Why Is Visual Content Marketing Effective

Visual Content is Queen


With any business you must provide great content. Great content as in helpful, useful, and thoughtful content that will let customers know what you’re business and branding is all about. Providing great content is crucial to any business, for your website, newsletters, social media posts, and ads. Will having great content and copy be enough for you to grab your customer’s attention?

NO! It’s not enough. That’s where visual content comes into play for marketing your business. Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text?

Robert E. Horn, an award-winning scholar at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, said, “When words and visual elements are closely entwined, we create something new and we augment our communal intelligence … visual language has the potential for increasing ‘human bandwidth’—the capacity to take in, comprehend, and more efficiently synthesize large amounts of new information.”

Take that into consideration. Visuals have an emotional pull on us. We look at a picture of a baby and we have an instant emotion of, “AW! That baby is SO cute.” Not to say we should post baby pictures on our blog posts when the blog is about architecture… Visuals must be chosen wisely and must be relatable to the blog.

I get such disappointment when I see an awesome post in my social media feed with a great photo and quote to find it’s completely unrelated to the article. I actually found an article to do just that for Google+ traffic. Since Google+ is such a visual platform, the author of the article stated to grab an awesome photo and place your link on it. It doesn’t matter that it has nothing to do with your article as long as you get more hits to your website. WOW! I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Unbelievable!

Please do not do this! Yikes.

Effective Visuals

Take the time to find what type of visuals would be best for you. Here are different visuals you can use for your website, newsletter, social media posts, or blog.

  • A simple blog graphic can be created with the title of your post, add your URL or logo, and DONE! Use simple easy-to-use graphic tools like Canva, PicMonkey, or Pixlr.

  • Sometimes a video will help a little better to express what you’re feeling and gain your audience’s attention.

YouTube – Vemo – Wistia are great video tools.

  • Infographic – people love or hate statistics but an infographic is a fave for both the stat lovers and haters. Check out this interesting infographic on how your brain sees a logo!

How Your Brain Sees a Logo Design by Logomaker.comHow Your Brain “Sees” a Logo.

  • Use the correct image size per social media platform – they are NOT all a 1 size fits all. A Facebook post will be too large on a Twitter post. Size it correctly and your potential customer won’t have to click the expand button on Twitter to see what you’re actually trying to convey to them. See the example below:

It WAS an awesome design but now it looks silly and the title is illegible.

  • PowerPoint and Keynote presentations can be transferred to SlideShare. As a professional, business, or organization, the presentations you create can now be linked to your LinkedIn profile as a portfolio item. Also SlideShare has 29 million unique monthly visitors. If you want to be heard and display your knowledge then you need to upload your presentations to SlideShare. It’s definitely powerful and an effective visual tool.

Here’s an example of my recent SlideShare on finding awesome photos that are FREE and unrestricted on the public domain (meaning you can modify and do whatever you want with them).

So if you’re ever wondering if you can do more with your content… THERE IS. There are a variety of visual tools you can use to suit your needs and your customer’s.

“Content is King they say BUT Visual Content is Queen. They complement each other for a good balanced marriage.”– TWEET THIS!

You can  learn more about how you can use Canva to benefit your business needs by visiting www.tigerlilyva.com at the Canva School.

Take care,

Lillian De Jesus

*Originally posted on LinkedIn.