The Age of Visual Content: Your Guide To Placing Photos in Everything You Write
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.
Get Your Free Copy of 13 Incredible Free Stock Photo Resources.
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.
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