ARTICLES

All text and no visuals makes a content a dull one.

There was a time when just writing a plain old article with enticing words and a good structure was enough.

However, in today’s online world, that hardly ever works anymore. Viewers no longer want to just read content. Now, they also want to visualize what the content is talking about, which is why there is a need to establish a visual-text relationship in your content to keep viewers coming back after that first glance, especially in this age and time when attention spans are drastically dropping.

The challenge settings and difficulty level in convincing people to keep on reading articles and blog posts, all the way to the end, has been shifted and pushed to “very hard”.

Why? Because this is an informative age and they would prefer actually grasping and understanding these bits of information, rather than being info-dumped and harassed with an excessive amount of texts that they probably won’t remember in the next minute, or seconds even.

People tend to recall learned information better when there are pictures and colours to back it up in their memory, because then, they not only remember what it looked like, but they can recall the emotions it triggered and what they were feeling at that precise moment—shock, excitement, intrigue, and so on.

So here are different types of visual content you can incorporate into your site pages to boost traffic and enhance your viewers’ learning experience.

– Stock images

They are professional pictures or shots of usually, places, nature, or even people, that are licenced for creative use, and can be bought online. Some you could even get for free, if you know where to look. You can check out popular sites like Pexels, for starters.

So why buy stock images, in the first place? Why not just randomly download images off the Internet?

Just by using them without proper permission can get you into serious trouble. Also, because you can get stock images for cheaper than you’d probably get from hiring a private photographer to take those same shots.

– Infographics

These are a combo of concrete illustrations that further explain a topic, especially complex ones, that are based off factual knowledge. Infographics involve a simplified summary of the topic into a short list of points, while existing alongside enlightening and informative images.

– Non-generic photos

Besides featuring stock images in your content, sometimes, it’s wise to employ the presence of original pictures you took yourself, as some stock images can be overly generic and have already been used to death by other sites.

– Memes and Gifs

These are the comedians of visual content. They give that comic relief and laughter your viewer needs. It doesn’t always have to be all serious content and no smiles, all the time!

– And finally, videos. You don’t even need to continuously make videos to capture viewer attention. Sometimes, just promoting that one video you’ve made is enough for the time being.

In this article, we will be looking at the top three strategic and smart ways to placing these visual assets all across your content, and the first path to take towards getting viewers to fall in love with your visual substance is:

1. Ensuring that your visual content is of top quality.

If your stock image is of low quality, or your videos are of low resolution, it makes your viewers have quite a boring experience. No one likes boring content. It makes it too easy to scroll past, and possibly whiz over information that could be relevant to them, without them knowing.

It also shows how little an effort you’ve put into your content, and so, your viewers will know then what to expect from you- below expectation bar delivery and low standard content. And you can best believe they won’t be coming back soon, after that.

2. Optimizing your visual content to perform at top speed.

So what if you already have top quality images and videos? The next question to ask yourself is, “are my images loading fast enough?”. Just featuring visual content on your page alone isn’t enough reason to relax just yet. Because while you’re doing so, a viewer could be currently waiting ages for your photos to load, and when they eventually fail to, that awkward back button to the search results to find other sites will be getting a lot more visits than your site.

Site speed is very important, especially when you’re seo ranking focused, and determined to make it to the top of the search results. If your featured visual content isn’t loading fast enough, your user will be dissatisfied. Google can recognize this as a flaw and push you down the ranks!

Imagify is one example of tools that can optimize and reduce the size of your images, without it losing its quality, in order to make them load faster.

3. Have an envy-worthy and addictive social media presence. 

Creating the right social media presence speaks a lot about your site brand, especially one that makes your competition mad with envy, and makes your fans want more of you. Now, how can you create such a balance in content delivery?

Identify your audience.

In other words, know who you’re creating visual content for. The entire human population of planet Earth cannot be your audience. There’s a specific segment of its population that exists to view your content, and those are the people you should shape your content to entice.

For instance, this post was designed to grab the attention of people who are looking to improve their visual content strategy. Who are these? Bloggers and site owners, the likes of them. Those are our target audience.

So professional boxers will find a video about visual content marketing irrelevant to them, especially when the reason they are online at that moment is to search for content that will help them improve their boxing techniques within the ring, a night before their big fight.

Who are your target audience?

Construct solid goals and plans for your visual Content. 

This will help you avoid uploading images and videos aimlessly and getting little to no response for it.

Working around the “I think I should post today… Maybe?” calendar is sort of a defective and disorganized plan. But structuring your content to flow along your own well thought out social media outreach routine will produce better results for you. It also helps you to have a clear vision of why you want to achieve in the process.

Your social media strategy will help you get an off-site and close up feedback of viewers response to your content, without you directly asking it out of them.

Your visual assets have the power to keep you afloat in the content marketing pool, for as long as you can use them wisely. And they can also sink your site rep, at the same time. If harnessing and wielding that power to your advantage is part of your long-term goal or plan, then there is a sure guarantee for success.