While words are an undeniably important factor in your content, visuals supercharge audience engagement. That’s because our brains respond better to visual content than to text. In fact, the brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than it processes text. That means adding supporting visuals to your content enables your audience to retain much more of the information.
Visuals and Video Support Text
In addition, including an illustration such as a pie chart or a bar graph with text can help readers grasp your message more quickly. That’s because they don’t have to create their own mental image of what they’re reading. Even just adding a relevant picture can help readers better understand your text. At the very least, pictures can help you grab reader attention more effectively. Finally, visuals give your brain a break from the work of reading.
Visuals include video as well pictures and graphs. Watching a video of other people using a product can increase viewers’ understanding of that product’s capabilities. Also, seeing people talk about your product or service in video testimonials builds credibility. While some cynics may suspect that text and/or photos could be fake, video can overcome such suspicions.
In fact, the majority of businesses (86%) use video in their marketing in 2021. Even before this, the majority of those businesses were reporting a positive return on investment from using video. Also, most social media platforms now support video content. So you can make the most of one video by sharing it across multiple social channels for a wider reach.
The infographic below contains quite a few interesting facts and figures about the role that visuals, especially video, play in content marketing.
Note: The infographic mentions that blog posts with charts and graphs get more backtracks with other types of images. Without getting too technical about it, backtracks are basically notifications of someone linking to your post.
Kelle Campbell is a content writer for e-learning and B2B software companies. Contact her to discuss your next project.
