Visual content marketing is an effective digital content strategy that uses visual elements to reach your audience and achieve business goals. Visuals boost the audience’s attention, help them comprehend, and retain information. In this post, we will see the importance of visuals in marketing, their benefits, and the types of visuals you can include in your content to achieve your marketing objectives.
What is Visual Content Marketing?
Visual Content Marketing is the process of using visual content such as images, videos, infographics, and GIFs in your content mix. Visuals help inform, engage, and influence the audience while remaining easy to understand.
Besides, it is proficient to include visual elements in your content marketing strategy since it gives an appealing aesthetic look to your website.
The content and the visual design will grab the audience’s attention and stay on their mind for a prolonged time. It impacts your bounce and conversion rates and helps retain your customers over the long run.
The Science Behind Visual Thinking
Visual content marketing is backed by science. What we see impacts how we think. Our brain is a fast processor that only takes nearly half a second (400-500 milliseconds) to respond to visual stimuli. An MIT study found that the brain can process entire images within 13 milliseconds!
Our eyes transmit information about what we see around us to our brains. The visuals remain much longer than the plain text or auditory information. Visuals are proven to improve learning and comprehension. And it motivates the audience to take action, such as sharing it on social media or consuming additional content.
That’s why you must have visuals in your content since our brains are hardwired to perceive visuals faster.
Visuals Speak Louder
The internet revolution has given us enormous data. Our brains have the ability to process a vast amount of visual data, so you don’t need to read the text but skim through the information.
Research says that the human eye can look at 36,000 visuals per hour which is not the same as the text. You cannot read 36,000 words in an hour.
Visuals convey a lot of information faster. When your content is enriched with visuals, you give your audience something their brains can process more quickly.
Have these scientific facts in mind when you design your website. More than you, or your audience, the marketers love visual content. As they can pull new audiences, retain them on your page, generate leads, and ultimately bring revenue.
Significance of Visual Content Marketing
1. Visuals are Shareable
Visuals are creative that inform and impact the audience. When your audience finds them attractive or interesting, they share it on social media. Including options for users to share your content online quickly would be great.
2. Visuals are Ranked High
Visuals are ranked well by Google. Attention to alt tags in images since they explain what the image is all about and provide a better picture understanding. When searching with relevant keywords, the search engine quickly picks up the visual with proper alt tags.
3. Visuals are Fast and Easy to Consume
Visuals are best for explaining a process flow or a methodology. Rather than a textual explanation, a visual flow diagram can easily define a complex process. Ensure to include visuals in your content strategy, as they will fetch the expected results.
4. Visuals are Appealing
Even the most interesting blog article can turn boring. A visual makes it exciting and entertaining. Visuals are creative and add value to the text. Instead of a regular mix of words, it gives variety to your content. You can grab the user’s attention and keep them engaged.
5. Visuals Help Trigger Desired Actions
Visuals prompt your audience to take action. It helps your potential customers to ‘Sign Up’ or download your white paper or any other marketing strategy you have planned. Visuals help you to accomplish your business goals by drawing your audience further down the marketing funnel.
Types of Visual Content That You Can Use
There are plenty of options for the type of visual content to use. You must consider time, cost, and the type of visuals you require. It could be static visuals such as a picture or a chart or dynamic visuals such as videos and animations.
Let’s look at the different types of visuals that boost content marketing.
1. Images
The old adage is true in content marketing: A picture is worth a thousand words. Images make the reading experience more exciting and help the readers understand your content. It increases user engagement and the overall accessibility of your website. You find that images add value to content marketing statistics. Do use them liberally to complement your blogs and social media posts. As a cherry on top, they are incredibly good for your SEO performance.
2. Videos
If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how important videos are for content marketing. A video can convey complicated information in the shortest possible time. This makes the audience stay longer on your page and revisit it later for more information. Besides, search engines like Google prefer pages that have embedded relevant videos. Video content marketing is critical for your marketing success and pays rich dividends almost instantly.
3. Infographics
Content containing graphics or images generates more views and is universal eyeball magnets. Include a link on the infographic and cross-post it on social media to bring more visitors to your website. Besides, they are good for image SEO.
4. Slideshows
You can discuss your business goals, present your annual report, and effectively explain your sales and profit through slides. It’s a perfect solution for a B2B content marketing strategy where you can share with your customers, win their confidence and give a view of your business. You can provide the link to your business website in the slides and share it on your social media accounts.
5. Data Visualization
Data visuals in charts and graphs can communicate complex information that is easy to understand and intuitive. It aids in discussing future goals, comparing past and previous sales, and analyzing.
Such comparisons and analyses use numbers and text that will represent charts. This makes it easier for your audience to comprehend the data behind that text and numbers.
6. Animations
Animations are cost-effective means of marketing that can help your business convey a simple message or explain a complex concept appealingly. You can add the animations to your website and share them across social media for effective engagements.
7. Memes
Memes build user engagement and create a conversation around it. You can design it to be funny and relate it to a theme or a concept. They can become viral in minutes and increase your brand’s popularity if done right.
Moreover, memes convey the information you intend to share with your audience with a long-lasting effect. That’s the reason why your content marketing plan should include memes.
8. Interactive Visuals
You can try to have an interactive visual in your blog because they are dynamic, exciting, and draw the audience’s attention. Usually, these visuals are embedded in a dashboard. As you move your mouse or click on any elements in the dashboard, the content/visuals change accordingly.
9. Screenshots
A screenshot captures the content display of your current screen on your smartphone or your computer. It enables you to share it with others for their reference. Generally, screenshots are helpful in explaining a step-by-step process, such as how-to-do guides. Use screenshots to break down complex processes into simpler steps.
10. Illustrations
An illustration can be a drawing, a picture, or an explanation of a concept. They are depicted based on the context of the information. You can also use an illustration in your content when you cannot get relevant images. Though time-consuming, it can be a unique asset for your business in the long run.
FAQs
Why is visual content important in marketing?
The marketer’s role is to sell a product to the targeted audience. Conveying information discussing its features, pros, and cons can be explained through blogs and other types of content. The brain takes ¼ seconds to process the visuals, and the brain is capable of recollecting them. This triggers the audience to become interested and turn into prospects.
How will visual content marketing have an impact on customer purchases?
Visual content marketing can help increase conversion by withholding the target audience. It makes the target audience stay connected and engaged with your brand. This strong connection can convert leads into potential customers.
How powerful is visual content in a marketing strategy?
Using a mix of visuals and text can help you reach a bigger audience, offer more value, improve your message’s clarity and impact, and make your blog more engaging.
What is a visual marketing strategy?
Visual marketing uses images, videos, and other multimedia content to strengthen your brand and communicate with your target audience. As part of a larger marketing strategy, it helps you depict certain subjects and concepts that would otherwise be harder to approach using only text.
What visual content ideas can you include in your content marketing strategy?
You can include in your marketing strategy to offer shareable images, downloadables, and printable images. Provide all these in the social media channels, and it is easy for you to track the metrics. Post new employee photos and behind-the-screen videos, and plan for webinars.Â
Closing Thoughts
Visuals play a significant role in accomplishing your marketing strategies. There are plenty of online tools to create visuals. You can leverage the aesthetics of the visuals to convey your ideas faster and better to your audience. Make sure your blogs have a variety of visual content marketing elements in line with your business goals. Let visuals do the talking and reap the benefits in record time.
Please keep visiting our blogs for more interesting information on content marketing.
