I recently came across some notes I took during a content marketing conference about using visuals in content marketing. While excellent text content creation is still crucial to the search engines and building a reliable resource for your clients to rely on, images can move your business blogging to the top of the charts.
As you can imagine, there are plenty of reasons to use visuals when marketing on the web. Despite the need for large amounts of text to make your blog SEO ready, we’re drowning in content. We simply don’t have enough time to read everything that is on the web. That’s obvious, but the point I want to make is that Images cut through the web content marketing like a hot knife. After all, a picture is worth 1,000 words.
Images are also more sharable than text. Click and select an image as opposed to a specific body of text and you will see what I mean. Not only that, but an image can be resized with minimal disruption. Text too small is simply illegible. Ever try pinning some text on Pinterest? Nope, didn’t think so.
So what kind of images should you use in your online content marketing? A good rule of thumb is to let the creation of content set the boundaries for the imagery. For the most part, although this can blur a little bit, putting a picture of a puppy on a blog about IT services is a bad idea. Unless, of course, your content has something to do with dogs.
Images don’t have to just be stock imagery, either. Mix in some other styles of visual communication such as:
- Comics – A great way to engage with your consumer right away. A good comic can put the reader at ease instantly.
- Memes – An image with a little text (think motivational poster). You can use these to represent an offer or a whitepaper. You can push people towards an offer more powerfully with a nice clean image attached.
- Info-graphics – This is a fantastic way to communicate info, especially anything that is not overly simple.
- Video – Most people are willing to watch a video. It’s easy for them. However, it is expensive and quality does matter – as does the story board.
- Visual note taking – Mostly utilized in a lecture environment, this can be a great way to keep people engaged with more difficult material.
With your digital content marketing you want to make sure that your imagery and your text communicate. Hopefully this will be seamless and they will communicate the same message. One last thing to consider with your business blogging is the many ways of managing content marketing. Investing in a comprehensive content software program will make the addition of imagery as easy as adding another line of text. Innoblogs is our proprietary program for managing content marketing. The interface is extremely user friendly and there are ways of tracking the addition of imagery to make sure your blog is meeting the needs of both the search engine as well as your client base.
For any of your online content marketing questions give us a call or contact us to get more information about how innoblogs can empower your blogging for business needs.
