Why should you use visual

Can anyone remember a long block of text (with no image in it) going viral ? Never.

Visuals will take the stage anytime because visuals are processed 60,000x faster than text. According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of us are visual learners. 90 percent of all information that comes to the brain is visual. 40 % of nerve fibers to the brain are connected to the retina and a visual can be remembered at least 30 days after!

So why not use visuals in advertising campaigns? 

Marketing is the creative process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods or services to satisfy the needs of individual consumers or organizations.

Based on data, companies can set different segments of audience, in order to find effective ways to communicate with them, at the right moment ( micro-moments), to fulfil a need and anticipate one. An effective advertising campaign generally includes:

• spreading the word about a product/service in an effective way, so that people easily understand and memorize them, react fast and take buying decisions
• attracting new customers and making them loyal
• creating and maintaining a brand identity or a brand image (which would be almost impossible without visuals)
• and all these to  generating sales

None of these can be done without using the whole range of content (text and visual). Because people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, 80% of what they see ! Humans are visual creatures. Most of us process information based on what we see. So, visual content is important for building a brand identity because it helps people recognize a product, a certain logo, and creates powerful emotions around it.

Unfortunately, people’s attention span became shorter and shorter due to the oversaturation of digital content and the increased adoption of mobile internet access, therefore it is crucial to gain people interest in seconds. The buying behaviour is changing, as innovation became part of our lives. The advertisers and companies have to adapt their marketing strategies to the new trends and their customer’s behaviour in order to survive and grow.

Imagine a company that wants to promote a great innovation. Could they reach most of their audience only through text? Probably not much online, but more offline. So the price of the product will be high in order to cover its offline marketing costs. Any marketer knows that offline is more expensive than online in the upper funnel of customer acquisition (the awareness stage).

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average customer’s attention span is eight seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000. That is officially less than the attention span of a goldfish (nine seconds). Our capacity to focus on one thing is diminishing, making the initial impression all the more valuable.

It is believed that human communication has existed for over 30,000 years, but text-based communication has only been around for 3,700 years. So for the vast majority of human history, people have had to communicate without written word, meaning our brains had plenty of time to brush up on visual messages.

That is why it is important to use visuals in advertising to create valuable, attractive content that stands out from this huge amount of digital information.

Using images we can deliver fast simple messages and make the first interaction with our brand enjoyable (the brain process an image in less than 0.25 seconds). Effective visuals include are also:

• infographics – a useful, convincing way of presenting complex data and statistics
• videos – are more effective than any other type of content! (because they include both audio and visual representations)

For example, how would you promote real estate without visuals (images and videos)? Hardly impossible, isn’t it? More than that, it looks like listings that include videos usually receive 400 % more inquiries than those without. Why?

Because People Prefer Videos

Many people just like videos more than texts. In fact, 59 % of executives would rather watch video than read text while four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product then read about it. 70% of millennials find videos helpful when comparison-shopping while 60 % prefer to watch a video to reading a newsletter.

So, Video Consumption is Up 

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic.

And more important: Videos increase sales and boost the brand because:

• 80% of users recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days.
• videos turn watchers into advocates as 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others while social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
• posts with videos receive nearly 300% more inbound links than those without.
• it brings more visitors to a website. Companies using videos receive 41 % more web (organic and direct) traffic from search.
• adding videos to email marketing campaigns can bring a 200-300% increase in click-through rate.
• including a video on a landing page increased conversions by 80%.  In fact, 88% of visitors stay longer on a site with prominent video displayed. Those that stay longer spend an average of 120 seconds more on a retail site and are 64% more likely to purchase after viewing a single product video.
• 50% of executives look for more information after seeing a product or service in a video. In fact, 65 % of them visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video.
• 52% of shoppers confess that watching product videos makes them more confident in making a purchase 40% of shoppers will even visit a store online or in-person after watching a video.
  the average conversion rate for websites using video is 4.8 % compared to 2.9 % for those that do not use video while 40 % of customers state that video increases the chance that they’ll purchase a product on their mobile device.
• 90 % of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision-making process

Simply put, videos drive sales: 74 % of users who watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service subsequently bought it and 77% of consumers say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video. Businesses using video grow company revenue 49% faster year-over-year than organizations without video.

None of this is really surprising when you take into account that one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words (Forrester Research).

In conclusion, as people react better to visuals instead of text, why companies should not deliver their messages through visual more in order to drive their audience’s attention and engagement?

3 viewer behaviors we saw play out on YouTube in 2018

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/video/2018-youtube-viewing-behavior/