Why Visual Content Matters And How to Leverage It In Your Marketing Campaigns In 2020

Know what separates top-performing marketers from also-rans? They understand how to tap into their audience’s brains for powerful impact.

Consider this: it takes about 50 milliseconds to lose a positive impression – that is like, 150% faster for an eye blink (a blink of the eye takes 300-400 milliseconds).

It’s mind-boggling, to think top-performing marketers consistently keep their customers’ attention long enough to get into their brains. And then, of course, gently guide them to take the desired action.

How are they able to achieve such a feat? A better question, I believe, would be to ask, how can you achieve such feat too?

Enters Neuromarketing

To understand what’s going on in your audiences’ brains especially, when they see your ad campaigns or land on your landing page, you will need a sneak peek into how they process information and which part of their brain fires on seeing your content.

Basically, neuroscience (the study of the brain and its relation to stimuli) meets marketing, hence the term Neuromarketing.

Neuroscience + Marketing = Neuromarketing

You see, by understanding and mapping which element in your marketing campaign evokes what emotions, you can double down on the particular emotions you want your target audience to feel.

Where does visual content come into all this?

Remember the saying, “A picture is worth more than a thousand words?” Well, that’s kind of true when you need to capture and retain customers’ attention. 

In an increasingly overcrowded and noisy marketplace, you need to stand out. You have to figure out a way to grab customers’ attention and in those split seconds when you have their attention to get into their head permanently.

Unfortunately, words are no longer enough. Sure, words have their place in your marketing toolkit. But today’s customers are distracted. They are continually being bombarded with information. Your campaign, content, ad has to stop them in their track for a moment to take a look. 

Text-only content is inadequate in today’s noisy marketplace to get that initial pause. Here’s where you need appealing, break-the-mold visual content as part of your campaign.

Still not convinced about visual content?

While you are dallying about whether to incorporate visual content into your overall content marketing strategy or not, 80% of other marketers are currently using visual assets in their social media marketing. With video accounting for 63% of visual content used while blogging (read: text-only) in usage as a social media marketing asset at 60%. (Industry report)

In the same report, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second at 27%.

Want a memorable, attractive snackable content? Use visual elements in your campaigns. In a brainrule.net report, when people see your campaign, only 10% of the information is remembered three days later. However, if you pair the same information with a relevant image, people are more likely to remember 65% of the information three days later.

As the data shows, not only are more marketers turning to visual content to power their marketing efforts, customers appreciate the information in visual form.

Wondering what type of visual content to use?

Video, images, infographics are all visual content, but it can be incredibly overwhelming to decide which of the formats to use when getting started.

Understandably, you would want to use all visual content formats in your marketing campaign; however, as a result of limited resources, you may want to parse down to the most impactful ones.

One thing is for sure, using any of the visual content formats in your campaign, whether in addition to a text or not, performs way better than when you use only words in the content.

That said, the general rule of thumb is to test all the formats and see how they perform with your audience. You may want to keep an eye on your audience’s engagement and reactions to each of the format.

With time, you should get a sense of which visual format performs better and the most effective channels to use.

Here’s how each visual content format stacks up against each other:

According to Cisco, global internet traffic from video content will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021.

A 2018 content marketing institute B2C report found that 43% of marketers say pre-recorded videos are the most successful type of content for their marketing purposes while 62% of B2B marketer rates video as an effective content marketing tactic.

54% of consumers say they want to see more video content from brands they support. While emerging trends support video content, you should not ignore infographics.

Several eye-tracking studies have shown internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, according to these studies, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the pictures than they do reading text on the page. (Source)

Of all the visual content formats, infographic saw the highest uptick in usage among B2B marketers – now at 65%.

After analyzing over 1 million articles online, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received twice the social media share than those with fewer images.

On social media, tweets with images receive 150x retweets than those without an image while Facebook posts with a picture saw 2.1x increase in engagement than posts without a photo.

What’s the takeaway?

Top-performing marketers understand using appealing visual content is a powerful way to grab attention. Now, the secret is out, be sure to leverage visual assets in your marketing campaigns.