How Does Visual Content Equal Sales?

Everybody’s Talking At Me

Everyone is sharing visual content. Think about it, how many times have you seen a funny picture and you clicked that share button? And how many of those images were posted by one of your favorite companies from their fan page at the top of your news feed?

In the last couple of years, there’s been a rise in social media networks highlighting visual content. Personally, I love it. I think it makes marketing more engaging and quite honestly, less boring than a bunch of words telling me that I need to buy something. Show me a funny picture of a dog trying to use your product and you’ve got my attention.

And I’m not the only one. A study conducted by an online marketing program Shareaholic found that Pinterest drives more sales and web traffic than Google+, YouTube and Linkedin COMBINED. They discovered that people are more willing to click on that ‘pay for it here’ button if they saw how they could use it in their own lives.

Visual Content Facts and Figures

If that statement about Pinterest doesn’t convince you, take a look at these stats from MDG Advertising:

1. Content with images receives 94% more total views than content with just text.
2. 67% of customers consider detailed images to be more important than a list of the product description and customer ratings.
3. When making a buying decision, 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business if they see images about their products show up in search results.
4. Facebook’s marketing statistics have shown us that businesses will see a 37% increase in engagement when their Facebook posts include photos or some type of graphics.

So how does a photo make me sales?

It really comes to down to this: the majority of consumers are visual learners. When given a choice between reading a 10 page product guidebook or looking at a how-to-do-this picture, most people will take the graphic and then spend an hour trying to figure out which one is Part A and where is Slot C. That’s just how our minds work.

I want you to start thinking about the images you use to promote your business. Stop just throwing your logo up on your Facebook posts. You’re not teaching anyone how to do anything by showing us how what your logo looks like.

Is there a way to creatively show someone using your service? Let them imagine themselves see how cool it is to use your stuff. Create images to help them envision how your products can solve their problems.

And here’s a little marketing secret about images: They help with the SEO of your website. When you include your keywords, company name and product or service in the ALT tag of your images, your images will come up when someone searches for that topic.

Don’t forget to add your keywords as the name of your image when you post them on your Facebook fan page or pin them on Pinterest. Both of these sites have a graphic search function and your images will pop up with a link to your website.

Here’s your equation for more sales:

Engaging images + keywords in alt tags and image titles = an image linking to where they can buy the exact same thing that they just clicked on. And that’s how a photo can make you a sale.

Photo credit: Betsy’s market stop

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