3 types of visual content to use in your digital marketing strategy

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Feb 26, 2015 / by
3 types of visual content to use in your digital marketing strategy

Nearly 20 years ago, Bill Gates uttered the famous words: “Content is king” – a phrase which has become a popular adage in SEO and blog-writing circles. While there is a lot more to creating asuccessful blog than just the content, high-quality, compelling material which is targeted to your audience’s needs is still clearly and absolutely crucial.

Social media videoBut text-based content is not the only way to reach people. Evidence suggests that visual content is extremely effective in generating exposure for your brand: posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts, 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text and publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t!

So we’ve collected the three most effective types of visual content which can help to power your digital marketing strategy.

1 – Images

According to marketing expert Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more views than those without. While the types of images you choose to incorporate in your blog posts will vary dramatically depending on your niche, compelling visuals help to break up a sea of text and keep people viewing your site for longer. While generic stock photography from Shutterstock might look nice, it’s far better to use original images to add a human element to your articles. Additionally, choosing generic images runs the risk of other companies within your niche picking the same ones. To quote marketing expert Tommy Walker:

“If the stock photo you’re using is at all similar to another website that created a negative experience for the visitor, subconsciously, they’re projecting their negative experiences onto your stock photograph, reducing trust & adding friction to the process.”

While original images that you’ve personally taken are ideal, particularly for content involving happy customers, this is not always feasible or appropriate. Fortunately, using photo sharing sites such asMorguefile and Flickr, you can find a limitless amount of high quality, original images which won’t have been used a thousand times by every company in your niche! Just make sure that you only search for images with the appropriate rights for reuse, or ask the creator’s permission to use them.

2 – Infographics

While infographics are not as popular as they were a couple of years ago (probably due to the proliferation of terrible examples), a well-researched, excellently crafted, visually compelling infographic can still be incredibly useful for promoting your brand. While infographics can be used for a range of purposes, they are particularly useful for the elucidation of survey data, which can often be bland and meaningless when left as statistics and raw facts. By weaving a visual narrative around such data, facts and figures can be brought to life and become immediately more understandable.

With the right promotion, infographics also have the potential to go viral. Not only will a good infographic spread like wildfire on social media, bloggers within your niche may also decide to post it as free content which benefits both of you. Advantageously, when posting an infographic on social media it is not possible to include the entire image due to size restrictions – this allows you to post a thumbnail image which links readers back to a section of your site where the full infographic is hosted, bringing you lots of new traffic and helping to boost your site’s SEO.

3 – VideosCamcorder

While videos are the most expensive type of visual content to produce, the results of including one on your landing page can bestaggering. In the age of information, people’s attention spans are shorter than ever (1 second less than a goldfish to be precise), which makes video a powerful tool for keeping people engaged. Videos are particularly powerful for explaining the benefits of a product, hence the rise of explainer videos. While thoughtfully-worded text can be great for conveying a product’s key attributes, it is difficult for a person to truly understand how the product will benefit their lives without some kind of visual explanation. Coupled with some catchy music and compelling narration, videos provide a more sensory-rich experience than other forms of content.

Conclusion

GoldfishGreat content serves to inform and engage while bad content serves to bore and repel – this is the case whether you use text or images. There’s no point in including visual content in the form of badly designed and mystifying infographics, boring stock images and low-quality animated videos.

However, including visual content in addition to traditional content can have a powerful impact when done correctly. With 70% of marketersplanning to increase their use of original visual assets in 2015, visual content may be something worth considering to help you to stay ahead of the competition!

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