Plain text without images or visuals is a thing of the past. Have you ever noticed that your eyes get immediately captivated by visuals and images when you scan textual information either in a newspaper or online blog post? The same holds true when it comes to engaging the existing and potential customers through your content marketing campaigns. Content marketing lets you put the value of your offerings (products/services) into words. And when you combine the power of words with the charisma of visuals, it elevates the effectiveness of your marketing efforts beyond your imagination.
Nowadays, when customers want businesses to put considerable energy and time into enticing them to have a meaningful connection with their brand, a well-thought-out content marketing strategy incorporated with varied visual approaches can do wonders. If you are also planning to launch a new content marketing campaign and looking for some good reasons to invest in visual content, you have landed at the right place. In this blog post, we have listed some of the most significant benefits of visual content marketing. Have a look!
- Reduce Bounce Rate
Not getting enough leads even after launching a well-planned content marketing campaign? It indicates a higher bounce rate and implies that there is something wrong with your strategy. A higher bounce rate shows the ineffectiveness of your content marketing campaign in convincing the users/visitors to stay and act on your CTA (call-to-action). Well, you can reduce the bounce rate by incorporating high-resolution visuals in your campaign.
Visuals, such as images, videos, charts, graphs, GIFs, memes, etc., increase the readability of the content and make it more engaging, thereby captivating the lead’s attention and increasing the conversion rate.
Pro Tips:
- Use and high-quality images.
- Visuals must be congruent with the overall ethos and style of the brand.
- Combine the right fonts, shapes, and colors in the visuals to gain more traction.
Example: Rypple, a web-based social performance management platform, witnessed a 20% spike in conversions by inserting an explainer video on top of its landing page.
- Stay in Memory for Long
According to Lynell Burmark, a proponent of visual literacy, “…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information (plus or minus 2). Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.”
Scientific studies have established the fact that humans have an outstanding ability to encode pictures faster than spoken words. The human brain is more inclined towards images and is primed to secure the visual information deep in the memory of the viewers. Further, studies have also proven that 65% of the population are visual learners. So, if you want your audience to store information in their long-term memory, complement the content with meaningful images. Moreover, visuals make it easy to make sense out of the complex content and increase the retention rate.
Pro Tip – If you genuinely want to increase the visual retention, ensure that the images you are using are not badly resized, over-compressed, or pixelated.
- Improve SEO Ranking
Struggling to get your content noticed and generate organic visibility? Use visuals in your content marketing campaign to increase user engagement and rank on search engines. Content marketing campaigns with images have a higher click-through rate, which means more leads. Moreover, images are highly shareable, which helps your content gain more visibility and engagement on social media, ultimately increasing your brand awareness.
Visuals make content more comprehensive and digestible, making the audience spend more time on the page. It will reduce the bounce rate and increase the average time spent, ensuring better SEO ranking and performance. Further, you can get high-quality backlinks from other high-domain authority websites, which pushes the rank of your page on search engines.
Pro Tip – Since Google can’t read visual content, the algorithm searches for images by linking them together or matching shapes in other images. Thus, to generate more visibility, you must use optimized visual content in your strategy.
- Easy and Faster to Process
As a reader, what would you prefer to refer to the most – a complex concept explained through a well-written 1000-word article with no images or the same concept explained in a visually appealing manner through a video or infographic? We are pretty sure that you will prefer the second option!
Visuals add to the richness of textual information. Human eyes can register 36,000 visual messages per hour, and the brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text. 90% of information or data transmitted to the brain is visual. You can reap maximum benefits if you prepare your content marketing strategy taking into account all these facts.
By including images and visuals in your campaign, you provide the audience with something more in addition to just text, prompting them to absorb the complex information within a short snippet of time.
- Define Brand Personality Impactfully
What comes to your mind first when we talk about the two most popular brands – Apple and Nike? Well, it is their simple, clean, sleek, and powerful images that say a lot about the brands’ personality. Isn’t it?
Visuals provide insights into who you are, what you are about, and why people should prefer you over competitors. By aligning the brand’s visual assets with the brand’s personality, you can gain the trust of potential customers and increase the revenue of your business. In addition, visuals create a positive and strong brand persona, making customers feel connected with your services, products, and overall business.
Pro Tip – The reputation of your brand gets impacted by the images you choose to represent it. Customers feel more associated with your brand if the images look great and resonate with them at the emotional level. So, before choosing an image for your campaign, make sure it communicates your brand message rightly.
- Influence Human Emotions
If you want to elicit a strong emotional response, use visual metaphors. Visual information and emotions are processed in the same part of the brain, generating memories. Moreover, visuals have the power to shape human behavior and perception; they might put your audience in a state of contemplation or capture their mood. So, by leveraging the right visuals in their campaigns, marketers can influence the intended audience’s perception of their products and services in a positive manner.
To sum up, visuals act as anchors and trigger emotions in viewers, ultimately increasing information retention. Visuals impact the perception of the audience for your brand, interacting with them on a primal and emotional level.
- Encourage the Audience to Take Action
With reducing attention spans, the role of visuals has become undeniable in the content marketing sphere for generating higher user engagement. Visuals provide comprehensibility to the content without losing its readability, thus making it easy for the viewers to grab the important key takeaways without reading the text in its entirety. Visuals provide them the direction on what they are supposed to do next.
Pro Tip – To drive your audience to take the actions you desire, use actionable words or CTAs (call-to-action), such as “Give us a call to learn more” or “Download now,” etc., on the images.
Example: See how Dropbox has taken its content marketing strategy to the next level by including the “Get Dropbox” CTA on its website’s home page.
The Inference
There is no denying the fact that the role of visuals in content marketing is growing tremendously in this digital era. High-definition visuals, such as infographics, images, icons, GIFs, etc., quickly capture the attention of the audience more than plain text. In a nutshell, a perfect blend of visuals and content in your marketing campaign can drive significant growth to your business and set it apart from the competitors.
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