'll start out in CMYK, and then I'll convert it to RGB, because I want to have that mobility to that.

Because I can always knock down the DPI and I never want to increase the DPI. So it's easier to reduce DPI than increase it. But with that, we have widespread cell phone use and I think it was about eight, nine years ago that smartphones started to outpace looking at websites and doing things than the computer. A lot of people still have laptops and tablets, but when you look at the statistics, most customers or potential customers,

and clients are on smartphones looking at your content. So you have to make sure that your content is mobile friendly. It's optimized. And it's particularly important because it's easily consumable on the mobile devices. I can look at it. I can share it. I can do a whole bunch of stuff with it really quickly. So with our social media platforms and mobility, we're going to take that and maximize our ability to use those smartphones.

So we're going to make those designs, and it's going to be optimized for smaller screens to make it easier to have a seamless experience with our clients. And I think that's important too. And finally, one of the things I think is really important is the engagement and conversion. Visual content tends to generate higher levels of engagement compared to text only.

So if I put out a social media post and I only put text, not that many people are going to look at it. But if I add some type of relevant visual content, people are going to see the visual and they're going to wonder, hey, what's going on with this? Let's take a look at this real quick. And so that's going to help us capture their attention. It's going to help us generate higher levels of engagement. It's going to be whether it looks like this.

Ty Swartz (09:13.474)
whether it's in likes, it's comments, it shares, or it's clicks, it all depends on what the visually appealing design is going to do and what our engagement purpose for that design is. So we can drive higher levels of engagement and ultimately lead to increased convergence for business. But if we just sometimes want to just share something, fun facts or silly different things, then we want to definitely get that happening. And...

We got it. We got to really think about those messages when we're creating our products Okay, so let me finish up now. I try to keep these things under 10 minutes, and I'm hitting that 10 -minute mark so so basically Overall visual design is a powerful tool for capturing attention. It's good for communicating messages effectively. We're gonna foster emotional connections

And ultimately, we're going to drive our engagement and conversions in today's social media -driven world. And that's the purpose, honestly, of visual design, whether it's photography, videography, graphics. Our purpose when we're creating is, how are we going to use this? What is our end result? So we have to pre -visualize what we're going to use for social media. All right. My name is Ty Swartz, and I'm here with Snap Lens. And I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to my thoughts.

on visual design and social media. You have a great day.