Viena / 5 Mins Read
Updated: December 22, 2022
Determine why visuals and infographics are essential in the creation of your website content as you read this article.
Various types of websites populate the internet nowadays, with multiple and assorted contents to offer. Thus, it is a great challenge to produce web content that will engage and sustain your viewers' interest to read, post, and share your content.
Humans are visual creatures and spend 10% more viewing time than reading text. It only takes seconds for the viewer to decide whether to stay on your website or jump to the next one.
This visual preference led content marketers to invest heavily in visuals to attract their target audience significantly. About 40% of advertisers predict that 51% to 80% of businesses will heavily engage in visual content by 2021.
It is, therefore, crucial to carefully select your web content. Web content not only depends on its textual content to deliver information. Also, it heavily relies on the power of visual appeal and meaning to further deliver your message. This is where visuals and infographics come into the picture.
Visuals or visual content is web content that relies primarily on visual elements to convey or support other web content. On the other hand, infographics are a compilation of images, charts, and minimal text that provides an easy-to-grasp topic overview.
Let us determine why visuals and infographics are essential in creating your website content.
Humans are highly visual creatures with the capability of processing visual information 60,000 times faster than text. As good as these may sound, our brains had short attention spans from 12 seconds in 2020 to only 8 seconds in 2018. It is even more concise than a goldfish's average attention span, which is at 9 seconds.
We are constantly overloaded with information, most in the form of text. The brain often interprets textual information as 'repetitive and boring' and selectively retains information.
According to statistics, viewers are 80% more willing to indulge in web content with meaningful images. Content with significant images garners 94% more attention than plain text content. These data substantiate the need to use engaging, relevant, and engaging visual content for viewers' sustained engagement in your web content.
The information takes on a new form through visual content like visuals and infographics and engages viewers' limited attention. It is like playing on the visual sense to capture, engage, and sustain their interest.
Visual contents also have this 'strong attraction' effect on your viewers by appealing to their senses. It stimulates their brains' cognitive and creative functions to process and understands images. Through this manner, viewers are hardwired to 'emotionally connect' and stay on your website to learn your content.
Visuals and infographics may attract and sustain attention and create viewers' connections by the use of:
Visual content doesn't just stand out at the viewer's first sight but is easily remembered.
People are more inclined to remember 65% of information with visual content three days later than the story they heard. You can add attractive and compelling visuals to your well-researched web content and watch your content resonate with your viewers over time.
The more attractive your web content gets, the more the website becomes marketable. It is easy to attract visitors to engage and stay at your website with creative visual content. Thus, creative, stimulating, and compelling visuals are the backbone of advertising success.
If you venture into product or services marketing, this is an excellent opportunity to market using attractive visuals and infographics by:
By statistics, infographics can increase web traffic by 12%, while Facebook posts with images obtain 2.3 times more engagement than plain Facebook text posts.
Instead of reading long text paragraphs, viewers engage in beautiful visuals to better understand your web content. Long yet relevant information such as steps, processes, and definitions can be best presented and summarized through visual content.
Visual content also helps clarify complicated or lengthy information contained within the plain text. It makes the story more accessible, quick, and clearly understood than reading groups of text. It helps your viewers, especially those with low literacy, easily digest chunks of information for better website appreciation.
An infographic, for example, can help people follow directions 323% better than following directions in plain text.
Examples of information that can be summarized and clarified by using visual content include:
Visuals and infographics are great ways to land relevant internal and external links. You can attach hyperlinks of related information to your chosen visuals or infographics to help your readers land on intended informative websites.
Visual content acts like a snowball that enables the reader to transfer from one website or link to another through links. You can attach relevant hyperlinks to your content and contain authoritative sources.
Visual contents are also easy to share. As a content creator or marketer, you can share various visuals (charts, infographics, images, etc.) to your social media or main web page. Twitter, for example, has 35% more retweets from tweets with visual content than tweets with plain text. You can entice your viewers' attention through visuals and infographics while promoting and advertising your web content.
You may use visuals and infographics to repurpose your content to sustain your viewers' engagement and produce fresh, up-to-date content. Here are great tips on how you can use visuals and infographics for content repurposing:
Repurposing your content in a meaningful way complements your web text content and considers your audience preferences.
Visual content creates a long-lasting visible imprint in the minds of the viewers. It makes them identify and distinguish your brand and products apart from your competitors by using appropriate visuals.
Also, visual content allows increased engagement with your target customers that are attracted to your visuals. Frequent web visits, shares, and interactions help develop customers' brand loyalty. You are cementing your brand authority and promoting brand loyalty through relevant and creative visual content.
Visual content creates more viewer engagement, which can result in more leads. A lead is a person that displays interest and engagement in the product or service a company offers. It is a prospective customer that you aim to attract to visit and engage in your web content.
About 60% of people tend to click on the business with images in search results rather than plain web content. These viewers tend to check on the quality of the product images. It can significantly affect their decision to stay, purchase a product, convert towards your services, or leave your website.
Lastly, web content with engaging visuals garners more search and click rates in Google than in plain text. Visuals give higher visibility chances. Apparently, it comes through linkability, shareability, and quick appearance among search verticals. For example, visuals like videos can earn more than three times the amount of backlinks, increasing their search ranking. It is expected that 82% of consumer web traffic by 2022 will be coming from videos.
As visual people, we highly regard those that we find attractive, including visuals. Compelling, catchy, and engaging visuals and infographics are crucial for every web content. These promote viewer engagement and provide various consumption choices to your target audience. Boost your web content with attractive, creative, relevant visual content, and experience increased visibility, viewer engagement, and loyalty.
Did you like this post? Leave your suggestions, experiences, and insights about using visuals and infographics by commenting down below.
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Viena runs a content writing agency at iWriting Solutions. She is an Information technology graduate who has been working in the freelance writing industry for more than 7 years. She has worked as a content writer, senior editor, and project manager for multiple niches projects. Also, she has an excellent command of the English language both in oral and written forms.
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