Today, great visuals are everything to engaging, readable online copy.
In addition to making your material more exciting, they also help pull readers through your text, making it easier for them to engage with and connect to it.
Without visuals, content is just a sad shell of text, and won’t make it far.
Here’s everything you need to know about why visuals matter and how to use them in your online content.
What the Numbers Say About Visuals in Your Content
When you were a kid, you loved books with pictures, right?
The illustrations just added something to the text, and you enjoyed learning about new worlds and people through colorful images.
Today, it’s no different.
While it might be true that we’re older and that the visuals in question now aren’t so much illustrations as they are graphics, screenshots, and infographics, visuals are just as important as they’ve always been, and adding them into your marketing copy can take it from “blah” to memorable.
The reason is simple: visuals tell a story, and that story helps enhance your online content. Without visuals, the words must stand on their own, which makes your material less compelling and exciting for readers.
37% of marketers report that visuals are their most valuable marketing asset, second only to their blogs
74% of social media marketers add visuals to their social updates
While people only remember 10% of the information they hear, they remember an average of 65% of what they see, making visual information the way to go for companies that want to encourage brand recall.
In 2016, 51% of B2B marketers were prioritizing the creation of visual assets.
By the end of this year, experts are predicting that 74% of all web traffic will be dedicated to video content.
Infographics earn 3x as many likes and shares on social media as any other type of content.
Tweets that have images in them receive 150% more retweets than text-only updates.
Facebook posts with images earn 2.3x the engagement of text-only posts.
With these numbers in mind, it’s clear that visual marketing is here to stay, and that engaging in it can be the most productive thing you do this year.
10 Ways to Use Visuals in Your Online Copy
New to the world of visual marketing? Don’t fear. Start by using these top ten visual tricks:
1. Add Images To Every 200-300 Words in Your Blogs & Create Social Shareworthy Inset Images
This is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to incorporate images into every blog you publish.
But don’t just “add images.” Here are some rules of thumb:
Add a screenshot per every 200-300 words. By nature, the brain responds more to visual stimulation than text, so you’ll want to break up your content with a lot of visuals. Screenshots work well to illustrate points.
Design (or have designed) a beautiful blog topic image, sized for optimal social sharing. Things to consider: theme it to the color code of your logo, have a custom artist design it.
Here’s an example of a couple creative blog headers our designer has put together that gained a good deal of traction on social media:
One of the most valuable things you can do for your marketing is to create a custom infographic. It’s seriously worth the investment. We create one every quarter (sometimes more): and to date, this content type has been our most-shared.
Unique because it’s designed specifically for your company and helpful because it addresses the concerns and interests of your target audience, this form of visual content will help to differentiate your brand online and help you stand out from the crowd.
Infographics perform better on social media than other types of content, so you’ll earn a solid ROI from your infographic.
If you’re looking for a team to create infographics for you, look no further than our creative infographic services!
3. Create Custom Blog Headers that are Themed In Your Colors
Custom blog headers can give your content a unique look and help your blog feel more cohesive. This is the “featured image” section of your blog.
Ideal for brands of all shapes and sizes, custom blog headers are some of the most useful things you can create for your brand.
For best results, create headers that use your company’s colors, utilize your logo, and incorporate a streamlined and cohesive design. Check out how we do this for our content on The Write Blog. The end “blog roll” look is visually engaging:
We’ve been experimenting with drawing “visual story steps,” too.
As of late 2016, we added unique, storytelling imagery to our content shop, which is a new variation in our visual products. Here are a few examples from our Process Page, to give you an idea of what these look like.
4. Screenshot Everything that Has a Visual Explanation
If you’re writing a tutorial, how-to, or instructive post, you need to be including screenshots. Visually explain what you’re talking about.
Screenshots help your readers understand what you’re saying and synthesize your post accordingly. This, in turn, makes it easier for them to connect with your content and absorb the meaning of your posts.
It also helps your content be more useful to your readers. Be sure that if you’re going to include a screenshot, to add one that’s in-depth and detailed, not a broad overview that won’t help your readers or that they could just as easily find on their own.
