Welcome to the visual marketing age. Visual marketing is key to developing an effective marketing strategy generating more leads, better brand visibility and an ultimate surge in sales. Consumers love it and it’s time marketers embrace visuals harnessing the depth of their power creating truly immersive customer experiences. Visual marketing benefits are numerous and justify the time and expense we expend in their creation.
Every day our brains face invasion from a relentless flow of information. Visuals make this information more palatable and digestible for our overworked brain’s, hastening rapid first impression processing. Think about it for a second, when we are born, we don’t understand the verbal speech of our parents, but we understand the images and body language they portray. The brain actually processes images 60,000 times faster than text, according to the Visual Teaching Alliance. This clearly demonstrates that visual communication is the way forward to increase your company’s brand awareness, advertising recall, and revenue.
Why Visual Marketing is Important
Visual communication is extremely important in order to attract busy people lacking the time to read large text formats. By supplying people with an easy way to digest the information, it is more likely they’ll understand and remember the content. It has been proven (by Brain Rules) that people will remember 65% of the message three days later if a relevant image accompanies the communication. This compares with only 10% remembering it through copy alone.
Visual Marketing is the easiest way to inscribe the message into people’s long-term memory banks. It not only helps us to process and retain the message, but it also affects us emotionally. Ever had that moment when you saw a picture of a doughnut and then bought one for lunch? By stirring our emotions we are more likely to act on impulsive urges.
There any many visual marketing benefits of which we could talk about all night. But ultimately, visual marketing helps people absorb information faster, aid message retention and entice engagement with the content. This is why a consumer will choose your brand over a competitor, remembering your company first due to the invoking of internal emotions. This is further demonstrated with all the changes happening on various social networks. And after all, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest and Instagram all have that one thing in common - they are all some form of visual content sharing site.
What is Visual Marketing?
Visual marketing is any type of visual aid that tells your brand story. This can range from anything visual such as images, Infographics, videos, presentations, leaflets, and banners. It has been proven by Nielson Norman Group that people pay close attention to the type of images depicted. A great quote from Forbes to summarize visual marketing is:
“…the world is awash in words and we found that a “word only” approach was not enough. In order to get into minds today, you also need a visual. But then the problem occurred, if the objective is owning a word in the mind, what is the role and function of a visual? Perhaps it is to work jointly with the “word” you have chosen.”
We are all nostalgic creatures. Not so long ago during the Christmas hype, we were bombarded with nostalgic Christmas ads that took us back to a time of halcyon bliss, reminding us of some of our happiest memories. This is how our brains operate always making connections. Whether you are a business owner or a marketer you must make a connection between the word and the visual.
I have listed a few tools to get you started in the visual age to help your brand stand out and be remembered. We’re not just talking in the short term but long term also. Don’t worry if you don’t have the design skills like some of the bigger players or the big budget to purchase software like Photoshop and so forth. These three very simple and free tools help people create visuals with no design skills.
Visual Creating Tools for Social Media Marketing
Infographics as I mentioned previously, are a great visual marketing strategy as they grab attention. In fact, people like and share them 3x times more than any other type of post according to Massplanner. A great tool to create them in is Piktochart. There is a free version available while having a limiting capability does offer 10 free templates to choose from.
Two other marvelous tools you need to exploit are Canva and PicMonkey. Canva allows you to create beautiful visuals for any platform including all the major social media platforms as well as designing leaflets, brochures, posters, and presentations. PicMonkey is very similar to Canva but is more user-friendly especially for people like me whose heads are sent spinning, like the tyres of a racing bike, by Photoshop’s complexity. With PicMonkey you can edit your own photos, add different types of fonts, frames, filters and effects. You can also create your own unique graphics and make banners for your social media accounts such as Facebook.
Conclusion
There are many other factors at play here driving the need for better and more widespread use of visual marketing. Diagnosis of dyslexia is increasing every day and 25% of the general population have low-level reading skills. Most people with dyslexia learn by seeing. People with dyslexia have trouble reading, writing and solving math problems. That’s why visual marketing is the perfect strategy to reach this segment as they connect with images more easily.
In conclusion, let’s recap a little on all our visual marketing benefits for your business. We have established that we are all visual in nature with short attention spans processing images 60,000 times faster. Visuals can make us act and feel a certain way. So why wouldn’t you use them in your marketing? Utilize them to increase sales, awareness, and revenue.
By using visual content you will experience more social shares, better brand awareness, and improved website traffic. We offer some great packages to help you enter this exciting new marketing landscape. Visual marketing is growing and you need to incorporate it into your marketing strategy. Start now.
