What Is a Key Visual? How to Create a Distinctive, Engaging One

“Key Visual” is an important highlight of every communication campaign. It is one of the elements that shape a brand and leave a strong impression on viewers. To understand more about the concept of What a Key Visual is and how to create one that attracts customers, let's MONA Media discover it in the article below.

What is a Key Visual?

Key Visual is the main image, carrying a meaningful message, that many brands use throughout their marketing campaign to guide their communication. Using a Key Visual is a smart move, because after each advertising campaign a business raises its brand recognition among target customers.

A Key Visual is a useful tool that brings a business many benefits, because it acts directly on what viewers see. Building an impressive Key Visual is far from simple. A business must spend time researching, exploring and weaving in a meaningful message that relates to the brand.

Key Visual example from the Milka brand

Why a Key Visual matters

A Key Visual plays an important role in creating a strong brand impression. A distinctive key visual also makes the campaign message more visual, memorable and attractive to customers.

Raise brand recognition

There is no denying the importance of a Key Visual in build brand awareness. If you invest in a carefully made, eye-catching and creative advertising Key Visual, customers will remember your brand for a long time. With a distinctive image and a human message, the message travels more strongly and helps a business reach more audiences potential customers.

Key Visual brings clear benefits to brand recognition, helping a brand stand out and be remembered easily. An impressive key visual is therefore one of the deciding factors in a branding strategy. To support businesses in building a strong brand image, MONA Media offers MONA Media provides professional solutions brand identity design, which helps you create the most impressive and professional look.

Specifically, these are the benefits of choosing a brand identity design service:

• Brand logo design for use on every platform, following a set of standards
• Design of all marketing and sales materials, from poster design, banner design cho website, fanpage, social media,…
• Communication strategy advice tailored to your business field
• Full “real time” reports on all activities so brand-building solutions can be adjusted in time

And many other attractive benefits when you work with MONA Media on your branding journey. Contact HOTLINE 1900 636 648 or get direct advice from the MONA team right here.

Create a signature highlight for your brand

For customers to remember your brand at once and praise it when comparing with other businesses, you need a unique Key Visual with a pioneering direction. Prefer bright, standout colors in your Key Visual, to catch attention and stimulate customers' sight and emotions. This brings lasting value to your business and helps it spread more widely.

Help your brand lead trends

In today's era of technology, a brand with a distinctive, impressive Key Visual immediately leads trends on social media platforms, with Facebook as a clear example. It is an extremely influential medium that increases your business's reach.

Key Visual vs. logo

Key Visual and logo are both concepts related to brand recognition, so it is easy to see why many people confuse the two terms. In practice, what is the difference between a logo and a Key Visual?

• Logo is a symbol that represents a brand. Logo design usually aims for simplicity and focuses entirely on the brand name.
• Key Visual is used to describe the image used throughout, and tied to, a brand's promotional campaign .

To be fair, creating a Key Visual suits brand communication campaigns better, thanks to its ability to carry product information, catch attention and attract potential customers.

How to create an attractive, memorable Key Visual

Define the target customer

You must define which customers your business is aimed at, so you can build a Key Visual that suits them. Only when you identify the right target customers and build a Key Visual in a matching style can you reach customers' hearts and stay in their minds for a long time.

Stay consistent

Many people think the more elaborate a Key Visual is, the more impressive it is to viewers, but this is not necessarily true today. The most important thing is that the Key Visual is relevant and consistent with the brand identity. Choosing simplicity, the necessary content and consistency helps your Key Visual stand out and compete with strong rivals on the market.

Focus on emotion

It is neither the image nor the sound but emotion that directly shapes how customers feel. A Key Visual is successful when it delivers its message with the full range of emotion, such as joy, sadness, surprise, reflection or doubt. This makes customers want to interact, give feedback, share and pay attention to your advertising strategy.

You may not know that a Key Visual carries many shades of emotion and is seen as the “ace card” of every marketing campaign.

Combine colors well

The best way to create a Key Visual is to match content and form well. Alongside emotion, you should also combine colors harmoniously. Combine several standout colors such as red, yellow and green to stimulate customers' brains. Don't forget to put in the care to create a distinctive image instead of cramming in extra content.

→ Read more: The meaning of brand identity colors

Limit text

There is no denying the value of striking text, but when creating a Key Visual, keep text to a minimum. Customers often don't have much time to read all the text you present. So focus on a beautiful, simple and distinctive image to keep their eyes on it longer.