One tool I love is the Full Page Screen Capture, in the Chrome app store (free). I use Chrome daily, and to get a full-length screenshot without zooming and messing up the focus, the Full Page Screen Capture is my hidden weapon.
5. Add or Create A Meme
Memes are a great way to add some comic relief to your posts. Break up a long, detailed section with a meme or add it to offset a funny point you’re making.
There are dozens of free online meme generators to choose from, so you can always make your own. Just be sure that your memes, like all your other visual assets, are relevant, high-quality, and targeted to your audience. Otherwise, they won’t perform as well as you’d like them to.
6. Include Process Photos
If you’re in an industry where you’re showcasing tutorials or telling your customers how you make something, include process photos to help them go one step deeper.
Designed to allow your readers to connect more firmly to your material, these images are ideal for articles that tell people how to do things like how to change a bike chain or add oil to their car. The more images, the better for these posts.
While you can tell your readers all day long what they shouldn’t be doing, an image can be the best way to show them. Ideal for any topic that’s in-depth or complex, a “what not to do” photo can drive the point home more efficiently than a simple explanation.
8. Create Custom Videos
Videos are some of the highest-converting types of visual content out there.
While they’ll work in virtually any environment, from social media to your home page, they can revolutionize your email marketing and landing pages.
For best results, hire a company to create a custom video for you, since doing it yourself involves a somewhat steep learning curve. Once you’ve got a video you’re proud of, add it to your landing page, or email campaign. Of course, you can also share videos across social media and on your blog.
The meditation app Headspace does a great job of including relevant, high-quality videos all across its website and social media profiles. Here’s an example of one that’s gotten more than 700,000 views:
9. Try A Live Stream
Feeling adventurous with video? Try a live stream. Ideal for anyone who wants to tap into the rapidly growing trend of on-the-go video, live stream videos are the perfect way to make your online content more exciting and personalized for your readers.
You can live stream with Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, and Periscope, to name a few channels.
10. Create Galleries
Galleries are a unique way to use visuals and can be a smart way to showcase your work or introduce your employees on your website. For best results, ensure each image you include in your gallery is high-quality, relevant, and demonstrative of the gallery subset you’re displaying.
The Case for Compelling Images
If you’re looking for a smart way to go deeper with your images this year, these ten options are fantastic places to start.
Perfect for brands in all industries and specialties, carefully-selected visual content has the potential to boost readership, make content more impactful, and promote brand recall – all of which are excellent things for you.
What’s more, creating and compiling high-quality visual content has never been easier than it is right now, so there’s no reason to wait!
Need help creating professional visual assets you’ll be proud of? Check out our custom image services today!
Imagery in blogs and web content: they vary from the sublime to the ridiculous (crash test dummies in love, anyone?) but they’re vitally important to your content.
Research has shown that articles that feature images earn 94% more views than those that don’t. This makes sense given the fact that we live in what some have dubbed “The Visual Age.” There are currently more than 2.5 billion camera phones in existence (whoa!) and image-sharing sites like Instagram are exploding in popularity.
With all of this in mind, it’s clear that images should be playing a large part in your content strategy.
The Power of Visual Content
According to an infographic created by Wyzowl, only 10% of people remember things that they have heard and only 20% of people remember the things they read. In contrast, though, 80% of people remember the things they do and see. This is why so many of us, myself included, categorize ourselves as “visual learners.”
The human brain is wired for visuals. We process visual information 60,0000 times faster than we process textual information and 93% of all human communication is not verbal. For this reason, the addition of visual content into blogs and other content marketing materials has the power to boost views and strengthen your content.
In fact, Jeff Bullas states that the COO of Shuttlerock, Paul Bingham, has noted these changes firsthand. According to Bullas, when customers optimize visual content using Shuttlerock, their email lists grew by upwards of 44,000 subscribers and they earned 23 million new impressions via Facebook timelines. One user even experienced a 57% growth in sales and another gained over 33,000-page visits after running a photo competition.
How’s that for proof?
