With rapid technological change, there is a quick change in how people consume information, and there is a lot of competition vying for those viewers' attention.
As customers' attention spans continue to drop, online businesses increasingly turn to visual marketing in search of the immediate impact that only videos and images can provide.
Multiple studies have shown that people have a shorter attention span than goldfish. According to a recent study from Microsoft Corp., the average human attention span is just eight seconds.
That is why it is vital to consider the visual marketing techniques that will make content more authentic, unique, and compelling.
The Importance of Visual Marketing
The customer journey goes through the noise in the marketing lifecycle at every step. Everyone is trying to catch their audience’s attention, and they don’t know where to focus their attention and loyalty. That’s where visuals will help you pass a message to your audience and help them retain information for a long time.
Based on the 2020 Widen Connectivity Report, high-quality visual design in content marketing builds stronger relationships with audiences. To get the most out of your visual marketing, you need to understand what visuals gain the most traction and effectively meet your goals.
Once you start tracking the impact of all your visuals, you will get a clear picture of your ROI and identify best practices to maximize your visual content efforts.
1. Focus on User-Generated Content
User-generated content takes word-of-mouth marketing to a new level by delivering a product or service value using a more authentic visual lens. Many marketers use UGG images and videos as an honest portrayal of a brand’s products as they come from real customers instead of the brand itself. Moreover, this type of content brings more attention and conversions to a business because it concisely shows the audience’s needs and pain points.
You can create exclusive campaigns to drive more ROI with user-generated content. The main idea is to make people share photos or videos of your brand on social media with a specific hashtag. Social media activity will increase your brand’s visibility and engagement on the cheap - says Harry Johns White, Marketing Specialist at NBAblast.
“Another way to encourage people to talk about your brand is to reward them,” said Kashif Raza from Kami Web Solutions. “It’s a preferred trick for small businesses and startups to increase user interactions. We run a weekly or monthly giveaway where we choose users with the best user-generated content.”
UGC can be used as a visual or video review for an eCommerce business. You can link the posts to your product pages and use them as a review to show people how others benefit from the products. Use paid formats like Facebook Carousel Carousels and Instagram’s Shoppable Ads to incorporate user-generated content.
2. Use A/B Testing
You can try out multiple visual formats. For example, you can track the results of a hero image against a hero video or compare the impact of static images versus an interactive photo gallery. While testing different images on your website to find out which results in higher conversion, I recommend expanding your activity.
Testing and tracking your results will help you get an ROI increase for your visual content marketing efforts. It works well when you stack up new types of visuals like galleries, whiteboard videos, or screenshots.
You can find different stock images and video libraries available on Depositphotos with a template-based graphic editor that instantly re-organizes and maximizes your visual content on your site.
3. Make Your First 10-Seconds Impressive
As discussed earlier, the average human attention span is getting shorter each day, and companies are fighting for consumers’ attention and search clicks on Google. All you have is eight seconds to get their attention.
You can use tactics to get more eyes on your content and improve your visual performance. Include eye-catching titles, thumbnails, and immediate start. Ensure to address common problems and ask thought-provoking questions in the beginning.
You can create a relevant questionnaire for your target audience to stand out. Learn and measure how others make a killer hook and triple their traffic.
Another way to succeed is to put your videos in the appropriate formats for different channels. You can use InVideo to easily resize your video for any marketing platform and help you automatically convert text-based content to videos in a few minutes.
4. Add Call-To-Action Buttons
Visuals are the best traffic drivers. To maximize the impact of your website imagery and urge the audience to immediately take the desired action, add buttons and calls to action directly on your visuals to track the ROI of these buttons easily.
Call-to-action buttons are the gate to learning more about your product or service through links to your site. You can clearly see which visuals drive the most traffic.
You can easily create a new event in Google Analytics for every CTA button you want to track.
5. Improve Video Search
Nowadays, it has become easier to produce videos and get them online without special skills in videography. With the rise of video, you need to optimize your video marketing visibility to get ranked in the universal search engine results.
Since Google owns YouTube, publish your videos on this platform. Google’s first page links directly to YouTube. Spend time creating an engaging video title and description with relevant keywords. That will help people find your video when entering a specific keyword on Google.
Include video transcripts to make your videos more accessible to a larger audience and more scrapable by search bots. Don’t embed different videos on a page, as Google indexes only one video per page.
The video thumbnail serves as a book cover or your website's homepage. It is essential for video SEO because it determines whether people will click. Finding a suitable thumbnail image will influence click-through rates and other video SEO metrics.
6. Include Closed Captions
Adding closed captions can improve the viewing experience and make videos accessible to millions of people, including the deaf, hard of hearing, and people who don’t speak the language of the original video, says Jasen Edwards, chair of the Agent Editor Board at Agent Advice.
It also simplifies your job of delivering the right message and removing this invisible barrier to understanding your information. Plus, closed captions will make your videos more searchable.
“To let people understand the point of your videos, use the tools like InVideo that make captioning easy through the built-in caption editor,” said Cesar Ornelas. “Potential customers will no longer crawl, trying to find out what the message is about.”
7. Measure The Results of Your Visual Marketing Efforts
Last but not least, monitor your visual marketing metrics after the campaign ends, and measure the impact of your visuals. That will help you understand whether your past strategy works out and use this data for future campaigns, mentioned by Eyal Elazar, Head of Product Marketing at Riskified.
Check out the numbers of visuals viewed, interactions, engagement rates, and duration of video watched, and compare that data to other visuals without ever leaving the site.
These insights will let you know whether your visual marketing meets your audience’s needs and make some improvements to reach your goals better.
Bottom Line
Visual marketing is one of the most effective ways to deliver a message to your customers and help them digest the information. These strategies will help you better optimize your marketing processes and maximize the return on investment from your marketing efforts.
