By Ronita Mohan and Anchana Latha
Visual content marketing has become the go-to for marketers over the past few years. Everything from infographics, charts, graphs, presentations, GIFs, and videos have been earning brands views, followers, and revenue.
But marketers are still wary about investing in visuals. They can sometimes be expensive if outsourced to agencies, and relying on in-house experts isn’t always a feasible option. Many marketers have been turning to stock images, but these have seen decreasing levels of success.
The question remains, how and why should brands use visuals to create quality content? And which visuals give brands the most bang for their buck?
Why is visual marketing important?
We talked to 10 experts—CEOs, founders, content marketers, and content writers—and asked why they think visual marketing is so powerful and how their content marketing practices have benefitted from visuals.
1. Visuals make marketing more personal
"Visual imagery has helped to make marketing more personal. It allows us to tell stories that more effectively draw on emotion and empathy. We've found great success with quote graphics. Everyone loves a small bit of wisdom in an attractive shareable package!"
—Jordan Stella, Manager, SEO and Social Media, UpCity
2. Visuals offer powerful storytelling capabilities
"Visuals have become an absolutely vital part of modern marketing. They have the ability to grab people's attention, convey complex messages, and transcend language barriers more quickly and memorably than words can. The powerful storytelling capabilities of visuals have made them indispensable to content marketing. Put simply, if you want people to read your content, you need to pair them with compelling visuals."
—Megan DeGruttola, Head of Global Content & Communications, Stackla
3. Authentic visuals are more effective than stock photography
"Across industries, authentic visual content is far more successful than stock photography or branded visuals. The consumers of today are content hungry, but they're also highly skeptical and tough to impress. They crave visuals that are relatable and reliable rather than staged or stock.
That means the use of authentic visuals, like user-generated content (UGC), is on the rise. Brands create a more community-centric experience by leveraging the content their customers are already creating about them. Plus, featuring UGC across marketing channels is far less time-consuming and costs less than producing professional photo shoots or designing highly-branded visuals; authenticity is a win-win. After all, your customers are your best content creators!
—Lindsay MacDonald, former Content Marketing Copywriter, Stackla
4. Visuals grab the attention and communicate quickly
"1) Visuals stand out. A splash of color in a sea of black-on-white text catches the eye; 2) Properly designed, they can communicate important information quickly, such as illustrating trends; 3) They convey emotion. Is a blog post serious or snarky? The featured image chosen should make that immediately obvious.
"[The kind of visuals you use] really depends on the purpose of the communication. For communicating information (such as research results), charts and graphs are most effective for visualizing specific findings; infographics for tying together a number of related conclusions and statistics."
—Tom Pick, Founder, Webbiquity
5. Visual content drives engagement
Infographic Source: Venngage
"Images, whether they are diagrams, infographics, photos, graphs, etc., help to drive engagement across various channels, increasing the chances that written content will be read. They are also highly shareable, meaning your content becomes more shareable, which could ultimately help with social media engagement and raising your brand awareness.
"However, it's worth noting that people are now switching off when it comes to stock imagery. Images need to add something to the content or illustrate something being discussed in it, which means brands need to start creating their own images or finding non-stock options that add to the value of their content.
"Some of the most effective images we have used within our content are infographics. Although they have been around for years, infographics still manage to drive a good level of engagement and get our content shared. Many aspects of marketing can be quite dry and so infographics help to showcase important, must-know information for those in the sector but in a more entertaining way.
"We also find that customized images that offer examples, such as screen grabs of Google Analytics with highlighted sections and notes added, work well, as they help to perfectly illustrate the advice we are providing. Essentially, if a visual element is interesting and helpful, it adds value to our content much more than a generic stock image ever could."
—Joanna Carter, Digital Marketing Executive and Blog Editor, Smart Insights
6. Video content easily explains and educates
"Digital media truly opened the floodgates of visual content accessibility and transformed marketing at every level. From its humble beginnings with slow-loading images, evolving through gifs and infographics, and now to the ubiquitous video content. Visuals overhauled the way brands interact with their audiences in the best possible way.
"We use all types of visual content for our marketing in some form or another, but we get our best results from explainer and educative videos. For perspective, on our YouTube channel we have an educative video with over 380,000 views and an explainer with 150.000+. That kind of exposure has been a boon to our business."
—Victor Blasco, Founder and CEO, Yum Yum Videos
7. Great visuals are appealing to potential customers
"Focusing on design and creating visually appealing content is going to do more than generate readers, sales, or get shares—it's going to reach a customer's soul. With (nearly) every product that I've started and worked on, we've prioritized creating that "stimuli" that's going to be well-received and disrupt a market.
"If you're following the upcoming wave of startups, you'll see that they focus on UI/UX design and bright and appealing sites with an uplifting voice and tone. They are disrupting new and old markets by providing a better, visually appealing customer journey."
—Jeffrey Fermin, Cofounder, New Theory Creative
8. Visuals make it easier to connect with consumers
"Today's consumer wants to know more about the brands they buy products from. They want to understand what you stand for, and this is why it is critical for businesses large and small to try to make themselves as relatable to today's digital consumer as possible. There is no better way to showcase your business than to do so in a visual way, whether it be static images, dynamic videos, or even live broadcast. Visual content gives your brand a chance to be relatable in an unparalleled way.
"This is in addition to the fact that in order for your company to be successful in social media, where today's digital consumer spends most of their time online, you absolutely need to develop a visual voice and be able to represent your brand in a relatable way visually."
—Neal Schaffer, Social Media Speaker
9. Visuals break down walls of words
"Visuals are great aids for making your content easy to read and digest. A study by Buffer concluded that 55% of people spend only 15 seconds or less on an article, so a wall of words can be a definite turn off for them. Visuals can help combat that by breaking text and sharing information in an eye-catching manner while also holding readers’ attention."
—Masooma Memon, Content Writer, Ink and Copy
10. Visuals are a must in order to compete
"At this point visual content is redundant. No marketing strategy has even the slightest chance of yielding even the most minimal ROI without having visuals (preferably videos) taking center stage."
—Oren Shmulevich, CEO, Cincopa
Stand out with visual content marketing
The experts have weighed in—visuals in content marketing aren’t just a luxury, but a necessity.
With decreasing attention spans, and increasing content creation targets, it isn’t surprising that visuals are so successful in the content marketing sphere. If you want your content to stand out, you need to start investing in high quality visuals today.
RELATED: Is It Time to Stop Using Stock Photos in Your Marketing Materials?
