Visual Storytelling for Brands: The Recipe for Compelling Content Marketing

So, what’s your story? It’s the kind of question you ask an acquaintance, a first date, or someone who’s just introduced themselves at a networking event. It’s also the kind of thought your audience has the first time they encounter your brand, whether they consciously realize it or not. 

What stories does your brand have to tell? And how are you telling them? Here’s a hint: You’d better be using visuals. 

Let’s dig into what visual storytelling is, why it matters for brands, and how you can use the power of visuals to show off your brand’s smarts, heart, and personality — and ultimately, to meet your goals.

What is visual storytelling?

Visual storytelling is the practice of using intentional design and content writing to convey meaning and personality in an efficient, effective way. When you break it down, it’s about using visuals — design, illustration, animation, data visualization, you name it — to enhance storytelling — sharing a structured message with a clear goal, usually to explain, entertain, or persuade. 

It might sound complicated, but you see brands using visual stories all the time. They often take the form of things like infographics, animated explainer videos, even social media graphics (what we call microcontent).

Visual content uses design to convey a message to an audience with a clear goal — sound familiar? That’s visual storytelling in a nutshell.

What makes a story?

But are infographics really stories? When you think of storytelling for a brand, you might automatically think of testimonials and case studies, which are great, but anything you want to communicate to your audience can be a story. 

As long as it has structure, some kind of progression or change, and a conclusion that includes a takeaway or action item for the audience, we’d call that a story. 

It could be the overarching story of how your product or service makes a difference — the pain points your prospects feel, how your company helps, and what results they could expect if they trust you to solve those pain points. That’s just one example. We create infographics that use many different story types.

Why is visual storytelling effective for brands?

Now that we get what visual storytelling IS, let’s talk about why it works.

Starting with storytelling

Let’s start with the story part of visual storytelling. Whatever form they take, stories move your audience, which is ultimately the goal, right? When you create content, you’re trying to influence the people you’re talking to — to persuade them to make a purchase, change their mind, lend support to your cause. Stories establish context, appeal to emotion, and create connections.

They make your content more relatable, too. Your audience has the opportunity to see themselves and their situations reflected in your stories.

You’re probably already telling stories, whether you call them that or not: blog posts, ad copy, email blasts, those kinds of things. Your brand’s messaging is probably already framed as storytelling — it has structure, a clear goal, and an intended audience.

Visuals make the difference

But messaging alone doesn’t make great visual storytelling. It’s the visuals that really make the difference. A classic PDF report with a few stock photos isn’t visual storytelling. A fully designed report with bespoke illustrations and data visualizations that reinforce key points and add to the audience’s understanding of the content? That’s visual storytelling. 

Infographics are Lemonly’s specialty, so our visual storytelling approach uses elements like charts, graphs, and other data visualizations to enhance our stories where possible. We use icons, illustrations, animation, and characters to add clarity and personality where it matters.

Creating effective visuals is about intentionality. What will make the content not only look better, but work more effectively toward the goal for your specific audience? What visuals will make the information easier to understand (not just make it look pretty)?

Capture audience attention and drive action

Your organization has so many stories to share and not much time to capture your audience’s attention. (You may have heard about how audiences have short attention spans these days — surprise, surprise.)

The secret to earning — and keeping — your audience’s attention is visuals. Visuals make your storytelling more efficient, engaging, and effective. How do they do it? 

• Efficient: Visuals are easier to process than text alone, which helps your audience quickly understand your content.
• Engaging: Visuals are more interesting for your audience to look at, which keeps them engaged and helps avoid reader fatigue. 
• Effective: Visuals encourage retention. With visuals, your story is way more likely to stick in your audience's memory.

The power of visual storytelling comes from the combination of clear, purposeful messaging and intentional, engaging visuals. Together, that means your content will get noticed and drive action.

Common use cases for visual storytelling

So we agree that visual storytelling is an effective way to get your audience’s attention and share your story. But what kinds of stories can you tell with visuals? Let’s talk about three of the most common categories we encounter at Lemonly when crafting visual stories with our clients: sales and marketing, education and advocacy, and internal communications.

Sales and marketing

Most of the stories we help clients tell fall under the category of sales and marketing. Visual storytelling eases the challenge of promoting your business and capturing customers. Effective visual content can answer questions and spark interest at every stage of the sales funnel, from capturing top-of-funnel awareness to driving bottom-of-funnel conversions.

Example: Launching a new product

What kind of sales and marketing stories can you tell with visuals? Everything from top-of-funnel info about your product or service to lead-generating white papers. For example, let’s say you’re launching a new product. 

• You can start with visual content at the very top of the funnel to build trust, awareness, and brand recognition. If you take an editorial angle, you might not even mention your product or service until the call-to-action.
• Another great approach is to explain the problem your product is solving or the opportunity it unleashes. We call that a problem-solution-action story: You explain the problem, describe your solution, and drive the reader to action. 
• Comparisons are another great story type for sales and marketing. Help your audience easily see how your new product outperforms competitors or alternatives. 
• Once your audience has decided to go with your product — which they will, of course! — even your pricing tiers can be a story. Consider a flowchart with questions that guide the audience to the pricing tier or service option that best suits their needs. 

So, for our hypothetical product launch, we could create an explainer video to introduce the product, an infographic comparing it to competitors, and a flowchart to help match customers with the best pricing option for them. And that’s just the beginning.

