Storytelling takes website design to a more engaging level. It enables site visitors to connect emotionally since stories resonate more significantly than straight facts. Elements that draw people in and bring your design to life include images, videos, infographics and narrative.
Visual storytelling provides an excellent first impression, which can in turn lead to longer visit times, higher conversion rates, stronger brand identification and more loyal customers. It takes complex data and concepts and makes them relatable to your audience.
Add a Visual Story to Your Website
Around 25.8% of people still use websites to get to know brands better. If your design doesn’t stand out, you may lose them to a number of other sources, like social media or video. Engaging visitors through graphics is one way to ensure they stay on your pages.
Perhaps you created a factual website, and now you’d like to incorporate some storytelling details to better interact with your audience. Adding visuals is a great first step to a stronger design and more engaging content. Here are some ways to add visual storytelling without spending a fortune or massive amounts of time.
1. Humanize Your Brand Story
People remember stories about 22 times more than facts. One of the best ways to build rapport with your audience is to include your brand story. What better way to do this than by adding visuals of the founders, the building in its early days and images of today’s team?
What is your company passionate about? If you have a charity you regularly volunteer for as a group, include images of your most recent day with them. Humanize your brand, and people will be more loyal to you.
2. Take Custom Photos
Photographs are ideal elements to add to your visual storytelling. Hire a professional photographer to take product shots and behind-the-scenes images of staff. Introducing the world to your employees adds a personal touch that shows real people stand behind the company and its offerings.
3. Coordinate Colors
Your brand image can make or break your website design. Around 60% of people will determine whether they like a brand based on the color palette alone. The illustrations and photographs you choose can be offputting to individuals who associate certain shades with something negative.
Run A/B tests to see how your audience responds to various hues. Once you have an idea of the ones that encourage users to stick around your site longer, use them in multiple visuals. Even an arrow in an accent color can grab attention and point them toward the information you want them to have.
4. Remember Videos
The success of social media sites like YouTube and TikTok is testimony to the power of videos for storytelling. You can easily embed videos on your website pages to inform and excite your customers about new products or events.
While it does take time to write scripts and film and edit videos, you can keep them short and get extra traction out of them. Upload your videos to Facebook Reels, YouTube and your website to get the most leverage possible and make them pay for themselves.
5. Bring Narratives to Life
You will have to use written storytelling at times to get your point across on your website. Using techniques such as “scrollytelling” and the more familiar animation options can keep users moving through the material and feeling enthused.
Imagine your website with only paragraphs of text and the occasional image to break it up. Such a traditional design is familiar but boring. Now, picture your site with added illustrations, parallax scrolling, images that change as the person scrolls through the story and animated arrows pointing the way. Scrollytelling takes a drab website and makes it interactive.
6. Turn Data Into a Story
If you’re sharing a lot of statistics and straight facts, turn the data into an infographic. The best ones have sections so you can pull images from the graphic for smaller, detailed visuals. You can then paste the entire design somewhere on the page or lead visitors to a PDF file.
Rather than telling the user that you increased revenue 100% for ABC Company, show them an infographic that includes a graph of the increase in revenue over time.
Visual Storytelling Creates Better UX
Adding visual storytelling makes your site more engaging and ensures people will hang around and bookmark your page for future visits. The world is full of beautiful images waiting to tell a tale. Grabbing inspiration from the things around you and making them a part of your company pages can turn your website into a compelling narrative and help you achieve your business goals.
