Why Do Your Customers Love Your Visual Media Marketing Efforts?

Visual marketing is the KEY to effective content marketing. Don’t put creating visual marketing on the back burner because you think it’s too expensive and complicated. Visual marketing is much simpler than many believe. Simply adding an image to a post on Facebook can boost engagement rates by almost 40%.

Consumers love visual content. Instructions enhanced with visuals are 323% easier to follow than ones without them. This content is easier to remember too. Three days after viewing visual content, people can remember 65% of the information they learned. With text-only content, they can remember only about 10%.

Why should you be concerned with how much information they can remember? Because it’s absolutely vital for brand recall. This is why you should always support your key takeaways and most important information with a visual when you post content.

Let’s say you’re publishing a blog post on the benefits of interactive content. One of your key takeaways is that interactive ads increase the time spent on a page by 47%. Below is an example of a good way to enhance this takeaway with a visual.

21 Best Visual Media Marketing Statistics

1) Nearly 42 percent of marketers agree original graphics have the highest engagement rates.

2) 30 percent of marketers already create their own visuals.

3) Infographics are shared 3x more than any other form of content.

4) 57.6 percent of blog posts have more than one image.

5) 15.9 percent of blog posts include a video.

6) 46.8 percent of blog posts include a visual list of some type.

7) 8.1 percent of blog posts include at least one type of visual.

8) 74 percent of marketers include visuals in their social media posts.

9) Tweets with visuals are retweeted 1.5x more than those without visuals.

10) 51 percent of B2B writers prioritize visual media.

11) Articles featuring images receive 94 percent more views than those without visuals.

12) 51 percent of marketers already prioritize visual asset creation.

13) 70 percent of viewers on YouTube watch videos to help them with a problem.

14) 43 percent of B2C marketers agree that pre-produced video is the most effective form of marketing.

15) 62 percent of B2B marketers agree video is an effective form of marketing.

16) Adding the word “video” to an email subject line can boost open rates by 19 percent and increase click-through rates by 65 percent.

17) 35 percent of brands already use live video.

18) Long videos (20 minutes or longer) account for 55 percent of all videos watched by people on their smartphones.

19) Infographics boost site traffic by 12 percent.

20) Blog posts with images every 100 words receive 2x the number of shares on social media.

21) 85 percent of videos watched on Facebook are without sound.

The Human Brain Is Wired for Visual Content

When used strategically, visual content helps you boost site traffic, expand brand awareness through link building, enhance social media engagement, improve lead generation, and increase sales.

Consumers have a preference for visual marketing like video and infographics because they’re more appealing than text-only content. You can use various types of visual content, including whiteboard explainer videos and screenshots, to build an effective visual content marketing strategy that engages the audience and moves them through the buyer’s journey.

Jakob Nielsen is with the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), a world leader in research-based user experience data. He says that when people visit your website, they only read 28% of the words. They skim through the content to avoid online information overload. Text that is enhanced with visuals grabs the reader’s attention and helps them digest the information in the fastest way possible.

Top Reasons Your Customers Love Visual Content

• It aligns well with their short attention spans
• It simplifies even the most complex topics
• It engages their interests
• They want to share helpful content, and visuals help them to know they are sharing content that their friends and family will understand
• It appeals to them on an emotional level, which stimulates the mind, and people love stimulation

The human attention span has greatly decreased over the past several years. In fact, in 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. In 2013, it was only eight seconds. That means our attention spans are smaller than that of a goldfish, which has an attention span of nine seconds.

Visual content allows you to excel in three core areas of value:

1. Appeal
2. Comprehension
3. Retention

Humans have a natural attraction toward visuals. The first thing on a web page that appeals to our attention are the images and graphics. The visuals allow us to comprehend the message being shared, and thanks to the way our brains are wired, these visuals help us retain the information for a longer period of time. Ultimately, visual content creates a memorable customer experience.

But it’s not just marketers’ research that confirms the value of using visuals to improve engagement rates. Scientific evidence also confirms its value.

