Enhance Your Marketing Efforts with Visuals

When marketing your company, you’re trying to trigger some sort of response from your target audience. It could be for them to purchase a new add-on you’ve just started offering, or to subscribe to your newsletter. It doesn’t matter what response you’re looking for: no matter what, incorporating visuals into your marketing collateral will help ensure that the message you’re trying to convey is better received.

The Science Behind Visual Communication

To understand why incorporating visuals into your marketing is so important, you have to look at the science behind how the human brain processes visual information.

When a person is reading words on a website or page, that information goes into a person’s short-term memory and is grouped into 7±2 units of related information in a process typically referred to as chunking. Although, more recent research into this area suggests that most people can only retain approximately four chunks of information.

Chunking allows a person to store more information in their short-term memory. However, the duration of that time is limited: if not rehearsed or actively maintained, that information will only be stored for about 20-30 seconds. Some of this information may be transferred to a person’s long-term memory, but a majority of that information will be lost or forgotten after a brief period of time.

On the contrary, visual information is processed more quickly and more often than text: 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and 93% of human communication is visual. Once that visual information is transmitted, it is stored differently in the brain compared to non-visual information.

Visuals go directly into a person’s long-term memory, a relatively permanent storage. This doesn’t guarantee that a person will be able to retrieve all of that information that they obtained, but they are more likely to remember some aspect related to that visual (whether they do consciously or unconsciously).

Visual Communication and Marketing

Marketers have tapped into the power of visual communication by incorporating visual aspects into their marketing strategies. In fact, 31.7% of marketers say that visual content was a cornerstone of their 2017 marketing strategy. Another 53% of marketers said that between 91% and 100% of content they published contained some type of visual element.

It makes sense: as discussed in the previous section, visuals in your marketing make it more likely that the viewer will retain what they are seeing, while at the same time making your message more persuasive and more trustworthy. You can’t guarantee that a prospect will be ready to convert the second they receive a piece of marketing collateral. But, they may be looking to leave their current managed service provider a year from now. If you include visuals in all of the marketing - especially one of the most important visuals, your logo - that prospect will be more likely to either remember you directly, or recall you when they run across your company name in their search.

Research into consumer behavior further proves the power (and consumer preference) of marketing visuals over plain text:

• 4X as many consumers prefer to watch a video about a product rather than to read about it
• Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images
• Articles with visual content receive 94% more views compared to those who have none
• 46.1% of survey participants said that the number one criterion for judging the credibility of a website is its design
• Website pages that contain images or video draw 94% more views than their pages with text only
• Presentations with visual aides are 43% more persuasive than those with none

By now, you should be able to see why marketing and visual communication are so intertwined. Now, you just have to know how to use those visuals.

Marketing With Visuals

Here are our recommendations of what visuals you should use and where you should be using them:

Images

There are many different type of images you can be incorporating into your marketing efforts.

• Pictures taken around the office can help showcase your business and its operations.
• Stock images can add a professional touch to your marketing due to their quality and the wide variety of images out there.
• Infographics can be used to represent complex data and statistics in a way that is easy to understand. However, a lot of time will need to be put into designing an effective one.
• Gifs and memes can be used sparingly as well if your target audience is a younger demographic.

One important image you should be including on most of your marketing collateral is your company’s logo. Remember, visuals help the viewer better recall a message later on. And, your logo is an image that is tied directly to your company. Branding your logo onto your marketing materials will help viewers better remember that the marketing materials they received came from you.

Images can be used to liven up pretty much all of your marketing efforts. Any print media such as postcards, newsletters, and brochures should be incorporating images into them to break up any text. Images should work with your digital marketing too: your blog, website, emails, social media, and any online deliverable on your website should be using images liberally to help your target audience retain your message.

Videos

Videos can be incorporated into your digital marketing efforts in many different ways, depending on the type of video you use.

• Talking Head videos can help you add a face to your company.
• Animated videos are a great way to help explain a complicated topic in a way that is easy to understand.
• Webinars are a great way to engage your audience in real time, whether you are answering questions or just presenting information to your audience in a way that is convenient to them.
• Video interviews with industry thought leaders can help showcase your company’s dedication to industry knowledge.
• Video testimonials allow you to showcase your quality and expertise through social proof.
• Fun videos highlighting your office culture can help humanize your company to viewers.

Videos are typically limited to digital marketing unless you are at a trade show or at a meeting with a potential client. You should have videos embedded into your website on applicable pages. Some good places would be on your homepage, landing pages, service pages, and your About Us page, depending on what the video is about. You should also be sharing your videos to social media. Also, remember to brand all of your videos to your company logo so that those videos are associated with your company in the viewer’s long-term memory.

Charts and Graphs

When you are trying to present data in any way, it is best to turn it into a chart or a graph. The type of chart or graph you choose will depend on what you are trying to showcase. It’s usually best to stick to a standard chart or graph format such as a bar chart, pie chart, line chart, or scatterplot because those are well-known and easy to understand. Best practice is to make the chart or graph you create visually appealing with the general color scheme and design that you choose.

You should be using charts and graphs whenever you are presenting data. This may be on your website or in a whitepaper, video, brochure, or PowerPoint presentation. If you have the ability, make the chart or graph interactive through the source that you choose: so, if the user hovers over or clicks on a particular data point, it gives them more information.

Give Your Marketing a Facelift

Our marketing team can help you incorporate more visual elements into the marketing you are already doing. Contact us today to learn more.