Why Visuals Are Important

Most people skim articles these days, meaning blocks of texts can impede you. When it comes to the best practice in marketing, adding visuals to your ads and content offers you the chance to catch more readers and get your message across, even to the non-readers.

Attention spans are getting shorter:

· 55% spend fewer than 15 seconds actively engaging on a page (source, TIME)

· People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan…individual words and sentences. (source, Nielson Norman Group)

· Eye-tracking studies show patterns in how people scan pages (source, Crazy Egg)

With this in mind, it’s more important than ever to find ways to not only attract a customer’s attention but keep it on your marketing efforts. One way to do that is with compelling graphics and visuals.

Visuals allow you to break up blocks of content, highlight key findings, and set a mood or tone of the information. With the smart use of color, typography, and spacing, you can draw the client’s eye while still speaking to them with your message.

Visual Aids

According to a report by 3M, visual aids improve learning by up to 400 percent, and we can

process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

There are multiple ways to use visuals:

· Infographics

· Video

· Flow charts

· Images

Each of these presents a fast, easy way that makes information easily digestible to your audience.

The most important thing to consider is what is complementary to your message? If the images don’t match the message, you’ll have a disconnect. Carefully consider what you’re trying to say, how you want to convey it, and what tone you’re using in your images as well as your text.

Do the images align with your brand?

Social Media is another place to keep things visual. In an article on Buffer about Twitter, it was found that tweets with images were shared 2x more than tweets without images. Think how much further your message could spread with the right image attached.

Visuals for the Win

Let’s look at a couple of factors that have become more relevant in today’s market.

· Changes in how people consume content

· Mobile phones and tablets overtake desktops and laptops for reading content

· Social media has created a pattern of people sharing content more readily

Changes in how People Consume Content

We’re bombarded with content between email, social media, news, and info-overload. Add in advertising and most people see hundreds of messages a day. Bite-sized content has become a necessary means to attract a user’s attention in a busy world.

Today’s Reader is on a Mobile Device

Many of your customers are on mobile devices which means small screens, jumbled text if, and a client who may skip past your marketing materials. Fast, bite-size elements mean that you’ll grab your reader’s attention quickly while getting your brand noticed. While the days of laptops and PCs being the most common way people consume news and information, now people do this via their phones and in short blips on sites like social media.

Content Sharing

People love to share content, whether it’s a fun meme, an interesting story, or helpful resources like an infographic, or a great how-to video. More people share visual content than textual. It’s easy to consume, easy to share, and can get a big idea across quickly.

Video, Infographics, and More

According to Hubspot, “The primary form of media used in content marketing is video.” Why is this important to know? Because, if you hear something, you’ll only remember about 10% of what you heard a couple of days later, but when you include a picture, you’ll remember 65% of that same information according to Brain Rules. And BuzzSumo found, was that “…articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.”

How’s your visual game?

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