Higher quality photos get you more involved in your marketing efforts.
The use of photos and graphics in marketing to connect and connect with potential customers has been around for a long time. Every company uses visuals in its marketing to communicate the company’s products or services. And the marketing efforts of small businesses or startups have to work even harder because they may have smaller budgets. So, what importance do entrepreneurs or small business owners place on the quality of photos for their marketing? And why are the actual photos so important?
According to Trend Reports, between 65 and 85 percent of people describe themselves as visual learners. In this fast paced world, there is such a huge amount of images displayed on product packaging, websites, social media, etc., that it can be quite overwhelming for the typical consumer. And that brings us to the importance of selecting quality and impactful images for your business. An investigation conducted by PR News found that content with good images gets 94% more views than content without. So, how do you choose more thoughtful images?
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Startup and small business marketers can leverage additional real-time insights on the most popular visual trends through a new interactive data analytics tool, VisualGPS Insightswhich is powered by more than 2.6 billion a year Getty Images and iStock searches and downloads. The tool can help show real-time interest in which images and videos are downloaded around a particular search term across time, regions, and industry segments — even comparing two terms. Through this tool, marketers can choose to embrace or break away from societal trends to differentiate their brand.
The latest VisualGPS consumer survey found that Gen Z and Millennials are twice as likely to make a purchase based on online imagery than Generation X or Baby Boomers, and young people in particular are turning to social media for entertainment and escapism, even more so. than for communication. “In the wake of the pandemic, consumers of all ages are looking for brands to inspire them with images that feel fresh, new and forward-looking,” said Getty Images and iStock Senior Creative Researcher Rebecca Rom-Frank. “So when choosing design elements, it’s important for brands of all sizes to think about how they can use tools and data analytics to better choose images for their marketing.”
Images used in marketing play a vital role. Marketers have known this for a while; an appropriate image, or a series of related images, makes for a successful campaign. But how do images really work their magic on us? And how can you harness the potential of visuals in a digital space already packed with countless images?
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A better photo evokes an emotion.
Here are some insights into why selecting good images is important to any marketing effort.
They are easy to identify. The truth is very simple: as humans we like to look at images. Our brains are designed to perceive the world visually, and we crave constant visual input. Images are so appealing to us because we spend more of our brain’s processing power on vision than on any other sense or ability. Seeing takes up as much as 50% of our brains.
We understand them intuitively. As humans, we not only enjoy looking at images, we are intuitively good at understanding them. The speed at which we analyze an image is astounding and in fact we are able to feel the feel of a visual scene in an astonishing 1/10 of a second, much faster than any text we read.
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They evoke emotions. More than any other type of content, images can evoke brand emotions with us. These emotions are more ingrained than those caused by reading a story and people make strong associations between these emotions and the content they evoke. When choosing which image to combine with your online content, make sure that the images you select evoke a sense of emotion. A dramatic landscape can be eye-catching, but a dramatic landscape with a child playing with a dog can be emotional.
They can be more memorable. Images that are easy to understand and can evoke emotions stay in our heads. The benefit of linking images to your online content is so powerful that after three days people’s ability to remember information increases from 10% in the case of text only to 65% when the content is combined with a powerful image.
They create potential engagement. Besides drawing our attention, evoking emotions and being memorable, photos have another superpower. As any marketer knows, images increase engagement. People don’t just want to look at pictures, they want to share them and then they want to see more of them, and in fact content with images gets up to 40% more shares than content without images.
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