“A picture speaks a thousand words”, this may sound cliche, but the adage aptly sums up the impact of visuals in content marketing. A text with no visuals makes the whole content appear lackluster and badly formatted. Although the text is the base of all content, the World Wide Web has created an entirely new paradigm as compared to textbooks, brochures, articles, and essays in brick and mortar world.
In the case of offline promotional and informative materials it is difficult to embed images or graphics at times, and adding videos is never possible. In online informative content architecture, links also play a major role for they enhance information. But keep in mind that connected content also leads to reputation building for the sender. Your efforts will be greatly diluted if you do not link properly. Remember our brain can process visuals 60,00 0 faster than text.
Digital Marketing is raging wildly to promote services, products, and brands. The core of digital marketing is content. It is content, that engages the target persona, and persuades for goal conversion.
Content marketing is creating content and distributing it on a wide range of platforms. Labeled as one of the best marketing techniques, it is an extensive exercise and requires vigorous efforts. Creators keep the content calendar saturated with visual contenting materials, blog posts, long-form, and short-form content, and videos. In all these masterpieces visuals are involved as graphics, videos, images, memes, and dynamic text.
Without the visuals, the impact of the campaign would be zero or at the most, it will be ineffective, failing the target by a long distance. Thus, each masterpiece should be engaging using not only the compelling body text, tag lines, and titles but craftily created visuals also, and the composition should resonate with the subject in its entirety. The visuals not only inform, but they also add to the crux of the story contained. A story that combines words and visuals is a highly conversant piece of a write-up that attracts friends, followers and all visitors on the social media feeds. Such compositions are amusing, informative, and entertaining, all this without creating eye strain, and stress and you must go through the fluff kind. Write to solve problems, be informative, and add to the reading pleasure…
Impact of Relevant Videos
YouTube is generating revenue to the tune of 28 billion plus USD annually from videos published by subscribers. Two billion viewers are on the video streaming platform every month, and millions of videos are being uploaded every year. There are five hundred hours of videos being uploaded every day. The figures are enough for content creators to understand the impact of these streaming visuals.
A link to a video or an embedded video makes a major difference to the content and the impact is much greater than that of an image or an infographic. Nowadays, users need not install applications to enable a view of third-party videos. You can simply choose the most relevant video from the link and embed it into your write-up along with graphics and images.
The YouTube videos play within the body content, or you can watch them on the YouTube platform. More important than quality is the relevance that the embedded videos carry. Although high-quality or 4K HD videos are most preferred unmatched video content could spell disaster for the marketing campaign hence be very careful as to what you add.
Analytics & Insights
Check if visuals resonate with the target audience or the readers. Use analytics regularly to discover how your content is faring. Analyzing the impact of your campaign will inform you as to how your writeups are faring and the analysis will help in making the right decisions. Besides Google Analytics each social media offer insight to the publishers and use them to gauge what you are doing. Online analytical tools and insights have entirely changed the marketing spectrum and the paradigm has shifted to decisions made on analysis and research.
Talking about research, keyword and semantic research are most important for creating compelling content. Hence you should caption using relevant terms and add alt text without fail.
Impact of Images & Graphics
Graphics are a recent phenomenon and are much in use nowadays. This is due to technological advancement, and compatible formats or standards being used. For content creators, it is a must to add low-weight but high-resolution photos. Some of the standards in use are:
- JPEG
- Giff
- JPG
- APNG
- PNG
- AVIF
- WEBP
Of these WEBO and AVIF are the latest formats and outshine the others so use them as much as possible. BMP,v ICO, and TIFF should be avoided for web content since they do not enjoy wider browser support. Heavy uncompressed low-resolution images and graphics will kill the impact of the writeups so be careful.
To End It All
Visuals are not added only to create a colorful mosaic or to make the composition aesthetic as the case may be. Visuals add meaning to the thought and the information contained besides making reading a lot more pleasurable, and not taxing at all.
