Everybody shops at IKEA for a reason: the importance of graphical design on your conversion rates

Content marketing has been around pretty much since the beginning of marketing itself. Even in the old days of newspaper supplements and direct-to-mail ad supplements, every product would come with an engaging copywrite text that would promote the product in down-to-earth, friendly advice.

Although written content will always be a staple of every successful marketing campaign(we all like a good story, don’t we?), recent years have seen a rise in visual marketing content. There are a plethora of reasons why it is so, and in today’s article, we will elaborate on all of them. Our visual design experts here at BBox have gathered everything you need to know about visual content marketing and how to successfully implement it in your next campaign. Before we take a look at the strategies you can use, let’s first see the two main reasons why people prefer visual content.

We’re wired that way

The first reason is simply neurological. Our brains are way better at retaining images than words, especially spoken words. Psychologists and neurologists have long tried to explain this phenomenon and have proposed numerous theories why it is so. One of them suggests that pictures convey a direct message while words create a meta symbolic space where abstract symbols(spoken words) are further interpreted by other symbols(written words), thus demanding more processing power from the brain. Another theory suggests that, since the alphabet is a recent invention when compared to the totality of human existence, humans are more used to interpreting visual than textual data. This is especially true for kids, which brings us to our next point.

It’s cheaper

Let’s face it: it’s getting harder and harder to keep your audience and to engage them in reading your article. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, especially in upcoming generations. In general, our brain prefers images because they are cheaper when it comes to energy consumed and time spent. Our research suggests that people process images 60 000 times faster than regular text, which makes for a significant difference when you are trying to keep your audience one second longer on your website.

Once you realize the importance of images for your website, there’s a wide array of strategies you can use to increase your traffic. Basically, it all depends on what kind of content you wish to present. Our wonderful experts here at BBox have gathered some of the most common visual content types and advice where and when to use them.

Choose the right medium

There is no universal formula for choosing the right type of visual content. It all depends on the type of the website and the niche you are dealing with. In general, the world of digital marketing has seen the rise of importance of infographics in the past couple of years. We’ve already discussed the reason in the introduction: people like images and storytelling and infographics are both! Instead of cramming images between your paragraph, consider making them one whole entity.

If you do decide to stick with images, avoid stock images at all costs! Stock images make your website appear cheap and lazy. Instead, try hiring a professional photographer that could meet the demands of your website in a more personalized way. The difference is so big, your visitors will notice it immediately.

Go big or go home

This one is trivial as it gets: the more space your image occupies, the better chances it has to be seen. Using A/B conversion testing, our researchers have come to the conclusion that the increase in image size by less than 30% can amount to a staggering 60% conversion increase. That means that two-thirds of your visitors can become potential customers just because you increased the image size.

Better SEO

We are aware that this sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but images can help a great deal with your SEO. When uploading images to your website make sure use the alt-tags correctly, i.e. describe what the picture shows instead of using every single keyword under the sun to increase Google ranking. Alt tags are primarily there to show users with bad bandwidth what your image is all about. Also, make sure to use meta descriptions too, since Google’s crawlers take them into consideration too. In the end, try to write a short 300-word description under each image to make your content as much comprehensive as possible.

Let’s sum it up

Visual content was way more important long before the advent of digital marketing. Throughout the history of advertising, images have been used to capture and hold the attention of potential customers. Since people are becoming more and more reliant on visual content in the digital world, it’s probably time to consider enriching your website with it. The experts from our graphic design section have gathered some of the most important things you should know, but there’s so much more you have to be aware in order to harness the power of visual content. If you have any questions or need advice for the visual content on your website, feel free to contact our graphic design team – they’ll be more than happy to help.