How to benefit from visual content to sell more
In the first decades of the digital world, we had tons of written content and poor-quality visuals, but advancement has taken us to a world where everything is based on and depends on visuals. Indeed, now we skip on long texts and hit the like button on eye-catching visuals. We spend hours on TikTok but may get bored reading an article. Content is king, but it definitely has appealing visuals.
If you are a content creator, regardless of what kind of end product you offer to customers, keeping up with the latest trends is critical. Knowing your customer’s demands is the fastest and safest way to be successful, and here is what to watch out for in the latest trend of visual content marketing.
- For 49% of marketers, visual content is crucial for marketing strategy at any business development stage. 19% of marketers build their strategies solely around visual content. The rest closely incorporate visual content into their tactics.
- Visual content for blogs and websites requires as much effort, professionalism, and research as written content.
- People typically remember only 10% of the information they hear three days later. While they retain 65% of the information three days later when an image is paired with the same information.
- In 2020, around 84% of digital content included visual content.
- 96% of customers check images and videos before making a purchase decision.
How important is visual content? Pretty pictures or something more?
The power of visual content: Our brain processing visual elements 60.000 times faster than written information.
We all love cute pictures in bright colors, but the importance of visual content is far from making us happy for just a moment. It is a powerful psychological weapon directly connected to our brain, processing visual elements 60.000 times faster than written information. Having this in mind, marketers leveraged visual content marketing better than anything else, succeeding in boosting customer engagement and retention. Are there any more benefits you will gain aside from communicating information more efficiently? Of course!
Driving customers’ emotions
Would you buy anything without checking the images first? We all know the answer, and besides evoking positive emotions, images can also have a negative impact. It is crucial to provide the highest quality product images wherever they are shared.
Impacting Google Page Rank
Visual content is highly prioritized by Google as being more user-centric and informative. Blog posts and product pages with quality images will be favored by Google Search.
Saving time while providing more information
It is easier and faster to create infographics with key data than to write a 4000-word survey. Spending fewer resources on visual content may have even higher engagement and impressions than written content. While mixing those two notions is an absolute success.
How to boost sales with visual content?
65% of the global population are visual learners. With Gen Z predicted to be a 100% visual learner, visual content may one day rule everything. If you are hoping to drive sales, get customer engagement, lower your bounce rate and have your piece of the pie in the market, you should not save on visual content creation.
Advantages of visual content: 96% of customers check images and videos before making a purchase decision.
Visual content is not only images but videos, data-driven visuals or infographics, customer testimonials, illustrations, presentations, GIFs, memes, and more. Each type is focused on providing maximum information and driving maximum satisfaction to customers. Depending on your product or service, you can have different variations of visual content, but some components are constant:
- Information within the image
- Aesthetics within a trend and uniqueness among the millions
- Quality
- Colors
Creating winning visual content
Visual content creation is not a spontaneous act but rather a matter of extensive research, defining goals, customer needs, market demands, and the value proposition that you may deliver through content.
A quality, emotional and meaningful image will undoubtedly increase the sales volume of any product on the web. Image credit: Shutterstock
In the next step, you need to decide which action or emotion you want to evoke in the audience with visual content; inspiration, engagement, sales, retention, lead generation, etc.
Prioritize quality over quantity; after all, if low-quality content has no followers, who cares how often it is published?
Don’t forget to promote your content, invest in visual content marketing, and don’t forget to track your KPIs.
These are just the general steps of what you need to do to start with visual content and work on driving sales. Here are the most popular content types that may address your needs.
Images
There is nothing new about images, but the new thing you need to focus on is human-centric design, presenting people like me and you, simple, with little flaws, sincere smiles, and open faces.
If your product doesn’t involve humans, think outside the box and never rely on stock images.
Graphic designs
Graphic designs are irreplaceable for visual content creation. Moreover, the aesthetics of graphic design are often incorporated with other types of visual content like illustrations, iconography, images, etc.
Illustrations
Illustrations have been around for a couple of years as a dominating design and visual content element. Actually, it is worth considering illustrations as the best way to create branded content.
Summer island beach and boat scene illustration – an image for travel story used in the blog post on traveling and recreation. Image by PixMeta Studio
Infographics
It is so far the most powerful and valuable visual content type that can be used in any business. By combining text, images, and data, infographics target several goals at once; informing, engaging, link building, increasing traffic, etc.
Animation
Short animations, animated explainer videos, or videos with animated elements are the perfect way to present serious things in a simple, more engaging way.
3D images
If you take visual content more seriously, 3D animations and 3D designs will become your competitive advantage, because we humans like to imagine how things may look in reality or other realities.
AR (augmented reality) images
With the popularity of Meta and different realities (besides the one we are used to living in), AR and VR images have become the new normal within and outside of the virtual world.
Words of wisdom; last words
It is never too soon or too late to change things and incorporate visual content into your digital marketing efforts. There is an audience of millions of customers waiting for your content to like, follow, and purchase. Be always
“Vision trumps all other senses,” says John Medina. Truth or not, I hope you will find the answer for yourself.