Increase Your Views 94% With Visual Marketing

Visual Marketing is extremely effective, we all know that. In fact, in a study Skyward conducted, content with relevant photos or Infographics saw a 94% increase in page views versus content without images.

That is virtually double the number of people reading your content, which can lead to more sales, increased brand recognition and more sales. 

Content with photos or Infographics saw a 94% increase in views versus content without images. CLICK TO TWEET

Powerful stats like the ones below, further remind us of the power Visual Marketing holds.

• Colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read content by 80%
• When information is relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than the content
• Visual content is more than 40x more likely to be shared on social media

With ‘65% of senior marketing executives believing visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated’ and ‘71% of online marketers using visual assets in their social media marketing’, we have fully bought into the Visual Marketing concept, but why exactly does using visuals in our marketing work?

The reason visual marketing campaigns are so successful is because humans are visual learners. So, when information is presented visually, it:

• Sticks in long-term memory better
• Transmits your messaging faster
• Improves comprehension
• Triggers emotion

The Visual Impact on Long Term Memory

“Words are abstract and rather difficult for the brain to retain, whereas visuals are concrete and, as such, more easily remembered.” ~ Haig Kouyoumdjian Ph.D.

The brain is primarily a visual processor, with very little used to process text, which makes sense since you mostly operate in this world visually. This allows us pretty much instant recognition and retention of visual content, where putting text to memory takes longer and is normally practiced and takes effort.

Even when people use tricks to remember written information or facts, they do so by visualizing them into pictures or scenes in their head.

Lastly visual long-term memory has the ability to store a massive amount of data, which is likely what makesInfographics and Video so effective as a medium for presenting large sets of information and concepts.

Faster Consumption of Your Content

We all know that visitors online have a short attention span. The National Center for Biotechnology Information found in 2015, that the average attention span had dropped from 12 second in 2000 to just 8.5 seconds. That is less than that of a goldfish.

Luckily visual content is consumed at a much faster speed than text, although probably not 60,000 times faster, a claim which no one has been able to find a source for.

A group of neuroscientists from MIT found that the brain can process entire images in as little as 13 millisecond, the fastest evidence has been able to show to date.

Mary Potter, a MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and author of the study, would even suggest that ‘The job of the eyes is not only to get the information into the brain, but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next’. This is something that should be considered when creating visual collateral for marketing.  

It’s Easier to Comprehend Visuals

As mentioned the brain is used primarily as a visual processor and as Dr. Potter would say; ‘what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long – trying to understand what we’re looking at.’

A really great example to drive this fact home, is in this image below:

Getting All Emotional

When it comes to making decisions we start with our emotions. This is a good thing since studies have shown that people are unable to come to a decision if they are not emotionally influenced in some way.

Not to mention it takes our rational cortex longer to get going (at least 0.1 seconds) than our amygdala. This means visuals that really set the right emotions can help to influence decisions quite a lot.

Simon Sinek really showcases this in action with his Golden Circle concept detailing how companies like Apple use emotional connection to sell their products:

More Than Just a Picture

Visual marketing is effective and powerful, but if you really want to have success with it, you have to do more than just toss an image into a post or cram a bunch of data into a low quality Infographic.

In order to really have the effect you want from visual marketing, you need to take into account your visitor persona and psychologic schemas. Illustration, font, and color choice also plays a huge role in whether your visual marketing efforts will be successful.

If you have any questions about visual marketing or would like us to help you create your visual marketing materials, please contact us and we will be happy to work with you.

Original post - https://www.pixelroaddesigns.com/2016/07/20/increase-views-94-visual-marketing/