For PR professionals, identifying targets, aiming messaging, and directing distribution towards a particular audience is well within the skillset, but one key element of the content usually lands outside of the PR department – imagery.

Visuals, graphics and videos tend to be under the purview of the marketing, product or advertising team. Understandably, these visual assets are often created to highlight the most popular features or uses of the brand. However, those images may not resonate with niche audiences or match the messaging intended for those particular audiences. For example, the main users of crayons are children, but an artist who uses crayons as their main medium may not feel represented by the imagery of a child using the product.

Thoughtful and targeted visuals attach emotions to your content, and can often make your message easier to remember, like an image or video of an adult using crayons to create art is more likely to be remembered by an adult crayon artist.

To develop targeted visuals, first identify your goal audience in terms of their demographics, their relationships with others, any pre-existing relationship with the brand, and how they spend their time. Based on your research, create personas that represent the features of your data and establish a story arc around their interaction with the brand. The imagery should be created based on these elements, representing the personas in their lives and their experiences with the brand. These visuals will be more representative of the brand, the audience, and the relationship between the two.

There are many tools you can use when developing imagery, and this BusinessWire blog post has a good selection for PR professionals. These are some of my favorites:

• Canva, to help you develop posters and graphics
• Panopto Express, to easily record audio, video and the content of your screen
• Animaker, to create animations and videos
• Adobe Creative Cloud, a more complex but highly capable range of tools for many types of visuals

You can also create targeted imagery without taking the pictures or editing the graphics yourself. Communicate the personas, their stories, and the importance of their representation with whoever already handles the imagery. Or hire a creative agency to provide you with content, from raw images to finished visuals. Blend techniques and tools to find a balance between time, cost, and quality satisfactory to your organization.

Once you have imagery that matches your messaging and your understanding of the target, aim the package at the intended audiences. Authentic and contextual imagery with a good caption is more likely to be used by earned media, and unique images with SEO-based names allow you and your audience to find resultant coverage more easily. These images will better represent the experiences of your audience, celebrate niche markets, and generate new conversations.