Getting the Most Out of Localized Elements in Media Visuals

This content was written and published for Shutterstock Inc.

Marketers who tailor visuals to reflect the people and places their audiences know see better engagement and success with content. Find out how you can add more local and personal elements to your media and build your relationship with customers.

Marketers put a lot of thought into what traits to include when they target audiences with content. Lots of consideration about location, age, ethnicity, gender, relationships, jobs, and other audience traits goes into every paid media targeting decision.

The same level of attention doesn’t always go into the visuals used in paid media. Some campaigns end up using one-size-fits-all images instead of tailoring them to specific audiences.

Ignoring the importance of local and personal elements in visuals is a common and costly mistake. Marketers are missing out by not adding local and personal elements to their visuals. After all, matching targeting with visuals builds personal connections between a brand’s content and their audience.

In this post we’ll explore both why local elements matter for the visuals in your paid media. We’ll also look at some tips for adding local elements to your visuals.

When Local and Personal Visuals Help

Only using local and personal visuals to expand to new regions is a common mistake. Market expansion has an obvious need for it, but there are a number of other times when local and personal visual content can be beneficial.

Service expansion can also utilize local and personal visual content. Something like adding a new language to your website and services can be an opportunity to improve visual content too. Site experiences based on visitors’ locations, languages, and activity are a great way to insert local and personal visuals. This will help maximize how relevant your brand feels to visitors.

New customer personas are another great opportunity for adding more localization to your visuals. Think of a bank marketing a new financial product with ads targeted at millennials in New York. The campaign can focus on images and videos that show traits like age, ethnicity, gender, marital status, and what their neighborhoods look like.

Pay Attention to the Nuances of Audience Locations

Think about the nuances of the physical locations your audiences live in. They’re a good place to start when improving the local and personal feel of your visuals. Cities and countries around the world have different characteristics and looks. Nuances of physical locations outside can include:

• Building styles and types

• Language and measurements on signs

• Common vehicles on streets

• Vegetation, topography, and weather

  
  

Passing off an image of a downtown Los Angeles street as Sydney could be problematic for locals for a subtle reason. The climate, vegetation, and buildings might pass well enough but traffic and signs would be appear foreign. You could lose the audience from the small local nuance of which the direction cars travel in and the lack of metric system on signs.

Likewise, workspaces and home interiors around the world also differ greatly from one country or city to the next. Nuances of physical locations inside can include:

• Room size and type

• Decorations used

• Furniture and objects

• Activities

  
  

For example, in many North American cities working in a large office tower with modern design and open spaces is common. By contrast, in European cities offices tend to be smaller, less open, and in older and more compartmentalized buildings. Similarly, while it may be the norm to show visuals of detached homes in North America, it would feel foreign in Asian markets. Suburbs and home styles in that region look very different.

Get Familiar With What Your Audience Looks Like

Another easy way to add local elements to your visual content is to be specific on showing the physical traits of the people you’re targeting. The nuances of individual people’s physical appearances are endless. Instead, try thinking of common physical traits on a macro level. It’s easy and effective to filter for ethnicities, ages, and genders on stock sites. What’s even more effective is pairing filters with descriptive search terms.

For example, a consumer goods company may be targeting young mothers in Latin America for a regional diaper brand. Their first search may be simple terms like “new mother” or “mother with baby.” But results could improve with an age filter of 20s or 30s. Likewise, they could improve further with an ethnicity filter.

An even better strategy would be to get more descriptive in the search terms. Include settings those mothers would be familiar with. So, the term “new mother” becomes “new mother with fussy baby.” Or “mother with baby” becomes “mother with baby in stroller” while using the same filters.

Also, using exclusion filters can help you refine your searches to get more relevant results. In the same example, “new mother” may bring back too many images of pregnant women or babies at hospitals. Excluding terms like “pregnant” and “hospital” while keeping the age and ethnicity filters can result in visuals that are more relevant to the people a brand is trying to connect with.

Understand the Activities of Your Audience

Another way to add local elements to your visual content is to show activities that are specific to your audience.

Every culture, demographic, and subset of people have unique activities and routines they do every day. Many of these are very local and personal to them. Showing visuals of activities is an effective way to build personal connections between people and brands. It’s even more effective when a brand’s product or service is part of the visual.

Similar to physical traits, the list of activities and scenarios you could include in visuals is endless. However, thinking of activities on a macro level can help. Think about the typical day for a target persona and what things they do on a regular basis.

When representing people in work settings, activities you could show include:

• Commuting to and from work

• Working at desks, in boardrooms, or talking on the phone

• Presentations, company wide meetings, or office gatherings

• Meals and lunch meetings

• Business travel
  

To connect with the daily activities of students or young adults, visuals could include:

• Listening in classrooms, lecture halls, or labs

• Common extra curricular student activities

• Playing recreational sports

• Gathering with friends
  

For mothers, fathers, caretakers, or other family roles, visuals of activities could include:

• Playing with children

• Preparing meals

• Travelling to children’s activities

• Helping with schoolwork

• Morning and bedtime rituals

  
  

Opportunities to use visuals that show activities specific to certain jobs are endless as well. Showing an engineer’s job could mean images of a daily visit to a job site, and images for a doctor could include attending a medical conference.

Create More Local and Personal Visuals Today

Improving your visual content to include more local and personal elements doesn’t require a lot of resources. Also, these tips on audience locations, appearances, and activities aren’t a one or the other choice. Instead, the best solution is a hybrid of the three.

Making use of technology resources like advanced filtering options on services like Shutterstock and thinking outside the box for search terms is a good starting point. It may be all you need to be successful early on.