How Do I Use Images, Videos, And Graphics In My Content To Get More Clicks

The written word is powerful. They aren’t the be-all, end-all in content delivery, however. More brands than ever populate the marketplace today. A lot of them put out thousands of words monthly and some to no response whatsoever. Users are being flooded every day with all this content, most of which will be dismissed in milliseconds.

 How you get your content marketing to stand out, get attention, and ultimately be its most effective is to use things like design, images, videos, and graphics. This is to frame your content message in a quick-to-digest format. The use of visual design will also help to overcome the repetitiveness of text which is easy for a modern consumer to browse past.

 If you can write amazing content, that’s excellent! It’s still not enough to guarantee success. You’ve got to work design in there. This is how you come up with more powerful content that doesn’t compromise the quality of your output. This is how you cut through the noise and gain competitive advantages across social media platforms, search engines like Google, and offline as well.

What’s More Important, Written Content Or How It’s Designed?

 A content marketing campaign is driven by words. You can’t do content with the written word. How these words are delivered in a visual is equal in importance, however. This isn’t to say use random font changes and graphics that are overwhelming in their delivery. Be creative but operate within the parameters of content. Any visual – image, graphic, etc. – shouldn’t be a distraction.

What Are The Three Goals Of Design In Content Marketing?

 How you design your content is consistently done for three purposes.

• Grab attention. Think of what’s the most eye-catching parts of your content and emphasize these with a visual of some kind.

• Make a product or service appealing. What is your content selling? It’s not necessarily a physical product or service. It could be an idea. Any design or visual should move the consumer of content to believe your idea is more attractive.

• Clarifies the action you want a user to take. Design is a clarification method. It’s a way to highlight your call-to-action as well as help move along a user through what they’re reading.

How Do I Maximize The Effectiveness Of Images In Digital Marketing?

 You will notice reading content on sites like Buzzfeed or CBC how they break up content with images and graphics. It has a distinctive tone. They know the audience they are serving. You, ideally, will know yours as well. This is how you stimulate their interest. Understand your target audience’s background. Understand their struggle. Solve their problem. This is a rudimentary pattern used in all forms of digital marketing and it holds true with maximizing image effectiveness.

How Can I Use Photos Or Images In My Content Marketing?

 An image tells a story without ever saying a word. There are several highly effective ways to use images and graphics in content. These are just a few of our favourites that we think every marketer, brand, or business owner should know.

• An image showing your product or service doing its thing, akin to a demonstration.

• Images with people who look like your target audience enjoying your product or service.

• An image showing a specific benefit of your product or service told through the eyes of someone in your target audience.

• Images showing how a product or service is enhancing the life of someone in your target audience.

As you can tell, these are all audience-centric ways to create images, videos, and graphics. Promotional images and the like have their place but they will never resonate as well as a storytelling-infused piece of content.

Can I Use Too Many Videos And Graphics In Content Marketing?

 Yes, too many videos and graphics can prove to be detrimental to your content. Limit your visuals only to what you feel is necessary to keep your content interesting. You don’t want content becoming overly confusing. This will make it more difficult to highlight your CTA and convert readers. Decorate your content in minimalism, not maximalism. This way, everything you do is effective and purposeful.

What Are Some Ways To Use Video In My Content?

 More than 82% of all consumer Internet use is video. It is, by far, the most popular form of content. How to use video in a blog is to do so sparingly and to select videos that are most relevant to what’s being discussed. Here are a few rules to remember.

• Do not host the video on your website server. Host it on YouTube and then embed it into your blog. This will save on hosting space and YouTube videos are more easily accessible compared to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.

• Try not to incorporate more than 1 video per blog. Two videos at most! Too many videos are distracting. Ideally, you want to include it towards the end of your blog as a supplement to what you’ve written.

• If you don’t have a reason to use video in a blog, it’s better not to and rely on GIFS and images to make your point rather than to incorporate a video that doesn’t need to be there.

• The most popular types of video to put into a blog include video how-to guides, video tutorials, vlogs, short video summaries, and/or an ‘About Us’ video.

Is An Infographic More Effective Than A Blog?

 An infographic condenses and summarizes content in a very visual, easy-to-absorb graphic style. It doesn’t replace a blog nor is an infographic inherently better than a blog. That said, a 2,000-word blog can be intimidating to some.

 A summary in an infographic can be processed much quicker and is more likely to be remembered than purely the written word. Infographics are also shared more often on social media than links to blogs. You may want to start using your blog content and filtering it into an infographic format, and see how this changes your engagement numbers.

Do I Need To Write A Blog With Social Media Images, Video, And Graphics Being So Effective?

 Even though images, video, and graphics are extremely effective in the right context at making a point, there are still dozens of reasons to continue writing a blog. You certainly don’t want to stop writing and maintaining a blog, and here’s why.

• Some people want more information than an image or video can give. Text is what they will be looking for.

• Blogs provide value in a way that still images can’t. They’re more exploratory and are central to gaining new customers, answering questions and allowing leads to skim past information that’s unnecessary. You can’t necessarily skim a video in the same way.

• Blogs help IMMENSELY with your SEO on all platforms, allowing you to be more easily locatable on Google, Bing, other search engines, and social media platforms a la Facebook, Twitter, and others.

• Blogs are a lot more affordable to produce compared to a video which will cost you hundreds, if not thousands, to make and possibly hours upon hours to edit.

Images and video are the sizzle. A blog is the steak. Let’s put it that way. At some point, we all want to read more. A blog is there to be that ‘read more’. They can offer 1,000s of words of information that fitting into an infographic or video would seem unnecessary.

 Images are quick to process and are click-friendly. Infographics vastly open up the opportunities that exist to put bullet point-style information in a quickly-read format. Videos are extremely popular, conversion-friendly, and are arguably the most effective way to deliver a tutorial on something. Blogs also offer tremendous value, elevating web design, social media, email, SEO, and more.

In your next digital marketing campaign, consider how you can build content with all of these having a role. Believe us when we say, you will see a difference in the numbers.