How Good Visuals can Help you Boost Sales

As the old saying goes: “One picture is worth a thousand words”, a picture can convey the most complex of emotions in a rather simpler manner. 

Remember the time when posters and billboards were the only thing to promote a business? Well, times have surely changed with the rise of digital marketing. However, the impact of attractive visuals remains unaltered. The Coca Cola billboard you saw a few years ago might have left a mark on your mind. That’s the thing about visuals - a perfect amalgam of colors, patterns and text captures the human mind. 

Visual content takes the whole marketing game a notch higher. In fact, content with visuals have 94% more views and is also more likely to be ranked by Google. 

However, the effect of visual content is not simply limited to marketing your brand on social media. Even if you want to pitch your services to a prospective client or invite some diginitories to a business event, visuals go a long way. 

For instance, you want to pitch your services to a client. You can either create a simple document file with tons of textual data or you could make a powerpoint presentation with a visually appealing template. What would appeal to the client more? Yes, a slideshow with decent colors and some text. 

You can use this free online slideshow maker to make your pitch a hundred times better. You can choose a template from the available ones, or customize your own and present your services that will allure the client. Plus, a unique pitch might land you a high-paying client and eventually boost sales. 

While this is one of the ways to impress a client through pitching in a unique way, there are many others as well. In this article, we will look at five more reasons for how good visuals can help you boost sales. 

5 Ways good visuals can boost sales

Whether you are a small business or an established one, a strong marekting strategy will help you outrank other competitors. Below we listed five ways how visually-appealing content can boost your sales. 

Drives human emotions 

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From the gazillion gigabytes of data you consume, how much of it stays in your subconscious mind? That groovy song you heard a few months back or that poem you are still coming back to, there are very few things that actually hit you, right? A strong image has the same power but only if you know how to convey emotion through visuals. 

Conveying an emotion is yet secondary. You first need to know how to add an emotion to the image. Following are some emotions that could grab a viewer’s attention:

• Desire 

• Urgency 

• Motivation 

• Glee 

• Care and compassion 

Depending on which industry your business comes from, you can create visuals that focus on the abovementioned emotions. For instance, if you are into food business, you could create urgency offering discounts or special offers on a food item for a limited time duration. This will make your customers want to try your services. 

You want to build trust with your customers. To do so, you need to give them what they want. To achieve this, you can collaborate with an influencer or a bigname and ask him/her to promote your brand. People are more likely to trust a brand that is associated with a big name after all. 

Simple to understand 

There is science behind this statement. A human brain can process visuals 60,000x faster than text which is why an image can convey a message way faster than just words. Below, we’ll list a few reasons why visuals are simple to comprehend: 

People remember up to 80% of what they see

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As seen in the image above, people only remember up to 20% of what they read and up to 80% of what they see. This itself shows that visual content is easy to see and hence, easy to remember too. So if you want to leave a lasting impact on a viewer, visuals are a must! 

More information gets communicated effectively

This is one of the most important reasons why visuals are easy to comprehend. You can use words, colors and patterns to communicate with your customers. Instead of writing a thousand words, you can convey the same message through a single image. 

Improves engagement

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As seen in the graph above, 80% marketers use visual images in their marketing strategies. Visuals easily convey information and are simple to comprehend – these are the two most important key points that improve engagement. Here are a few reasons more for how visuals improve engagement:

Easily shareable 

Between a blog post and an image, what do you think is more shareable? An image is way easier not only to remember but to share with others as well. If you come across a funny image on Instagram, you are more likely to send that one to your friends instead of a post with a few sentences. The reason is simple–you don’t need to put in more efforts to see an image. 

Hashtag campaigns are also easily shareable. You can create a design as part of your campaign and add campaign-specific hashtags to make it shareable. 

It is shorter

This is an era of optimization. With shorted attention span, 95% of B2B clients now prefer short and mobile-friendly content. Visual content just provide that. 

Breaks monotony while scrolling 

We all have a habit to scroll through Instagram and other social media posts. Even though it gets tiring and monotonous after a while, we continue to scroll through. This is where a colorful image or a short video can catch your eye and break the monotony. You will pause for a few seconds to understand a visually-appealing image. 

Gives your brand a unique identity 

The colors, logo, imagery and the emotion you want to convey – these things cumulatively help you build a unique brand identity. When creating an image, always use real objects, places instead of using stock images. These small things add up to building trust among your customers. 

For example, McDonald’s logo is red and yellow. Red is specifically used to instigate hunger in customers. While yellow is the most visible color during daylight and reflects the light! Hence, you can spot a McDonald’s poster even in an extremely crowded place.
Similarly, you need to figure out three things for your brand:

• What emotion do you want the viewer to feel when he/she takes a look over your poster/image?

• Which colors complement the emotion you want the viewer to feel?

• Do these colors complement each other?

• Is your design easy to spot from across a distance and in a crowded place?

• Check your competitors 

After you have clarity on the abovementioned points, you can create a design that reflects your brand identity.

Improves your Google rank 

Content with visuals are viewed up to 94% more often than those without visuals. Plus, visual content is not only more identified by customers but Google identifies it too. Be it textual content or video content, adding visuals to improve the scope of your page being listed among the top searched Google pages. 

For example, if you have a video to post on Instagram and you want to make it worldwide-friendly, then what do you do? Well, you add subtitles to it! You can easily do audio to text transcription with Happy Scribe and get subtitles added to your video within a few minutes. 

Similarly, you need to add visual images to a blog post so that Google ranks your page better. Of course, adding images to a blog or to your content doesn’t magically boost your Google ranking if the content isn’t optimized well. Visual content simply provides information in a more digestible manner, and the viewers are more likely to stay on the page. This improves the overall engagement rate of the page and attracts more viewers. 

Google cannot identify the images on the blog, however, the algorithm matches the shapes present in the picture and links them together. You can even reach out to SEO specialists or experts for this kind of optimization. They will help you create and add images to your content in a way that Google recognizes it. 

Wrapping up how visuals can boost sales

As exciting as all this may sound, you should know it also comes with a lot of responsibility. 

While good visuals can direct your customers in the right direction, incorrect visuals can also deter learners. So you need to be careful while designing or selecting an image or a video. One image could be interpreted in various ways. You cannot control a viewer’s take on the visual, however, you should try to create one such that it says what you want it to say. 

So, use visuals in your content and see how it drives your sales! 

Author Bio 

Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses.  When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.