Visual communication has been there long before the written word came around to be. If you go as far back as the first cavemen, their only means of communication where through visuals: carvings on the walls, simple drawings showing hunting rituals, etc. People always needed to communicate with each other, and when there was no way to tell a story, they simply showed it.
Not much has changed since then. Yes, alphabets, technology and internet were introduced and became an inseparable part of our lives today, but people are the still the same people they were thousands of years ago – we just have more information, education and technology.
The best way to communicate your message and engage people is still visual. It’s much easier to show, not tell.
Visuals content draws more attention
AS we know, communication and engagement is the key to building trust between your company and potential customers. On top of this, we also know that visual content is much more sought by people than plain, written text. There we you have it, the first combination of success: Communicating through visuals, will capture more attention, and therefore will be more effective.
With the attention span of people going down (from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today), it’s becoming more and more important to include a large amount of visual content in your communication. A few quick facts:
- Infographics increase website visits by 12%
- Content featuring any visual material (photo, picture, video, etc) generates 94% more views
- 60% of potential buyers are more likely to contact a business that have an image in search results
Social media posts featuring images achieve 37% more engagement - Facts and statistics don’t necessarily mean everything, but they can’t be ignored.
Visual content is easier to notice and memorize
If the message you communicate doesn’t reach the audience, then all the effort, time and resources invested into it suddenly become costs for your company. Spamming the web with communication is meaningless, if it doesn’t reach the consumer, simple as that.
On the flip side, something as small as a cool emoji, will make a lot of difference.
In the digital era of today, we receive five times more information than we used to, but the amount of information our memory can store hasn’t increased correspondingly. This leads people to become pickier about what content they decide to consume and the best way to interest them, is through visual content. Keep in mind that
Another thing to keep in mind is that visual content activates more sensory levels of the brain than written text. While text activates only two parts of the brain (language understanding and language processing), visual content combined with text activates motor, visual and sensor parts of the brain, in addition to the other two. This basically increases the chance to remember information or communication.
Visuals dominate social media
With hundreds of messages on the news feeds, your post needs to stand out from the mass for people to actually notice it and consider taking a closer look. Human brain processes visual content 60.000 times faster than text and 50 percent of information is transmitted to the brain through visuals.
Social media is one of the most important channels to increase recognition, brand awareness and build trust with your consumers. Creative, eye-catchy, unique and colorful content is a must for all three criteria mentioned above. People trust what they see, far more than what they read.
If you think about it, social media is about a lot of things, but more often than not, it’s about fun, and fun includes visuals. What this means for businesses, is that in order to capture attention, you have to provide some kind of competition for fun and that can never be achieved with plain text.
When thinking about visual content, it’s important to consider as many formats as possible: pictures, photos, infographics, videos, slideshares, memes, animated short stories, etc. and choose a compelling design for all those. Diversity will make your content more interesting and appealing to your audience, which is what every business should be aiming for.
