Grab­bing the atten­tion of your tar­get audi­ence is one of your biggest chal­lenges. When con­sumers see con­tent, they quick­ly process it and decide whether to give it any more atten­tion or ignore it. That’s why you need to cre­ate visu­al­ly appeal­ing con­tent to engage with your tar­get audi­ence.

Here are three visu­al mar­ket­ing trends to keep an eye on in 2016.

Micro Content For Social Media

When you want to give Twit­ter, Face­book, and Pin­ter­est cam­paigns a boost, micro con­tent is your best ally. Micro con­tent can be any­thing from a sta­t­ic image to an ani­mat­ed GIF to a mini-info­graph­ic resem­bling a post­card. Using micro con­tent makes it easy to quick­ly tell a sto­ry and grab your audience’s atten­tion in a crowd­ed Face­book or Twit­ter feed. In my expe­ri­ence, posts with micro con­tent out­per­form text-only posts by 20 per­cent. Tweets that include an image are retweet­ed more than twice as often, receive 89 per­cent more favorites, and have CTRs 18 per­cent high­er, while Face­book posts fea­tur­ing videos are shared 12 times as much as posts with just text, accord­ing to a Buffer report. Using micro con­tent such as ani­mat­ed GIFs have an added bonus of adding some per­son­al­i­ty to your brand, and help poten­tial and cur­rent cus­tomers see that you’re one of them. If you’re not sure how to make an ani­mat­ed GIF, you can learn how at lynda.com in this video.

Infographics Are Here To Stay

If ani­mat­ed GIFs are con­sid­ered micro con­tent, then info­graph­ics are macro con­tent. Longer form with longer pro­duc­tion times, well-researched and designed info­graph­ics that com­mu­ni­cate a sto­ry will not only gen­er­ate traf­fic when you first launch the info­graph­ic, but it is more like­ly to pay div­i­dends for years to come when peo­ple start to link back to your orig­i­nal info­graph­ic. Google sees these back­links as impor­tant sig­nals that your site is an author­i­ty on the top­ic you’re talk­ing about. The more peo­ple who link back, the more author­i­ty your site gets which in turn will increase your stand­ing in search engine results. If you want to cre­ate your own info­graph­ics, you can learn the fun­da­men­tals of cre­at­ing info­graph­ics at Lynda.com. If you’d pre­fer to hire a design­er to cre­ate your info­graph­ic, check out visual.ly.

Stock Photos That Don’t Look Like Stock Photos

Usu­al­ly, you can spot a stock pho­to a mile (or more) away. That’s been the case for the past sev­er­al years at least and noth­ing says “I don’t care about my brand” more than using the same stock pho­to for your cus­tomer ser­vice agent that every­body else is using. From mid-2014 through 2015, we saw sev­er­al new sites pop up that offered high qual­i­ty pho­tos that you could use for free for both com­mer­cial and non-com­mer­cial use. Now that we’re into 2016, this trend isn’t stop­ping. More sites are crop­ping up every day with high-qual­i­ty, pho­to jour­nal­is­tic style pho­tog­ra­phy. Many of the sites allow you to down­load the pho­tos for free with­out attri­bu­tion while oth­ers sim­ply ask for a pho­to cred­it. My cur­rent favorite free stock pho­to site is Split­Shire. 2016 will be the year that tra­di­tion­al stock pho­to sites either improve the qual­i­ty of their pho­tos or they’ll start to see sig­nif­i­cant decline in sales.