5 Benefits of Visual Content
Visual content, which includes images, videos, infographics, memes, and many others, has many benefits. These include the following:
Visual content can promote sales
Visual content can increase brand awareness and help consumers remember your company
Visual content can promote sharing on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter
Visual content can provide an SEO boost
Visual content can increase reader engagement
While many marketers steer away from visual content because they believe that the only option is cheesy stock photos or that they’re not qualified to create other types of visual content, like infographics, that provide marked traffic boosts, including visual content in your marketing is actually much simpler than it sounds.
The 5 Main Types of Visual Content You Should Be Using
There are many types of visual content, but some perform better than others. According to KISSmetrics, there are several types of visual content every marketer should be using.
1) Images
You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. But when you augment your high-quality blog posts with equally high-quality images, they can be worth a thousand views instead.
Now more than ever, people don’t want to wade through dense, impenetrable content that offers no relief. For this reason, images are an important addition.
There are many different types of images, varying from personal photos to high-quality stock photos and each has its own unique set of benefits. On one hand, images taken by you add a personal touch to your content and can help add value to deeply personal topics (it would be strange, for example, to purchase a stock photo for an article about your family). On the other hand, unless you’re a professional photographer it may be difficult for you to produce images that are as high-quality as they need to be in order to feature prominently in your content. In these cases, it may be a better idea to purchase images from a reputable stock photo company.
You can even do something really cool and get a custom artist to illustrate for you. Like we did in the How to Tell Your Best Story post above. You can find decent $5 artists on Fiverr.
To give your stock photos an extra boost, you can use a service like Canva to create unique photos via a drag-and-drop design interface. We’ve added a link in this post to a free resource we created giving you 20 awesome free stock photo resources.
Just remember that if you are going to use images, you must be conscious to always purchase them from a reputable source rather than simply copying and pasting them from the web, as this can easily result in a lawsuit.
2) Videos
According to Moz, posts that feature videos earn 300% more inbound links than their video-less counterparts. Videos are one of the most useful ways for marketers to present solutions, relay information, and introduce products.
When done correctly, a high-quality video can boost a content campaign by providing a personal touch, giving readers an insider view of the company, or clearly showcasing a product.
Videos can also be used to drive conversions. In fact, one study demonstrated that featuring a video on a landing page increases conversions by an average of 86%.
There are many different types of videos, from how-to videos to interviews, to customer service and tutorial videos. What’s more, live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat have ballooned recently and many marketers are using these platforms to offer behind-the-scenes footage or to promote secret sales and giveaways.
3) Infographics
Infographics are the prom queen of images. By combining visual and textual content into an information-dense powerhouse, a great infographic can easily go miles in your content marketing strategy. In order for an infographic to be as effective as possible, though, there are some important things to remember.
Here’s an infographic we did on the Ultimate State of Content Marketing.
First of all, the layout of an infographic needs to be simple and impactful. This means using the right colors, images, and formats to convey data in a simple and easily digestible way. Additionally, the information included in an infographic must be accurate, authoritative, and relevant. Because infographics are boiled down to nothing but facts, this is especially important.
When done correctly, infographics are one of the most popular forms of content. Keep in mind that 40% of people respond better to visual information than they do to textual information, which means that infographics can be a very effective part of your content strategy.
4) Memes
With all of the silly memes floating around the web, it may be hard to see how they would have any place in content marketing.
Fortunately, they do, and they can be very effective. Unlike infographics or videos, memes are seldom used to convey deep or information-dense topics. Instead, they’re an important form of fun, easy-to-create content that is ideal for sharing and driving traffic.
To create your own meme, you can choose to use one of any of the dozens of meme creation services on the web. When creating memes, think about where you’d like to distribute them. Memes are ideal for social media and places where younger readers hang out, like Facebook and Twitter. One way that marketers often use memes is to share in-jokes about a specific industry or occupation. This expands the reach of a meme and makes them highly shareable on sites like LinkedIn and, of course, your personal blog.
When creating your memes, you’ll have the best luck if you keep them relevant, witty, sharp, and funny. This ensures that they’ll appeal to a wide variety of audiences and that they’ll have a lifespan far beyond their publishing date. While memes aren’t ideal for heavy topics, they can be a fantastic way to make your readers laugh and get your content shared around the web.
5) Screenshots
Screenshots are a valuable way to underline a concept.
Here’s a screenshot inside SEMrush we recently took to illustrate a post about content auditing.
