What Is Visual Content Marketing (With Benefits)

Visuals have the power to captivate your audience and compel them to probe into details. Brain Rules was apt when they stated that pictures could beat text. This is because an individual can retain 65% of the information supplemented via visuals!

Contrary to the popular assumption, visual content marketing isn’t merely about sharing pretty pictures. Instead, it is about using a combination of visuals to connect with the audience and convey your brand message to boost your overall marketing strategy.

What Is Visual Content Marketing?

Gone are the days when people would devote hours to reading detailed information provided by websites. Today, most of us are on the go. If we stumble across a platform stuffed with lengthy content and no catchy photos, we categorise that as dull.

Therefore, it is common for brands to invest their resources into visual strategies. These include photos, infographics, animated GIFs, videos, data visualisations, and other content to engage with the audience.

Sprinkling visuals across the content brings the following perks for the brands:

1. Content Becomes Social Media-Friendly

Regardless of how much your followers love you, they tend to get bored if you post only text-based content. They might start skipping your posts and scroll to interact with more attractive profiles.

According to studies, posts with images receive 650x more engagement than textual ones.

Always choose relevant and high-quality pictures to support the content of your post. Ensure that the images support the narrative. They should also match your brand’s unique voice and style.

Whenever possible, use original photographs. However, if there are limitations, you can find cost-effective images easily on the World Wide Web. Using memes and animated GIFs is also an ideal option for social media. They are humorous and help integrate a unique personality into your post.

As a rule of thumb, always place social media buttons strategically across your graphics and link them to the social media platforms that can generate high traffic.

2. Visuals Enhance Readability

Adding visuals to a content strategy can drastically improve the reader’s experiences. With the growing use of mobile phones, users’ attention spans cannot stay stable across huge chunks of content.

They break the monotony in content and provide relief to the readers. Images also help to convey the key ideas effortlessly. According to experts, humans are biologically wired to process the world through visuals. It has been established that our brain can compute visual directions in a ¼ second!

Hence, a wall of words can be a huge turn-off for the visitors. Visuals help to combat this by breaking the text and sharing information in a catchy way while holding their attention.

3. Image Optimisation Improves SEO

Visuals can pull your website into the top ranks of the search results. With proper optimisation, the web pages will stay atop the ranks despite updates in search engine algorithms.

Google uses an improved Machine Learning (ML) system to scan the visual content and match it with others. Dedicating proper attributes such as alt tags and file names to images helps search engine algorithms understand the context better. They will then rank it strategically, so it pops when relevant keywords are entered.

The more valuable visual content you offer, the more websites use it as a resource and link back to it. You can also create an outreach campaign where you reach out to a high-authority website to publish your visual content. These steps contribute to improving your image Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

4. Content Becomes Relatable

Consumers today want to know more about the brands they are opting for. They want to understand what these brands stand for, making it essential for businesses to make their content relatable. It is an art to embed emotions in the visual content and make your brand relatable to the prospects.

When people can relate to your content emotionally, they develop a bond with you. Data, quotes, humour, and even photos of what happens behind the scenes can help people know you. Psychology Today discovered that emotions play an influential role in determining the customers’ purchase decisions.

Further studies also reveal how positive emotions toward a brand can enhance customer loyalty. Including pleasant images that evoke emotions will make your content more memorable too.

Finally, when they are about to make a purchase decision, they remember the image they saw on your website.

5. Visual Content Promotes Credibility

Another significant reason brands incorporate visuals is their power to enhance credibility. Add a statistic in an article, and some might question you. Put it in a visual, and they start believing you.

Moreover, people are likely to judge the value of a product or a service by looking at the photos. In fact, most of them tend to scan the customer ratings and product information later.

In light of these facts, it isn’t difficult to understand why most marketers rely on visual content marketing when trying to drive traffic. Every form of visual information lends credibility to the info presented.

This serves the same function in presentations. When the University of Minnesota School of Management conducted a 3M-sponsored study, they found that presenters who used visuals were 43% more effective in convincing the audience to follow a desired course of action.

The Takeaway

If you still haven’t planned to explore the potential of visual content, it is about time to jump on the bandwagon.

You need to embed visuals that steal the gaze of every visitor and encourage them to convert. Visual content marketing opens doors to innovative ways of interacting with the audience and getting your desired results.

Learn how to formulate an effective visual marketing strategy, reach out to a broader audience, and spread your word!