Why use Visual Communication in your Content Marketing Strategy?

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Images are everywhere. In fact they’re probably in more places than you realise. We use images for signs:

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To represent data:

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And, to present our brands to the world:

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There are two simple reasons for this.

One: images are universally understood. Even if there are a hundred different ways to say ‘no smoking’, there is one very easy way to say it that everyone will understand:

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Two: visuals are processed 60,000x faster than text:

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In this blog, we’re going to discuss the top three reasons why you should use visual communication in your content marketing strategy.

1. It’s Quicker

People are busy. They are definitely too busy to spend time reading your text-heavy banner ad, or to listen to you ramble on about how great your product is for three whole minutes. Take a look at the stat below:

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You need to use visual communication in your content marketing strategy so that your customers can digest your information quickly. The key to successful marketing is to make people’s lives easier, not harder.

This need to digest information quickly is something that is almost ingrained in us. Think about when you were at school, and you had a book or a play to read and write an essay on. Most students were much too cool to spend hours of their time reading a book or a Shakespearean play, especially when there was a movie to refer to instead. I love reading, but when you’re busy (or when you’re a high school student and you think you’re really busy), it’s a no-brainer, a two hour movie beats spending ten hours reading.

There’s another reason why we always watched the movies instead of reading the books, and that leads me on to the next point…

2. It’s Interesting

Visual communication is more interesting than any other form of communication. This is why it is a great way to present data, or to make a dry subject matter more engaging. Of course, visual content is not solely for making the uninteresting, interesting; or for simplifying your brand processes. You can tell your brand story visually, or basically any story that you want to increase the shareability of. Image-based social networks like Instagram are quickly becoming more and more popular, and marketers should be talking full advantage of this. Statistics show that:

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and this is proven when you look at the next statistic:

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These are staggering numbers by anyone’s standard, and just another reason why you must use visual communication in your content marketing strategy.

3. It’s Memorable

It is estimated that people are exposed to:

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That’s a lot of information to take in! But, of course, we don’t take it in do we? People have become so accustomed to seeing ads everywhere that we have practically become immune to them. In order to stand out from the crowd you need to make your ads memorable, and it’s a well-known fact that people are much more likely to remember images, over what they read and hear.

Take typical memory improving techniques as an example. A lot of memory training methods involve replacing words with images. So, if you need to remember to buy apples and milk from the supermarket you should think of images that will resonate with you when it comes to buying them a few hours later, like an apple with a caterpillar coming out of it, and a cow. This technique even has a name, it’s called the Picture Superiority Effect. The reason visual communication is so much more memorable is because:

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Closing Thoughts

Everyone loves visual communication, at least a little bit! As this blog proves, it allows us to digest information quicker, it’s more interesting than other communication methods, and, most importantly for marketers, visual communication is memorable!

It’s also really cost-effective to create visual marketing tools, especially when you consider how effective they are. In fact, 43% of content marketers agree that infographics are an effective tool. To learn more about infographics, or to get one of your own, click here.

http://www.business2community.com/brandviews/wyzowl/use-visual-communication-content-marketing-strategy-01199905