Nowadays, if a business is not online, it does not exist. This goes for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) too. One of the most effective ways to create a strong online presence is through content marketing. This strategy allows businesses to be where the customers are, like on search engines and social media.
Another important method to reach out to customers online is visual content marketing. This term lies under the umbrella term “content marketing”, but is used to emphasize the unique strengths visuals bring to the table compared to plain text.
Merely “being online” is not enough. Successful marketers use many types of visual content for their marketing strategy. SMEs can benefit by choosing the most popular ones like images, videos, infographics. Visual content can help SMEs to engage with the audience constantly to eventually influence their buying decision and gain new customers.
Let’s take a look at the examples of visual content marketing strategies for SMEs to explore its importance in your marketing efforts.
Image
When writing an article for your website or blog, you need more than just the right keywords. Keep readers long enough on the page, making sure visitors don’t leave too soon, as this eventually impacts your search ranking. Moreover, ensuring the visitors are interested in reading your content allows you to deliver information about your product or service that can increase your brand awareness and influence buying decisions. For instance, Big Brand System uses an image that enhances the title of the blog article, allowing communication in a way that text couldn’t.
Video
Humans are inherently curious about what happens next. That’s why people spend so much time on Instagram. Video is taking advantage of this behaviour too. If a video creates a great impression in the first milliseconds, people would keep watching it, right? The better the video, the longer will the viewer watch and the more likely they will watch it until the end. Reckless Erick is a local fashion brand in Singapore that uses very enticing video clips on top of their homepage which increases the chance of visitors to explore their website and purchase their products.
InfograPHic
With more than 7.3k shares, this infographic is a winner for several reasons. First of all, it delivers information effectively through simple graphs and short text that are easily understood and remembered. Secondly, it chooses the information that a lot of people might want to know about – trends in marketing. Then, the information is tied up to the service the company is offering, hence there is an implicit call to action. When this infographic is widely shared, more people visit LogoMaker’s website because they are eager to learn more about the services offered by the infographic creator.
Why are these visual content important to your SME?
1. Builds a Unique Brand
In the era of internet and social media, visual content represents your brand. On one hand, the quality of your visual content can make or break you. On the other hand, visual content marketing helps you to distinguish your brand in the market.
Visual content not only informs your audience about your new product or service improvement, it also shapes how your brand is perceived. For example, if your SME is actively creating engaging content on social media, people can see you as relatable and trustworthy.
2. Creates Better Engagement
Posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. How so? The simple explanation is humans are a visual creature.
Let’s take a look at more statistics to understand why visual content is a powerful engagement tool.
- The human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds.
- People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than those following directions without illustrations.
You will leave a very positive impression on your audience by making their lives easier, so they become more eager to talk with you. And by using visual content, you increase the odds of effectively communicating your message.
3. Drives More Website Visitors Than Text
The increasing popularity of video has influenced Google to change the search result (SERP). It is now more focused on the user’s intent behind a search query than keywords. Think about this, how many times have you looked for answers to your “how to” questions and picked a video?
Moreover, video is the most effective visual content in terms of making a visitor stay on a web page longer. Research has reported that people spent on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. If your website visitors spend a significant time on your web page, search engines will find your website valuable and rank you better.
Search engine’s algorithm makes video easier to rank better than text. What this means for your SME is an increased chance of getting more relevant visitors. In order to sell, your marketing efforts need to be targeted at the right people.
4. Establishes Customer Trust & Confidence
If a restaurant uploads a menu list online and doesn’t provide photos of each menu, would you order from them? If you are comparing online learning, would you enrol to the platform that showcases photos of alumni with their testimonial or the one without?
Winning customers’ hearts nowadays require more than unique products or services with stellar quality. Customers may not realize this, but they love brands who have a quick customer life cycle. This means, going through the processes of knowing, understanding, buying, and using your products or services takes a very short time. Visual content can help you with this as the human brain processes images just within milliseconds.
5. Stimulates More Conversions
Before customers make a purchase, they need to be aware of, consider, and engage with your brand first. All of the reasons previously-mentioned shows that visual content is highly effective in achieving these goals.
It can make a customer who has never heard of your brand be interested in information on how you can help them. It can also be the little nudge needed to convince a customer who is familiar with your products or services to make a purchase.
Visual content is adjustable to the phase where the customers are in their journey. Knowing this allows SMEs to target customers with the right content and at the right time.
Online marketing provides extensive opportunity to do business. Understanding how to harness it for your SME is the first step. Klaud9 helps SMEs to create exclusive photos and videos for social media, website, and digital marketing. We hand-pick all photographers to ensure high quality of your images. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you!