It’s the Digital Age. 2019. Digital content is visual content plain and simple. While many parents have the dilemma of finding a balance between their children’s screen time and their interaction with the real world, consumers have another dilemma on their hands. How do they make their screen time beneficial?
Beneficial screen time can be categorized in a variety of ways. However, the most blanket definition of beneficial screen time would have to be whatever screen time provides the most value in the shortest amount of time.
Enter visual information. Visual information is not only easier to process, but it is also statistically more likely to provide memory retention than any other singular form of informational processing. Therefore visual content plays a crucial role in almost every marketing campaign.
Benefit #1: Makes an Impression
When it comes to first impressions, visuals are the key component to the consumer’s opinion. You can have the greatest product in the world—seriously, it could end world hunger or something—but if you have a slapdash website or just giant blocks of text, your consumer is going to judge you and judge you so harshly that they won’t give your product a second look. Why? Images are just that powerful in subconscious processing.
Making a good first impression is absolutely paramount, particularly in a world where the rising population has an attention span of 90 seconds. What then should you do? A key innovation in the marketing world is the utilization of video product descriptions.
We have all bought clothing based on the way it looked in a picture only to have it arrive not fit, or be the wrong color, or what have you. While video product descriptions cannot change subpar sizing charts, video product descriptions allow a 360° view of the product. The product is shown in use, up close, with the narrator giving all of the specs. Audio information given with video stimulation is far more likely to be retained and simply a list of facts at the bottom of a photo.
Benefit #2: Makes Your Brand More Visible
Visual storytelling also makes your brand more visible. Your brand is more than your logo, your ethos; your mission statement. Who are you as a company? This question gets answered by following your strategy, so hiring a brand marketing agency can be insanely beneficial by letting the pros do the heavy lifting.
Representing your brand through your social media presence is far more powerful if your brand is paired with pictures of your company culture, speeches from your latest charity event, and an interview with your leader about why you do what you do.
Another wonderful way to show your brand is through the use of infographics.
Brands that herald themselves as educators show consumers that they truly care about the global society. By using infographics and blog posts as a means to educate your target market on things within their sphere of interest, brands establish themselves as authorities. Information paired with stimulating visuals is the fastest and most effective way to do this.
Benefit #3: Easy to Scan
Visuals also make pages easier to scan. As children in school, we always preferred to read books that had big, colorful pictures. This was because the visual stimulation made processing the information in our textbooks and in our fiction easier for us to conceptualize. Therefore, when it comes to reading a blog post, breaking the blog post text up with images allows us to creatively engage with the content at hand.
Images can be used to inform, for humor, or to simply share thought-provoking ideas. Images make information more easily digestible and provoke thought that mere words cannot express.
Page organization is an incredibly powerful tool as well. Specific placement of the call to action buttons will result in more clicks than simply putting them in the navigation bar.
This all goes back to the subconscious processing of a page’s visual design. Pages that are strategically laid out according to photography principles are more likely to generate leads and hits than those that simply throw something together. Understanding visual psychology is paramount to mastering visual marketing strategies.
Benefit #4: Engagement
Lastly, by creating quality content through infographics and other visual stimuli, your business is able to garner more traffic to your site. This is due to the fact that your consumers will engage with you through your social media pages. Comments about your visuals will bring questions about your niche. Not only will this fuel the kind of content that you can put on your site and innovations you can make to your product, but it will also grow your lead base exponentially. For the most impactful and cohesive brand strategy, consider enlisting the expertise of a top-rated branding agency.
Having a strong engagement with your consumers and creating content based on your consumers’ feedback is the backbone of every healthy marketing strategy.
Wrapping Up
Making your consumer screen time count matters more than anything in a digital marketing campaign.
Using visuals to relay information, market sales, connect your brand to their ethos, and promote education is a powerful tool for engaging your audience’s heart. Images can be used to make people laugh or move people to compassion. Humor and social justice are equally powerful methods of causing people to get involved with something bigger than themselves be at a product, a service, or charity. Using images to communicate will surely transform the way your brand interacts with the content you are already generating.
Stay up-to-date on modern photography philosophy and implement visual psychology—from colors to word positioning—into every digital post you can. This is the way to have maximum impact with fairly minimal effort.