The Benefits of Visual Content in Online Marketing

It has become clear over the past few years that Inbound Marketing is the way of the future for any company who wants to succeed in the online space. But as more and more information competes for people's attention on smaller and smaller screens, it's becoming increasingly clear that Visual Content is what will truly engage audiences and lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates.

Let's look at some relevant statistics about the importance of visual content:

• The human brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text.
• 93% of human communication is visual.
• Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets than plain text tweets (source: Buffer)
• Compelling visual elements result in a 37% increase in engagement from targeted customers.

But wait! would you prefer to read dry stats like those in a bulleted list of text, or in a snazzy infographic like the one below?

As you can see, presenting this content in a compelling, attractive manner results in an experience that is more engaging and easier to understand. What's more, a well-done infographic, an interesting image, or an informative video is much more likely to be shared on the various social media platforms. 

It's obvious that visual content is more important than ever. But knowing that you need visual content is different from using it effectively. Here are some helpful tools that you can use to create visual content for your website and social media channels:

Canva

This free tool (which also includes a wide variety of stock photos that you can purchase) is an amazingly easy to use web-based graphic design program, providing a wide variety of helpful templates, layouts, images, shapes, and text formats that can be combined endlessley to create blog images. We've used it to make most of the images that we use in our blogs, and putting together something like the image below only takes a few minutes:

Canva also has some great templates that you can use to easily build infographics, as well as plenty of other helpful capabilities.

PlaceIt

If you've ever wanted to create an image that shows your website or product as it would look while being viewed on the screen of a computer, tablet, smart phone, or TV, this site is for you. You can upload any image and choose from a wide variety of devices and backgrounds to create images like this:

You can even use PlaceIt to create animations, videos, and slideshows; the possibilities are near-endless.

Pablo

This free tool from Buffer to allow for the easy creation of eye-catching quotes that stand out against attractive photographic backgrounds that are formatted for sharing on social media. Here's an example, using a quote from this blog's opening paragraph:

These are only a few of the many tools available for content marketers, even those who aren't incredibly tech-savvy. As more and more content competes for people's attention, creating quality visual content is what can help you stand out and attract the attention, traffic, conversions, and sales that you deserve.

Do you have any questions for us about using visual content in your marketing strategy? If so drop us a note .We'd love to chat about it with you.? Please contact us to speak to one of our marketing experts, or if you have any content creation tools or ideas for using visual content that you want to share, please leave a comment below.