Identify the “golden” moment

A business needs to catch the “golden” moment to launch a suitable and effective communication campaign. Follow the “hot trends” on the market and social media so you can weave their content and meaning into the Key Visual. However creative and attractive a Key Visual is, if it does not suit customers' tastes, the results will not be very good.

Some famous Key Visual examples

Here are some examples of Key Visuals used successfully by brands, for you to refer to.

Vincom – the concept “Quà tặng cuộc sống” (Gifts of Life)

Vincom is a shopping center with entertainment, shopping and dining, well known to many customers in Vietnam. To strengthen its place with customers and build a larger brand, Vincom created a Key Visual with the idea “Gifts of Life”.

OMO Matic Wonderland

OMO Vietnam ran a brand-new campaign to promote Omo laundry detergent through a Key Visual. The perfect blend of senses natural, combined with modern technology made the campaign a big success.

The main concept is a human hand and a robot hand touching from two sides. Dropping many earlier design images, Omo Matic chose the image of two hands forming a heart, to stress where humans meet high technology.

The Hub Connecting the world

The Hub – a shopping center of 62,000 square meters, with a shopping area, restaurants, bars, a hotel, and a shuttle service to the station and the international airport. The Key Visual of this campaign presents The Hub as a miniature world, a center that connects the world and offers customers many conveniences.

The Hub's Key Visual is aimed at customers with a modern lifestyle, so it combines many bright and somewhat vivid colors. What makes The Hub's Key Visual special is its use of 3D design – one of the popular trends of recent years.

Le Tisane Sogni D’oro

Le Tisane Sogni D’oro is known as a natural tea product that is very good for the health of Vietnamese consumers. Understanding that consumers want natural, safe products, Le Tisane Sogni D'oro used this to build the Key Visual for its promotional campaign the brand image.

Using the image of a flower bud to stand for a cup of tea, Le Tisane Sogni D'oro made good use of a simple but very “valuable” detail. Thanks to the creativity of its design team, customers felt the full purity and calm that a cup of tea brings.

5 standout Key Visual trends you should not miss

If your business chooses a Key Visual for a communication campaign to promote its brand, take a look at these 5 standout trends below.

Digital Gets Delicate

The age of technology has a big influence on design style, and gives you finer lines and smoother textures. The Digital Gets Delicate trend shows that professionally designed images raise product quality, flexibility and creative opportunities.

Female Creator

There is no denying that women are always a “hot” topic and easily inspire viewers, especially through distinctive photos. If you weave in positive stories about women's real lives, the message in your Key Visual attracts customers more than ever.

A good theme for businesses to consider is the image of famous women who influence creativity and keep striving. With this theme, awareness, roles and gender balance are always a rich source of ideas for designers.

No Man Is Island

Environmental issues have never cooled down. They are a sensitive matter, because businesses carry a big responsibility for protecting the environment. Knowing this, many businesses prioritize conveying messages that balance natural elements with the surrounding context. For example, gardens, parks, rivers, streams or lush landscapes placed around man-made structures.

3D-designed Key Visual

One interesting idea that businesses should not overlook when creating a Key Visual is 3D design. It is easy to see 3D images and video ads in the marketing of businesses in the automotive, film, real estate and other industries, which aim to give viewers an interesting experience.

Storytelling

This Key Visual trend appeared in 2017 and has drawn the most positive reactions since. Storytelling shortens the distance to customers through fun, meaningful stories or even everyday life experiences. Many businesses also cleverly and sincerely add calls to action to buy.

Using images and video to tell a story to a specific customer group in a fitting situation will surely win a business many compliments from customers.

Things to note when creating a distinctive Key Visual

To create a key visual that is attractive in both form and content, pay attention to these key points:

• Prioritize simplicity and ease of communication because customers only see an ad for a few short seconds.
• Customers always appreciate brands with a unique, creative look that is “one of a kind”.
• Use the Key Visual across different media so it reaches customers in every format.
• Avoid a rambling Key Visual and focus on the tastes and style of the target customers you are aiming for.

Key Visual is the key that decides the success of a brand communication campaign. In this article, MONA Media helped you understand what a Key Visual is and how to create one that attracts viewers. We hope the information gives you more ideas for a successful advertising campaign.