How to Hack Visual Content 4 Ways: A Newbie Guide

Do you need ways to hack visual content for social media and other digital marketing strategies? People are visual beings. Visuals are a better way to (see graphic below):

• convey complex information
• cement your product in a prospect’s memory
• engage users’ emotions
• prompt engagement
• draw attention at the speed of light

That’s why 85% of marketers surveyed prefer visual content over text messaging.

Why do you need to hack visual content?

The image above shows why visuals (including images, infographics, and videos) are more suited for content than simple blocks or lines of text. People on social media are more willing to engage with visual content. In fact, 40% of online users will provide a more favorable response to visual content than plain textual content. For instance, tweets with images get 150% more retweets than tweets without images, while Facebook posts with images generate 2.3 times more engagement than posts without them.

Want more? In the next sections, we expand on why you need to hack visual content.

1. Increases views

Your social media content generates 94% more views if it contains visual elements, which proves that people prefer to engage with content that’s both informative and pleasing to the eye. This can prove invaluable, especially if you want to deliver a well-tailored message to your audience and ensure your message reaches your audience. Moreover, your social media post views can increase by 48% if they contain both images and videos.

While most social media platforms benefit from including visual content (even X), some, like Instagram Reels, YouTube, and TikTok require a short video to use.

Also, press releases that contain photos generate 14% more views when published. Blogs increase engagement by 94% when they contain visual elements, as well as increasing conversion by up to 80%. Visual elements also improve SEO by increasing dwell time. When writing blogs, consider inserting relevant images or other visual elements every 250-350 words.

Attracting the right kind of attention with your social media marketing is essential for your campaign’s success. By adding visual content to your strategies, you’ll be able to attract the necessary attention required to get your message through to your target audience.

2. Boosts engagement

Killer images also drive engagement (as you can see from the data cited above), build excitement over your posts, induce clicks, and drive traffic. Google uses information about your images as part of its ranking algorithm, so posts that contain good quality images help your rank (and thus the amount of traffic that visits your site). Supporting this, Jeff Bullas states,  “Articles with images get 94% more total views.” Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you know this.

High-quality visual content included in your social media marketing efforts can generate more likes, shares and comments than a simple text would. As a matter of fact, your articles can experience a 37% increase in engagement if they are optimized with compelling visual content. Furthermore, an engaging visual content is more likely to go viral, meaning that people will share it further with their friends, family and other members of their online community. Furthermore, engaging visuals aren’t just meant to go viral. They can also help your audience better understand or appreciate the message you’re trying to deliver.

For example, your message will be much better received if it’s backed by a soothing nature photo. Moreover, if your content is clickable, it can bring you a lot of inbound links; just make sure it contains your logo so everyone knows where the content originated from. Inbound links make your content more relevant and improve your search ranking, while generating 60% more interest from your target audience.  

3. Your audience loves video

Video is one of the most important visual aspects used in content marketing today. That being said, by 2019, 80% of internet traffic will consist of video traffic. Generally, the online audience prefers watching videos rather than reading plain text. In fact, four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, while 90% of consumers state that watching a product video is very helpful in making a purchasing decision.

In addition, 64% of consumers are more willing to make a purchase after watching a product video. Making video the main visual aspect of your social media strategy will undoubtedly boost your sales. Moreover, including video as appealing visual content will boost engagement among social followers. The fact of the matter is that Facebook users watch 8 billion videos per day, and a live video turned out to be the most popular format.

Visual content is undeniably more interesting and appealing to social media users, as well as online consumers in general. Implementing visual content into your social media marketing will not only improve views, engagement and social following, but it will also help your content attract the right kind of attention and boost engagement from your target audience.

 HubSpot cites evidence from 3M showing that 90% of the information the brain processes is visual, which is processed 60,000 times faster than text. People also remember images much better than words. No wonder the old adage says that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why your need to craft killer images for your website, social media, email marketing, offline marketing, and a variety of other marketing purposes.

How to hack visual content

The bigger issue is how to go about creating killer images that support engagement, ensure your message is remembered, and improve your search rank? Until now, you had to spend a lot of time and money to hire a graphic designer, video production studios, and artists, unless you already possessed these skills, which I don’t. In this post, we’ll discuss the tools and tricks available to non-designers in 2026 to help you create killer images.

I frankly feel unworthy to even approach this topic because I’m such a novice — I don’t even feel like I have an artistic bone in my body. But I know there are lots of you out there facing the same challenge I do every day. Hence, sharing the tools and tricks I’ve learned over the years to become a successful blogger and build my digital marketing brand should help the rest of you at least improve your use of images to support your brand.

