The science behind colors can help you attract more customers

science of marketing colorsThere are thousands of stats that point to the importance of using visual content in marketing. Social media analytics, surveys, studies and experiments all support how powerful graphics and color can be. Take the rawest stat of them all: When reading, our brain decodes visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

Many online visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website and delivering information quickly and succinctly is vital to online success.

Consider which social media platform gets the most engagement–that is, the one that enjoys the most follower-to-brand reaction on a regular basis. It isn’t Facebook or Twitter that commands the most engagement and interaction between its brands and their followers; that title goes to Instagram, the only social media platform among the three that is built on the premise of sharing visual content, rather than text.

Instagram’s pictures and videos garnered 58 times more engagement for its brands than Facebook’s status updates or Twitter’s 140-character tweets.

Even more telling in this equation is the fact that the posts followers engaged with most on Facebook and Twitter were also images and videos. Whichever way you slice it, it’s clear that visual content reaches your viewers more easily, conveys your message more concisely, and inspires engagement more effectively.

So you know that it’s important to include visual content in your marketing efforts. It’s also important to present that visual content in a variety of iterations:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • Slideshares
  • Memes

Each of these types of visual content has the potential to appeal to your audience in a more effective way than mere text. Understanding the relevance and effectiveness of visual content is vital to execute a great content strategy.

Even if you understand the importance of including visual content in your marketing efforts, you may not have a good grasp on the importance of design and balance in the visual content you produce. Learning about these elements, including white space, color balance, symmetry, and texture, can help you produce the kind of visual content that encourages engagement from your followers.

Still need convincing on the virtues of good visual content? 

Take a look at this infographic and decide if your marketing strategy has enough visual content — or if you’re 31,000 years behind.

Original source image: the Bigstock blog.