There was a time marketing was nothing more than white papers and mere text. Today, things have evolved and your inbound marketing success now depends to a large extent on your visual marketing efforts. Visual tools like animated videos, pictures and infographics have become important for grabbing your audience’s attention and improve your brand’s recognition across web.

The rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram Pinterest and the rest of them as the main channels for digital marketing has further increased the focus on visual tools. Statistics have shown that greater results are achieved with a shift in strategy from mere text to visual tools. This means there is a need to incorporate visuals into your marketing campaigns

What do the stats say?

Typically, people are more likely to remember the information they see than what they are told or read online. In fact, the retention rate of visual content is up to 65% even after three days of seeing the information. Knowing these, it makes complete sense that marketers are opting for visual content. A 2016 study by the Content Marketing Institute revealed that more than ever, digital marketers are making use of visual tools more than any other way to display content.

In the past two years alone, the usage of mobile videos alone has grown by up to 10 million viewing minutes per day. In fact, videos have become so important that merely adding the word “Video” in the subject line of your email can boost open rate  by up to 19%.

But video isn’t the only form of visual content that has become widely popular for marketing. Eye-tracking studies on various online platforms show that users are more likely to pay attention to information displayed as an image and will spend more time looking at it than they would on reading texts.  In fact, infographics can potentially increase web traffic to your website by up to 12%.

Summing it all up, it is certain you are likely to achieve more with visual content that you would without it. Here are some of the advantages of using visuals in your marketing.

So, What are the pros of using visual content for digital marketing?

Visual content grabs attention faster

While it is true that people spend a lot of time online these days, the reality is they are constantly being bombarded with information by millions of businesses trying to get their attention. So much that using textual content might simply put you at a disadvantage. To make sure that your business is noticed, you need to leverage innovative visual presentations. This way you will immediately grab attention and get your business the attention it requires.

It is a lot easier to understand

Today, we live in a world where there is just too much information in circulation and every business has a very narrow window to showcase what they are offering to their target audience. To take advantage of that very narrow window of opportunity, you need content that will explain what you are offering as simple and straightforward as possible. Complex information can be better broken down into bits using graphics and animated videos since they are easier to understand and will present clear and concise information almost instantly.

It boosts engagement and conversion

One important rule for effective marketing is to ensure that you are not only putting content out there but you are engaging your potential customers as much as possible.  The goal of every of your marketing efforts is to build an identifiable brand and to ensure conversion. Engaging your audience is one important way to achieve this. People are more likely to interact with visual content more than any other content type which makes it a more effective tool for engagement.

With more visual content on your social media pages and campaigns, you are more likely to get your audience interested in what you do. Adding visuals to your websites and landing pages is will also improve your conversion rates in the long run.

Visuals are more effective for soliciting required user actions

When an action is required, like following a page, subscribing to a channel or even purchasing a product, the best way to get the information across is by using graphics and visuals. Ordinarily, colors elicit varying reactions and can be used to communicate different information. Additional visual tools like animated content, videos and infographics are more likely to get people to click a button than mere texts.

Present the same information in a more interesting way

One of the main advantages of using visuals is the possibility of repurposing content. For example, if you have not been using visual contents for your marketing campaigns before and you intend to start now, you can simply convert all the information you have written before into attractive graphics using detailed and interesting templates. This way written information that will be otherwise drab and uninteresting to people can be made more interesting and relatable by simply converting to visuals.

Target specific social networks

In the world of digital marketing, understanding the dynamics that operate on various social media platforms is important. The truth is, what works on Facebook doesn’t always work on Instagram. For example, a short animated video would work across platforms like Instagram or YouTube. An stunning picture will make your tweets more attractive and catchy. Pictures will also work great for Pinterest and Facebook. For most of these platforms, using text alone will not be able to get you the sort of attention you need. But with visual content, you can easily tailor your campaigns to your audience and direct your information to suit the channels you are targeting. 

Conclusion

From all indications, adding visual content to your ads and marketing campaigns can effectively improve engagement and increase your brand recognition. However, it is important that you get familiar with the various options available and how to effectively make use of each one to get the best results.