You’ve heard it more times that you can remember: visual content gets more interaction and response than content with just text or links to other sites. It also provides a break for those marketers who may not have an English degree that can always create new, engaging content.
Now you know how important it is to incorporate images into your marketing, but you may not know how to do that with the type of business you offer. Maybe you have adding visual content down to a science with your social media efforts but may be at a loss when adding it to the rest of your marketing. We’re here to help! Read on to learn how to take advantage of the new marketing strategies you’ve been hearing about, we promise it’s not as scary as you may think it is.
Using Visual Content in Social Media
It is crucial to any business to use visual content on social media platforms. Facebook and Pinterest users are being bombarded with funny pictures they want to share or ideas for how to redecorate their living room. How can you make sure you can keep up and gain their attention?
You may think Pinterest isn’t relevant to you because you don’t have products for sale or an eye for home design. It’s important for you as a marketer to keep up with them times and find ways to integrate your business into the latest, greatest thing.
Companies like GE use the history of their company to engage followers. They have pin boards showing the history of certain products and how they’ve evolved but also have boards that raise awareness about being eco-friendly with statistics and tips on how we can reduce our role in pollution. Don’t have products your clients can go out and sell? If you’re a real estate agent, it would be beneficial to pin pictures of the properties you have for sale with links that go back to your website. You can also incorporate home décor boards or invite your clients to send you pictures of their house after they’ve spruced it up to showcase their work.
One thing to remember before getting carried away with your pins is to include links and ways for people to reach you for more information on your services and how you can help them.
The Timeline update for business pages has made it easier than ever to feature pictures and videos in your postings. Along with a new layout, the Highlight feature also came into play. If you have pictures of an office grand opening or other pictures you want to make sure people look at, you can make sure the picture spreads across the whole page to make it more visible. Postings with images get two times more interaction than those without, so it’s important to include pictures every once in a while. If you don’t have any personal pictures to post, include cartoons or other funny images you have so you can break the monotony and bring a smile to a customer’s face.
Because Twitpics don’t show the picture in the feed itself (users must click through to see the image) the best way to optimize your Twitter account is to add phenomenal profile pictures and adding a personalized background to your profile page. You can capitalize on this by adding products you offer in the background, list your web address, or incorporate pictures that really represent your brand and your company.
Is your puppy the company mascot? It might be a great idea to create an Instagram account that features his/her adventures and daily activities in the office. Instagram is a way to tell the story of your company using only pictures. The app allows you to instantly post photos you are taking to your profile and add cool sepia tones or other effects to spice it up a little. Since it was acquired by Facebook recently, it also gives you the ability to directly post the photos to your wall, bringing your social media efforts together.
Youtube
Using videos to showcase your products or expertise is one of the best things you can do. Creating a Youtube channel that has a mix of educational and funny videos will help people get to know your company better while expanding their knowledge of your product and what you have to offer. If you are an expert in something like FHA loans or Reverse Mortgages, this may be one of the best ways to get information to your clients in an easy to understand format. Be sure to include links to your website in the profile section as well as the comment sections so viewers can have easy access to contact you for more information.
Having a Youtube channel will also help provide you with links and embed codes that make it easy for you to post Youtube content on your other marketing platforms.
Using Visual Content in Your Blog and Landing Pages
Incorporating images in your blog or landing pages isn’t an important tip for making the page make prettier, it’s also important when sharing those posts on your other social media sites. Facebook, for example, automatically pulls images off of the page you are linking to and features it in the update. This will kill two boards with one stone; providing pictures for you social media posts AND your blog post/landing page at one time.
Images also help break up large chunks of text and help keep readers engaged. Providing graphs that help people visualize the statistics you just provided helps put everything into perspective, especially if the reader is a visual learner. It also makes it easier to organize the content within the page and let a reader know when there is a new subject being introduced.
You can even use images to help you with content creation. Of you got a list of data that you want to provide your client with, you can create charts and graph depicting the numbers and write a blog as to why that information is important. It’s also important to include links to landing pages with offers (free ebooks) or ways to learn more about your services. Adding images on these landing pages will help keep the feel of the content consistent and help tie everything together.
Using Visual Content in Email Marketing
Emails with images have a higher click through rate than those without so it is a wonderful idea to incorporate images into your emails. If you have certain products for sale (anything from a new real estate listing to the latest summer dress) having a picture of that product with a link to more information in your website will be more successful than writing information about it. It’s also a good idea to incorporate some images as your calls to action. Including a button instead of a text link to your site will draw more attention and entice people to click on the link.
You can also get creative as you want or have time to. Why not tell a story about a new product through several images thrown together? This will provide a change to the monotony of emails and engage the reader into viewing all of the email and possibly even forwarding it on for others to see your creativity.
If you want to introduce your new recorded webinar or how-to video to your email clients, including a screen shot of the video (not all email programs allow readers to view embedded videos) and linking to a page in your website or Youtube channel will help take people from email to video without any complications.
Using Visual Content in Your SEO Strategy
You may be worried enough about the content on your site and how high it will help you rank in the search engines. Integrating images into your SEO efforts may help you achieve better ranking while helping to make your content easier to read at the same time.
If you are using images in your SEO strategy, it is important to use only BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, or SVG file types. The file name the image is saved as should also help describe the content of the image as search engines won’t be able to read the picture itself. Adding alt tags will further help you describe how this image relates to the content on the page. When possible, it is also helpful to introduce or summarize your image in the text surrounding it.
Whether you are writing content for your blog, website, or social media postings, it’s important to include images in your text. Not only will it make your content more interesting to read and share, it can also help the reader understand the content a little more by providing visual depiction of what you are describing.
For those that have trouble coming up with content in the first place, images might be something that can either help inspire your copy for that day or make up the entire post you are making that day.
If anyone has tips or feedback about the content that you include in posts, we’d love to hear them in the comments!
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