Nothing transfixes the human brain quite the same way that visuals do. That's why if you throw an image up on your Facebook post you're likely to more than double the engagement.
But the web is littered with content, ranging in quality from completely worthless to simply stunning.
Every minute there are 216,000 photos posted to Instagram alone! (source). It's hard to stand out, so in order to achieve your marketing goals you have to use every resource you have ...especially visuals.
...but not just any visuals.
Before you go wild with the images, however, read this:
Simply slapping pictures on everything you post online without considering quality won't exactly make your engagement rates skyrocket the way a carefully planned strategy will.
Don't insult your followers, fans, and leads by showering them with visuals that can be described as any of the following:
- irrelevant
- inconsistent with your branding
- low quality (i.e. blurry)
- boring
- unattractive
Here are more reasons to use visuals.
1. Visuals drive engagement like no other.
- You just learned that including a picture on your Facebook post more than doubles your engagement: 2.3 x to be exact (source).
- Indeed, for all social media platforms there's one constant rule: if you're aiming for mega doses of engagement, visual content is how to make it happen. To put a number on that: visual content is forty times more likely to get shared than other types of content! (source).
2. Visuals keep visitors around for longer on your website.
- Well-organized visuals help visitors make sense of your content. Done well, visuals will entice, guide, and funnel your readers deeper into your content. As a result, they'll stay longer on your page and there's more of a chance your message will be heard.
- The typical website visitor, by the way, spend less than 15 seconds actively reading text on any given page (source). Up your visual game and you'll increase that amount of time.
3. Your visitors will remember your content more easily with visuals.
- Partly because the brain processes visuals faster and partly because most information that enters the human brain is non-verbal, visual content is more memorable than text.
- Plus, images, infographics, charts (whatever visuals you use) increase the likelihood that your visitors will understand your message, which means they're more likely to remember it, too.
Is your message breaking through all the online content clutter and getting heard? Perhaps it's time to make room for more visuals in all your content.