The twenty-first century can safely be called the era of visual marketing. The modern businessman does not waste time on leisurely reading newspapers in the morning, but quickly scrolls through the news feed on the information site.
Dry descriptions, even if composed by a brilliant author, are interesting only to the most loyal customers. The rest will pass by without noticing your efforts.
Why do pictures dominate text?
In order to understand how to properly use the tools of visual marketing, you should understand the subtleties of its work. Let’s turn to statistics:
- 90% of all information a person receives through his vision;
- Visual signals are processed by the brain 60 000 times faster than all others;
- text accompanied by an image is remembered 65% better than without it;
- headlines with the words “photo” and “video” get 60% more responses;
- about 85% of videos on Facebook users watch without turning on the sound.
Impressive data, isn’t it?
Not least of all, this situation is a consequence of the popularization and optimization of social networks. It makes sense that leading marketers and major SMM specialists have adopted visual resources and use them to the fullest extent.
Varieties and features of visual content
Visual content is a whole group of tools that are designed to highlight your publication and attract the attention of your audience. If 10 years ago users were happy to read posts of 1000-1500 characters, today a text with 7 sentences already looks very heavy.
Let’s consider the main types of visual content:
- Images. A picture conveys a large amount of information to the audience in an instant, without burdening a person with the need to go deeper into reading. Pictures break up long text and give it a lightness. But don’t forget that images need to be specially prepared for use on various social networks. What’s good for Instagram will not look good on Facebook.
- Videos and animations. Lifehacks, timelaps and short reviews are extremely popular today. It’s not necessary to saturate them with offscreen text, because, as mentioned above, most of the users watch videos without turning on the speakers.
- Infographics. In this way, you can combine and structure vast amounts of information, show the strengths and benefits of the product using numbers. The reader can perceive the data easier if they are presented in the form of colorful graphs, tables and lists. Creating such content is not difficult, because there are many online services which generate original infographics using templates.
- Presentations. This tool harmoniously combines the informative text and visual appeal of the image. It is great for demonstrating a proposal, detailed, but not boring to tell about the products. For social networks, the presentation is not suitable, but for the company website – that’s what you need.
If we talk about social networks, it is worth remembering about memes, pictures with quotes, images with riddles. All this brings a live response from the public and is also part of the large-scale world of visual marketing. However, you shouldn’t overuse entertaining content and make it your main focus. Let it act as a regular column that your audience will look forward to.