90% of the information sent to your brain is visual. Your brain processes images 60,000x  faster than text-only content. Because of this, the brain has a high preference for content with images. Images make it easier for the brain to establish a relationship between the concept being explained and the visual that’s supporting it.

Your brain works to ensure there is a rational connection between the visual and the concept. This is where visual perception comes into the picture. Your brain uses your surroundings and past experiences combined with your memories to build this new connection.

Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University of London, says:

“The brain has to actively construct or invent our visual world. Confronted with an overwhelming barrage of visual information, it must sort out relevant features and make snap judgments about what they mean.”

How to Please Your Customers With Visual Marketing

80% of marketers use visual marketing, and 63% of them use video within their social media marketing campaigns. Marketers are prioritizing visual content because it’s what their customers want. 54% of consumers wish brands would create more video content.

What are you doing to satisfy your customers’ preference for visual marketing? You have several content types to choose from. Best of all, you can mix these visuals together throughout different marketing campaigns to drive leads and increase conversions.

Infographics

When using infographics, you can dissect even the most complex topic and present it in a way that keeps your audience’s attention. They give you the ability to cover “heavy” subjects in a way that is easy on the mind. Your customers would much rather view an infographic with visuals rather than read through a 10,000-word blog post on the same topic.

Well designed and effective infographics are jam-packed with facts and figures that come from credible sources. This lends your brand authority and positions you as a tangible point of reference.

If you’re looking for a way to embed your message into the minds of your customers — and you should be — then infographics are the solution. They not only increase organic rankings through major link building advantages, but also expand brand awareness. Along with greater brand awareness comes an increase in conversions and ROI. And like a cherry on top of the sundae, infographics are effective for both online and offline marketing.

Explainer Videos

The likelihood of someone buying from you increases by 85% when the customer watches a whiteboard explainer video on your product.

Whiteboard explainer videos also make it easy to track what your customers are the most interested in. Like infographics, they allow you to make any topic easy to understand. You can also use them as part of a social media strategy to generate interest in your product. A single viral whiteboard explainer video has the potential to increase your brand awareness exponentially. Compared to paper pitches, explainer videos really hit the ball out of the park.

Trying to cram too much information in a landing page confuses the audience. With a whiteboard explainer video, you condense the information into a short video clip — or a long one — and your audience is much more likely to stick around to see what you have to say. As you’re telling your message, you can use a variety of graphics, charts, images, and animations to bring your message to life.

How Does Visual Marketing Influence Visual Identity?

When using visual marketing to please your customers, you need to understand how it shapes your visual identity.

“A brand’s identity is comprised of characteristics and attributes of the brand that cohere into the unique set of associations that a company aspires to create and maintain. Brand identity helps create relationships between the company and consumers and can lead to perceptions of brand personality. When consumers interact with brands, they are exposed to visual stimuli such as logos, colors, shapes, typefaces, characters, styles, and other brand-image elements.”

Every time you publish a piece of content, your visual identity is either enhanced positively or impacted negatively. But your visual identity goes far beyond marketing materials. The physical condition of your store — if you own a brick-and-mortar store — impacts your visual identity as well.

To enhance your visual identity with visuals, it’s important to start with your brand story, voice, imagery, and persona. Every time you publish a new piece of content, make sure you consider how it will impact these elements.

From font use to color selection, consider how everything will evoke emotion from your audience and how those emotions will shape the audience’s impression of your brand. For a better understanding of colors and how they influence emotions, make sure to freshen up on color psychology for marketing.

The Takeaway

Are you ready to make your customers happy, increase conversions, and achieve a high ROI? It starts with taking all of your existing content and enhancing it with visuals. It also includes publishing new visual content like infographics, whiteboard explainer videos, interactive content, and more. Both statistics and science confirm visual marketing is the KEY to effective marketing, so it only makes sense to partner with a visual marketing agency like IGW to improve your marketing efforts.