Sure, you can use some stock images, but they get expensive — especially since it’s common practice now to add multiple images to your blog content, not just a single image in the beginning. Using free stock photos often means using something that’s not quite right, plus it messes with your branding because these images are so overused that you start to look like everyone else.

Sometimes, you’re forced to create your own images to preserve your brand identity, ensure the authenticity of your efforts, and convey complex information.

I recently published a post showing 5 tools to create images without spending hours and buying expensive tools like Photoshop. If you didn’t see it, check it out here. To recap, here are some of my favorite tools:

• Canva – which gets better (and more expensive) every year. It now includes various types of visual content to share wherever you need images, including video on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels.
• Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are tools that come in Adobe Creative Cloud for a monthly subscription. A free version from Adobe is Adobe Express. These are relatively expensive, and, with the exception of Express, take a lot of time and training to learn.
• Preview comes installed on Mac computers and Apple tablets. While it’s not good for creating images, you’ll find it useful for editing stock images to make them your own.
• Originally, I mentioned Pablo as a tool. While it’s very limited, it was useful and fast. It’s now been deprecated.
• Dall-e was also part of my original list. Dall-e was the image creation part of ChatGPT. It’s functions have been enhanced and it’s now part of ChatGPT and available for all users, although use is limited for unpaid users. See the image below for an example.

1. AI tools

One of the easiest ways to hack visual content is to use AI-generated images and short videos to enhance your marketing efforts. You can use AI to do more than simply generate images and short videos; however, these tools are good for touching up images and removing unwanted objects.

While using AI-generated images doesn’t directly impact SEO, there are some considerations when using the images, and you can read this post from Forbes to gain deeper insights. These considerations include:

• Potentially damaging your brand by losing its unique look
• Generating images that are too large and take too long to load
• Feeling inauthentic, which can damage user trust

Obviously, there are ways to reduce the potential danger in using this means to hack visual content. For instance, you should experiment with various prompts to ensure your content is unique, fits your brand image, and effectively conveys the information you want to share. Generating effective prompts is a skill you must develop if you want to succeed at not only hacking visual content, but also using an AI tool effectively for other purposes.

My pet peeve with using AI-generated images is that the AI can make mistakes (for other tasks, as well). For instance, the image might contain misspellings, missing words, or incorrect words. Correcting these mistakes often means starting over, as generating a prompt to fix a particular element from the image is often ineffective.

I find Gemini (Nano Banana) does an overall better job with crafting images than other AI platforms, and experts agree with me.

2. Smartphones

Smartphones are everywhere these days. There’s always one in your pocket or nearby to capture an image or video to use to hack visual content. They build authenticity and trust by personalizing your efforts, especially when you include images of attractive people at your firm or pets, like the one below.

You can use these images straight from your camera or edit them using any number of tools, such as Photoshop, Adobe Elements, and Preview.

You can also use your smartphone for creating video and either uploading straight from your phone or editing it through tools like Premiere Pro. TikTok has a great interface to hack visual content, including editing videos, adding music, and including a description for SEO.

3. Infographics and data visualizations

When you hack visual content, don’t forget about infographics and data visualizations. In the age of GEO (generative engine optimization), where building expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trust are essential for capturing AI content searches, nothing performs like demonstrating your expertise and showing past performance.

You can use screenshots or download data visualizations from tools like Google Analytics or directly from other online sources. These contain a ring of authenticity.

Tools like Tableau are perfect for turning any type of data into a beautiful visualization, such as the ones below.

The trick with using visualization is choosing the right visualization format. Using the wrong one, such as showing a pie chart when a timeline would more effectively convey information, obscures and dilutes your efforts.

4. Memes

Memes seem to travel the internet at the speed of sound these days. Below is one I created for an earlier post. You’ll find a plethora of tools available to help you hack visual content with memes, including:

• Specialized meme generators
• Image tools like Canva and Photoshop that allow meme generation
• Apps on your phone, such as Content Aware Scale Meme Maker, which is available on Google Play

If you’re simply sharing memes crafted by other creators, you’ll likely find that your content has a sameness that negates the value of this means to hack visual content.

Conclusion

You need to hack visual content if you want to succeed in today’s marketing environment. As a newbie, I hope you found this overview helpful to get you started. You’ll find other posts on this site that dig into various aspects and help you hack visual content more effectively as you gain more experience.

Use the comment section below to let me know how your efforts are working. Good luck!

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