With the explosion of photo and video-driven social networks in recent years, visual content is now more important than ever with respect to digital marketing.

According to 3M Corporation, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Likewise, “social media scientist” Dan Zarrella found that photos perform best for likes, comments, and shares as compared with text, video, and links on Facebook.

Although we know visual content is key, not all businesses have professional photographers and designers on-hand to create aesthetically appealing graphics on a regular basis. Don’t let this stop you from crafting beautiful and eye-catching visuals! With this in mind, let’s run through a few simple steps helpful for anyone looking to design visual content for his or her business quickly and easily.

Recipe for an Engaging Graphic

Ingredients

Theme/Topic: Focus on an interesting statistic, catch phrase, or quote related to the theme of your post. Sites such as Goodreads can help you find a quote based on a specific topic.

Photography: You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a digital SLR camera to capture the perfect photo for your visual content. These days, most camera phones take high-quality pictures and are certainly more convenient for spur-of-the-moment shots. Use a photo-editing app to enhance and crop images to your liking.

If you’re not confident in your own photography skills, however, Pixabay is a fantastic source of public domain images and graphics (photo owners waive all image copyright rights, so you are free to edit and use them for your own purposes).

Directions

Mix it all together! Add the theme or topical copy to your photo to make it more engaging and shareable. (Be sure to give attribution, when necessary.) If you don’t own a copy of Adobe Photoshop, you can turn to several free and web-based image editing alternatives.

The most important step in the entire process? Have fun! Be creative! Ask yourself if you personally would “like” the graphic if you spotted it somewhere else. Have a purpose behind the visual: whether to educate, entertain, or inspire.

After creating your graphic, splatter it across your social media pages! Add it to a blog post and pin it to your Pinterest board, or upload to Instagram—and let the sharing begin.