When you grab a screenshot and include it in a blog post or tutorial, you allow your readers to see what you’re doing rather than simply read about it. This is important because people respond better to directions when they include images than they do when they are text-only. That said, the next time you’re trying to illustrate a complicated point, grab a screenshot and give your readers a hand.
Conclusion
While there are many benefits to including visual content in your blogs and social media, the most prominent benefit is user engagement. By including high-quality images, infographics, videos, memes, or screenshots, you add bulk to your content, break up text-heavy pieces, provide additional information, and essentially make your content more compelling and attractive.
Keep in mind, though, that any visual content you add to your blog will need to be high-quality, attractive, and relevant. Visual content is just like anything else – the more time you spend making it great, the more likely it is to attract viewers and produce positive conversion rates. So get creative with your content and beef it up with beautiful visuals of your choice.
Order blogs with custom-made images from us today.
Whether it is a stock image or the writer’s own, photographs really make a blog pop. Photos will grab the attention of the casual passerby or may convince a doubtful person to read your post anyway when the photo is combined with a stellar headline. Images are crucial to increase your blog views, but sometimes it is difficult to find the right image for your post. Let’s take this opportunity to look at the importance of images and three things you should consider when using them.
Are Images Really That Important?
Short answer: yes, images are important. Copyblogger says the reason images are vital to blog posts is because one simple image can create an emotional tie with your audience. Images also bring in readers who might not have read your post initially, but that image sure did catch their attention. Whatever the image does, whether bringing in an emotional tie to current readers or bringing in a new reader, it should always sum up your blog post. It might seem weird that a photo can do that, but we all judge whether or not a blog topic is interesting to us by the image the blog uses.
One of the best ways to learn is to have live examples. Several popular sites out there utilize images to gain the best results possible. Visit Buzzfeed, Mashable, MOZ, and Hubspot to see some great examples of using images in a powerful way. In addition, we utilize stock images for our blog posts and we have found some truly astounding images that relate with our content perfectly. This is attainable! Start looking through images and adding them to your blog posts to see incredible results from readers.
What to Consider When Picking Images
When choosing an image, there are many different things you will need to consider. Here are three things to think about as you use images on your site:
1. Do You Have The Rights? Rights to photos are crucial when you choose an image for your blog. If you steal someone’s photograph off Flickr or Google, you could be setting yourself up for some legal trouble in the future. Many artists will let you use their photos if you simply ask, but not asking is unethical, reflects badly on your company, and can cost more than a monthly subscription to BigStockPhoto.com. The best way to know if you are able to use an image is if it is listed under “Creative Commons.” You can use photos under CC as long as you properly attribute the photograph. If you are unsure, you should do some detailed research into the topic. You don’t want to be caught unaware and have legal problems regarding a simple image you pulled from Google.
2. Are the Photos Relevant to Your Topic? When choosing the right photo for your post, you must make sure it is relevant to your blog topic. You don’t want a photo of an adorable looking house cat if you are blogging about wild tiger and lion sanctuaries in the States. That would look very strange and wouldn’t give readers much confidence that you are a leader in your field if you can’t tell a regular house cat from a tiger or lion. Make sure the image you choose has an obvious tie-in with your blog content and attempt to make the photo a summary of your post. The best way to do this is to select the photo after writing your content.
3. Is It High Quality and Appropriately Sized? Another important element to consider is making sure your photo is high quality. You don’t want a low quality, pixelated image for your post because that will look sloppy and readers will click away quickly. Find images that are the highest quality possible to ensure that they are stunning and will grab your readers’ attention. We all love a good high quality image and we are more likely to click on a link that utilizes one for their post. Stock images are great for finding truly high quality images that will look great for your blog posts.
Images Are Expensive, What Should You Do?
A big concern for many people is how expensive the rights can be for one photo. A great idea to save money and budget appropriately is to set up a monthly or yearly subscription to a stock image site. This will help you allocate appropriate funding and will grant you access to hundreds of high quality stock images that will go with just about anything. This is what we do with our images and we are able to find some great ones our clients enjoy! Stock images are a great investment for copywriters and companies, and can provide you with many different photos from which to choose.
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