Visual content plays a crucial role in reach and, more importantly, engagement. It is also the difference between whether your business makes a sale or achieves the goals set out in your campaign strategy.

Text-based content is still important, but research has shown that visuals have a greater effect on audiences. A picture, after all, is worth a thousand words. Images draw people in, help them warm up to your campaign, and gets them to react to your content in a positive way.

The Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed that 74% of marketers 'use visual assets in their social media marketing'. The number increased in 2017, with 85% of marketers saying they use visuals in their marketing, while 73% said they planned to increase their use of visuals.

Visuals have been proven to get more engagement than text-based content. According to Adobe’s Q4 2013, posts with images result in 650% higher engagement than normal text-based posts. Infographics, which some marketers have declared dead, are three times more likely to be shared on social media. That’s according to SlideShare, which also found that infographics are liked 23 times more than documents.

Still not convinced that visual content is a powerful tool for engagement? Instagram, a picture-sharing app, has a higher engagement rate for brands than any other social network. The app’s engagement rate is 4.21%. According to Scrunch, an engagement rate of between 3.48% and 6.67% is considered very high.

It’s not just online data that backs visual content over text. Science also shows that people are attracted to images more than they are to text. According to Brain Rule, pictures beat text when it comes to memory.

Three days after hearing a piece of information, you are likely to only remember 10% of it. But if a picture is used, you are more likely to remember 65%.

Visual content is not just about images. Videos are also known to get good engagement from audiences. A Cisco Systems Inc report predicts that video will account for 84% of Internet traffic in 2018, while video will make up 78% of global mobile data traffic by the year 2021.

Depending on your audience, live videos, memes, gifs, screenshots, and even virtual reality are also good visual assets for marketers.

Here are four of the main benefits of visual content for content marketing:

  • shareable: High-quality visuals, paired with relevant information, have higher sharing potential, which increases your content’s chances of going viral
  • increased sales: People are more likely to buy a product if they watch a video about it 
  • appealing: Audiences are more willing to ‘read’ visual content compared to text-based content, and
  • affect emotions: Images can help show the human face of your brand, which will be more relatable to the audience. 

For more information, visit www.kagisomedia.co.za.