The common theme across visual storytelling for sales and marketing is authentically sharing who you are as a brand and why consumers should trust and care about what you're offering. From there, you can continue to delight them with helpful resources and ultimately remove barriers.

Education and advocacy

Visual storytelling can also make an impact in our next category: education and advocacy. The goal here is to provide learning, garner support, gain buy-in for your vision, or otherwise persuade your audience to get on board with what you’re up to. 

Organizations that do a lot of education and advocacy work, like nonprofits and public service organizations, already know the power of storytelling — these mission-driven groups are no strangers to telling stories that inspire and build empathy. But finding new ways to engage their audiences can be tricky. Visuals can do exactly that.

Example: Celebrating a major milestone

Let's say you're approaching a significant milestone in your organization's history, like a major anniversary or cumulative giving threshold. 

• You could tell that story with a timeline infographic that showcases your progress and key achievements along the way. 
• Or maybe you create a hype video for internal meetings or stakeholder presentations that builds excitement and momentum. 
• You could even develop an updated landing page or interactive infographic that lets your audience explore the significant developments that contributed to the milestone. 

With education and advocacy storytelling, visuals help inspire and excite your audience to learn or support your cause.

Internal communication

Our third category for visual storytelling is internal communication. The goal here is to communicate effectively within your organization, make internal messages memorable, and cultivate a thriving company culture. Visuals help achieve each of these goals.

Communicating effectively with your team

First, effective communication. Your team is busy, but that doesn’t mean you have to skip storytelling. In fact, that’s all the more reason to invest in effective internal communication — cut through the noise and stand out in a sea of seemingly important information. Swap paragraph-heavy pieces with more visual versions, like bite-sized microcontent or illustrated handouts, and watch your team engage with the content like never before. 

Making important internal messages memorable

Next, making messages memorable. Visual stories have clear hierarchy with headings, sections, and eye-catching formatting for key phrases, data points, or takeaways. More skimmable content is more likely to stick, and visuals add that skimmability.

Cultivating a thriving company culture

Last, there’s company culture. Your communication goes a long way in setting the vibe. Visuals add personality to your internal comms. Striking the right tone with your words and visuals can reinforce your team’s shared identity and sense of belonging. It’s like wearing your team’s colors.

Example: Upgrading your onboarding and training materials

Consider this scenario: Your onboarding and training materials are outdated or not engaging your audience the way you wish they would — making onboarding more time-consuming for your team and a bad experience for new hires. Visual storytelling can transform that experience. 

You could start by creating a new visual identity for your onboarding and training materials — think of it like a theme that ties everything together and makes it feel cohesive and consistent. 

• A unique visual identity for onboarding and training gives you an opportunity to introduce your brand personality to new team members early on. Is your culture quirky and fun? Supportive and human? Collaborative and innovative? Your visuals can reflect these values and set the tone. 
• Having that established visual identity also makes it easier to create templates and reusable assets for more scalable internal comms.
• You can then apply your visual theme to a series of onboarding videos explaining key concepts, introducing different departments, highlighting benefits, or sharing your company history.
• You could also develop training materials and an interactive quiz to check understanding. The possibilities are endless.

Visual storytelling that makes your content more effective, memorable, and unique helps set your internal communication (and your team) up for success. A bit of visual flair shows your culture matters and gives your important internal messages the fanfare they deserve.

Three ingredients for great visual storytelling

We’ve covered what visual storytelling is, why it matters, and some common use cases for brands like our clients. Before we wrap up, let’s talk about what makes great visual storytelling — the three key ingredients that make your visual content truly valuable for your brand.

Great visual storytelling captures three aspects of your brand: your smarts, heart, and personality. When combined, these elements create the foundation for compelling, persuasive, and authentic content.

Smarts: Your brand’s expertise and authority

First is smarts. Your brand’s smarts are your knowledge and expertise — the stuff you’re smart about. These are the content areas you know best and the information and processes you’ve mastered.

Showing your smarts in visual content might look like creating data-driven content, process explanations, or thought leadership pieces. These types of content build your authority and expertise on the topics you own.

Heart: Your brand’s purpose and emotional connection

Next is heart. Your heart is the emotional connection you have with your audience — it’s what you believe in and how you inspire and move people. Customers build loyalty with brands they identify with, so don’t be afraid to get loud and proud with what you’re all about.

Visual storytelling with heart might include mission-driven content or narratives that build empathy. It doesn’t have to mean getting sappy or tugging on the heartstrings if that’s not your vibe. It’s about showing what you care about and how you make a difference for your customers or the world around you.

Personality: Your brand’s unique point of view

The last of our three key storytelling ingredients is personality. Your brand’s personality is your unique identity and point of view — basically, who you are and how you present yourself.

Your content conveys personality through the voice and tone of the text, plus the look and feel of the design. Across all these elements, you want to strike just the right vibe, whether that’s playful and friendly or serious and sophisticated.

When you put together your smarts, heart, and personality, you have the secret recipe for pixel-perfect visual storytelling. It’s exactly what you need for compelling, persuasive, and authentic visual content.

Leverage the power of visual storytelling for your brand

Alright, friends, we did it! That’s an in-depth look at what visual storytelling is and why it's so powerful. There are countless ways to use visuals across sales and marketing, education and advocacy, internal communications, and beyond.

We’d love to talk about how Lemonly can help you use visual storytelling to show off your brand’s smarts, heart, and personality. Just use the link below to get in touch for a friendly intro call.