Marketers are increasingly using images to make their campaigns more effective. Visuals give life to your content, making it more appealing and attention-grabbing. Quality images help marketers get their message across easily, target potential customers of all ages, and overcome the problem of people's shortened attention spans. Whether you're promoting a product, service, or brand, increase online traffic and create a lasting impact on your audiences by using good images incorporated with your content.
This blog explains exactly why quality visuals are the key to a successful content marketing strategy. Follow the guidelines mentioned here to drive meaningful connections with your audiences:
1. They make your brand credible
A survey shows that 67% of customers consider quality images important to their buying decision. Product photography convinces more customers to purchase products online. You can easily showcase different features of your products with these pictures. Quality visuals make your brand more recognizable and build meaningful connections with your customer base.
2. They are easily identifiable
Human beings crave constant visual input; it's engraved into our DNA to get information from images. That's why our brains easily process visually-conveyed information. Your average customer is naturally drawn to visuals and you can leverage well-placed pictures to make your content easily identifiable.
If you're looking for the best image resources online, try using royalty-free stock photos to make your content look good. More than 200 million stock photos have been made available in several genres and with different backgrounds.
3. They are easy to understand
Our brains are wired to understand an image intuitively. Data shows that we get the essence of images a lot faster than grasping the gist of written text. That's why you should always pair your content with a picture that accurately conveys the kind of emotion you want your content to deliver.
That's how your content will get more views online, as more people will find it easy to go through your whole post without getting bored or feeling confused. A stock image will help them get your message and feel the emotions you're trying to convey. Even mediocre content looks interesting enough with a well-placed picture.
4. They create lasting memories
Images are far more memorable than mere text, research shows. Scientists have observed that people can easily remember a piece of information visually but struggle to keep text-based info in mind.
That's why brands invest in visual marketing to not merely make their content more attention-grabbing but also unforgettable. Your average customer will remember your brand if your content's been paired with a few amazing pictures. That's why travel photography has become a powerful means to capture people's attention. It also makes your content more searchable on search engines.
5. They grasp short attention spans
You may have heard of how our collective attention spans are shrinking at a faster pace. Some surveys suggest we lose focus within a minute after continuously looking at a screen. However, visuals can help marketers overcome this problem as the human brain processes images 60,000 faster than text. While your average customer may get bored in a few seconds reading long-form content, a well-placed image will grab the customer's attention and keep them engaged.
Combining quality infographics, images, or GIFs with useful content is a great way to keep your readers engaged. Imageless content will lose the audience no matter how informative.
6. They evoke genuine emotions
Visually storytelling dominates the marketing strategy nowadays. That's because quality images easily inspire people, trigger hidden memories, and evoke a thousand emotions. You'll connect more deeply with your audience by creating an emotional connection between them and your brand. Here's what science tells us about the brilliance of neuromarketing:
- Our brain lets us empathize with others by mirroring their emotions so we mimic the emotions of photographed individuals
- Different colors stimulate different emotions; orange evokes excitement, while green induces a feeling of serenity
- A well-composed image can evoke feelings of harmony and satisfaction
7. They drive more engagement
The crux of all the above-mentioned benefits is this: images drive more engagement online. They trigger emotions, stay memorable, and remain easily identifiable, motivating your content customers to interact more profoundly with these pictures. Instead of expecting customers to like and share your text-based content, you can add a few quality images to make content 40% more shareable on social media. That's because images accelerate our decision-making process, encouraging us to share image-based content more readily or respond to our favorite brand's CTAs.
8. They are easy to repurpose
While you struggle to reuse other content types, it's easy to repurpose visual content. Marketers strive to find unique ways to keep their content fresh without it coming out as repetitive. However, you can repurpose quality images with a few basic editing skills (and relevant software programs).
You can manipulate a picture to avoid Google strikes. Play around with its colors, add new features, or change it via AI tools. That's how you never run out of unique pictures for your content.
9. They tell customers' stories
Many brands are delving into user-generated content (UGC) in which customers share their stories to be posted online. For instance, you may ask your customers to capture images of them using some of your products. It's an amazing opportunity to tell a customer's perspective via visuals and find unique ways to improve your products by gathering careful insights from people's visual reviews.
Maybe, customers are admiring a certain feature of your product that your marketing team forgot to highlight in the ads. UGC can help you uniquely promote your products. It's time you leverage visual marketing to gain a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
This blog will help you realize the potential high-quality images have for enhancing your content marketing strategy. These images easily elevate your campaigns, boost customer engagement, and help people connect with your brand ideals. You can always use stock images freely available on different websites to make your content more engaging and interactive. Using quality images in your content is a surefire way to drive optimal SEO results.
