Visuals on your blog or site are a great way to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Cluttered design is the fastest way to closing down your business.
Most people arriving on a website read no more than 20% of the text on the page. Only a few, i.e. less than 10% (if that) tend to read the entire page.
They’re not reading the entire content, word-for-word. This means there’s every chance of them losing attention and leaving the blog. That means you will lose your hard earned readers. You won’t generate conversions either. If your blog has to make money, it has to have readers.
Fret not. Visuals can help.
Here are few facts surrounding visual content.
When people see colourful visuals they have an increased desire to read the post from top to bottom. Visually rich posts generate higher engagement. 65% of the population learn with images. For them, text is distasteful. Visuals are easy to process. Most humans prefer visual content over written content
But for visuals to add credibility to your site, generate trust and get people excited there’s an important thing to pay attention to.
What’s that? It starts with choosing your pictures well.
Use high quality photos
Pictures you use on your blog can make or break it. There are different types of photos you can use ranging from your own to that clicked by others. Or even stock photos. Look at all the quality photos Dragdropr uses on its post on landing pages.
Use visuals to stand out
You communicate quality through quality pics. A poor image can ruin the visual experience that people reading through your blog are having.
You don’t want that to happen. So here’s what you can do.
- Use high quality images with decent resolution.
- The images you use along with the site should be responsive.
- The images you use should tell the story you’re writing through your blog.
Add videos
Visual content marketing takes a leaf from videos. With videos you get to break up content and give something easy to process for your readers. Videos are way easier to understand.
Images do more or less the same thing. But nothing beats video. I already told at the start that a great percentage of humans are visual learners. That makes videos an exciting choice.
Even when sending cold emails, adding a video to it personalises the content.
Videos break the boredom of textual content on your site.
The only caveat? Videos should fit the content.
Use charts and graphs
In a textual post, if there’s a lot of information, only a few people will bother to read everything. You risk them losing interest.
That’s where charts, graphs and other things you learnt in school make sense. They have the wonderful ability to turn the most inscrutable pieces of data into visual representations that are easy to grasp. They aid comprehension. Plus they provide a nice visual break from the monotony of text.
Graphs should be based on data. Always cite the data you’re sourcing from. This builds the credibility of what you’re saying. Again, this builds trust.
With loss of trust you lose traffic as well.
Add infographics
You might have seen at least one infographic in your life. They exploded into popularity a decade ago. Seeing the novelty many marketers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars into them.
And that bet paid off. Infographics accrued hundreds of backlinks. Until the day when they weren’t the new thing that everyone was so pumped up about.
You may not be able to use them as a way to get backlinks, but you can definitely use them as a way to make comprehension easy for your readers. See this mistakes online merchants make example.
Infographics offer a breath of fresh air from the usual set routine of blog posts that are filled with text and more text. Infographics are colourful. They are vivid. They capture the essence of data in a bold and beautiful manner. But even now making an infographic from scratch is challenging. Visme is a great free tool that can help. Plus, here’s a handy guide to help you from Visme.
Custom graphics
Stock images are done to death. Custom graphics are only rising in popularity. Perhaps because of the cost associated with designing them, they aren’t as widely seen as they should be. Whatever may the reason be, it remains to be seen if graphics will become a trend everyone will jump into.
But, as of now they’re a great way to make your blog stand out from the crowd.
Everyone is relying on stock photos. Graphics cost but they also make it visually appealing.
If you can’t get rid of stock photos, the best thing you can do is add some creative visuals with the help of free tools like Canva. It could be something as simple as a creative font.
Just take ordinary stock photos and add text and graphics to make them pop.
It doesn’t take a lot of your marketing budget to do this. And it’s also highly effective. If you don’t know where to expend money on these quality custom graphics use a tool that audits your analytics for you and gives you insights on the highest converting pages.
Finally, great visuals are a fantastic way to grow your brand
About the Author
George is a freelance writer who blogs at kamayo.