Think back to when you were in school reading textbooks. Were you ever excited to turn the page and see that it’s entirely filled with text? Probably not.
Pages with pictures, charts and infographics made the text seem less intimidating. The same holds true for your business content. Ultimately, visuals drastically improve your reader’s experience and can turn a boring article into a post with high engagement rates and more value.
Visual content is good for retention
As a business, one of your jobs is to improve information retention in your readers. That way, they can get the most value out of the content you create. One of the best ways to do so is to include more visuals in your content. After all, our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, which means that you can promote more content digestion by just adding a picture or two to your text.
Additionally, people retain 65% of the information in an article paired with visuals, versus only 10% retention with text-only content. In other words, visuals such as easily identifiable images, compact infographics or short videos can help readers connect main themes and remember important points in your content. This can strengthen your messages and increase the value your content provides.
How to use visual content in your content marketing program
Although visuals provide excellent opportunities for content success, you have to use them strategically.
Don’t use generic images
Avoid using generic stock images as much as possible. They create a sense of indifference and laziness. In fact, that’s one of the first things that your readers will think when they click on your post. If you didn’t bother to finish up the post with relevant images, who’s to say you put in enough effort in the actual content?
Visual content requires just as much thought as the text if you want to create a polished piece that flows together.
To minimize brand associations of laziness or indifference, create your own images to ensure your visuals match the tone of your article. Or, if you don’t have the resources to create your own, gain access to licensed images to help you pick better photos.
Format your images carefully
Besides relevancy to your content, another area of importance in regards to visual content is formatting – both of the actual piece and how it is structured in the text’s layout.
Learn more
Tempesta Media is committed to delivering quality content at scale. Within our platform, we offer a licensed images add-on to further streamline your content creation process.
If you have a content marketing program, or are planning one, download our ebook: 100 mistakes businesses make when starting, optimizing and scaling content marketing programs. Learn from the mistakes of hundreds of other companies. 100 mistakes walks you through common and uncommon challenges that they faced with their content marketing programs.
To learn more, contact us today.
