The simple answer to this last question is: always. It is always right. In fact, it is essential!
Today’s media landscape is cluttered with a multitude of channels, all clamouring for attention –all fighting for a moment of the viewer’s time. And that is all they have – a moment. In order to survive in today’s jungle of messages, your message has to stand out – instantly. The key way to do that is with a visual – whether moving, still or graphic. Catchy headlines are all well and good, but they will always lose out to a striking image.
This is partly to do with the brain’s speed of processing. Most research suggests that someone who is a fast reader will read (and comprehend) at best, 400 words per minute. If we assume a short sentence length of ten words – just enough to describe a simple idea, concept or product benefit – then that is 40 sentences a minute. So let’s say it takes 1.5 seconds to understand a ten word sentence. But according to research by MIT, the brain can make sense of an image in as little as 13 milliseconds – an incredibly short space of time and over 100 times faster than text.
The brain doesn’t really like extra work, so we prefer images to text – they require less work to understand and make sense of. In addition, an image can contain a lot of meaning, context and data. A picture really can paint a thousand words.
So given that the brain is always going to favour images over text – how does this play out in the real world of inbound marketing? We’ve known for a long time about the popularity of videos and infographics for communicating ideas and data. Content containing relevant images gets 94 per cent more views than content without. Social media is now prioritised to display images and videos, with the rise of mobile driving that trend. Videos are predicted to make up 84 per cent of Internet traffic by 2018, according to Cisco. Even Twitter, which was originally a text only medium, is now dominated by images – without an image your tweet will simply be lost in the stream – unnoticed and unloved.
That’s all very well you may be saying, but I don’t have a beautiful car to sell, or a photogenic product, or a menu of mouth-watering food items – how do I use visual communication to market my serious, but remarkable B2B product or service?
The key is to relate the content back to first principles of inbound – make it relevant to your buyer persona at the appropriate stage of their buyer’s journey. Remember that buyers are researching, fact finding and trying to gain an understanding of their issues, the market and the possible solutions. So you can create visual marketing that is helpful with that quest for knowledge. Here are just a few examples:
These are just some of the ways you could take a visual approach to marketing B2B products and services.
Investing in video will undoubtedly add the most powerful of visual communication tools to your marketing, and it could be that the budget to do so might not be the insurmountable challenge you fear. If video isn't an option, then consider simply adding good quality images to your marketing – your blog posts, social media messages, eBooks and the rest. If you can brand the images in some way – even better. But make sure the images fit with the content.
Use your own images where you can and be careful when using stock photography. Well chosen, appropriate stock images can attract the eye and add some flavour and context to a post. But images that are clichéd or have a distinct message of their own, or sit uncomfortably alongside the subject matter, will only serve to distract the eye and the mind and detract from your message.
Given the popularity of infographics and video, the undeniable trends towards image-based content, and the rise in popularity of live streaming – you simply can’t afford to ignore the fact that visual communication is not only always right for B2B inbound marketers – it’s essential.