Visual Marketing: How Your Website's Imagery Can Attract Your Perfect Buyers

If someone asks how visual marketing works, just ask them what comes to mind when shown a picture with a big “M” in red and yellow background colors. If their first thought is Mcdonald's, visual marketing works for them.

Over the years, we’ve seen how the digital age has transformed how people consume different media forms—from newsprints to pamphlets, billboards, and electronic signs to websites and social media.

As the medium of information evolves, so does how people consume it. Gone are the days when we would spend minutes reading blogs or news. With the barrage of information online, web users do not like reading blocks of text anymore, and this is where visual marketing comes to play—-to break the monotony.

What is a visual marketing strategy?

True to its name, visual marketing is a marketing strategy that uses different forms of visual mediums to attract diverse audiences—from pictures, videos, animations, GIFs, infographics, and many more.

Compared to other marketing strategies, visual marketing breaks down the wall of “too-much-information” marketing. On average, a person spends 53 seconds on a website, and that’s certainly not much time to delve into essential information that a marketer needs to highlight.

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Visual cues, like infographics, help highlight crucial information that a website or a marketer needs to get through to keep a visitor on your website.

Volodymyr Shchegel, VP of Engineering at MacKeeper said, “Just using any random picture or video is not enough. You need to understand your brand identity, audience, and statistics to create the most compelling visual marketing materials for your website.”

Types of visual marketing content

There are many types of visual marketing content you can use to your advantage, as follows:

Images

As the most basic form of visual marketing material, the use of images helps readers and website visitors take a ‘break’ from a barrage of information, especially in lengthy blog posts. But this doesn’t mean you can just grab any random photo on the internet on your blog.

These photos must be relevant to your topic, easy on the eyes, and high-quality. If you are a digital marketer, you probably already know how vital high-quality images are in Google’s visual search, which helps make your pictures (and your blog) rank high on SERPs.

Your image options include original photos, screenshots, illustrations, digital drawings, or stock images.

For example, for inspiration on creating a comfortable and inviting bedroom, you may want to explore photos of top-rated mattresses, cozy bedroom setups, stylish furniture arrangements, and calming color schemes. Incorporating visuals of well-designed bedrooms, innovative storage solutions, or even before-and-after images can drive more purchases in your business.

can also ignite innovative ideas for driving more purchases in your business.

Videos

According to Statista, YouTube ranks as the second most used website in monthly usage at 2.5 billion monthly active users, just behind Meta-giant Facebook. Just four spots below is TikTok, with 1 billion active users per month.

We cannot deny how videos have played a significant role in consuming information and entertainment. While textual information is still relevant, video consumption helps brands attract and retain audience engagement on social media pages and websites.

GIFs and memes

The use of GIFs and memes wasn’t as prevalent before as it is now, but the wise choice of incorporating them into your website or blog posts will introduce a youthful freshness and likely attract a younger generation of audiences.

Infographics

Websites dealing with informational topics must consider that visual cues are the best way to get important information across.

Infographics use a combination of text and images to help readers quickly find relevant data, especially statistics, numbers, percentages, facts, and summaries of certain or all parts of the entire text. They can also come in the form of interactive content, like animated and interactive infographics.

How visual marketing helps your website

Builds your brand identity

Building your brand identity is a process of making a name for your brand—your image, your values, what you stand for, your products and services, and your promises to your customers.

While brand identity is a synergy of all these, there must be a strong and unique visual image that comes with your brand that you must incorporate in your logos, social media, and website designs.

Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel said, “Visual marketing isn’t limited to logos and signs. An intricate part of visual marketing is developing a single imagery that your customers can associate you with and incorporating this imagery—from fonts to colors—on all your marketing practices.”

Increase audience engagement

After we encourage visitors to stay on the page or a website, the next aim is to reduce the bounce rate.

Google Support defines bounce rate as a percentage of when a user only clicks a single page on your site and does not trigger any subsequent requests. In simple terms, a user clicks on your home page and then exits without purchasing anything.

Attracts potential leads to become buyers

Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches says, “The end goal of all marketing efforts is to lead all prospects to take action or become customers of your brand.”

Visual marketing efforts, like incorporating images on your blog posts, embedding a welcome or introductory video on your website’s home page, posting enticing marketing images on Instagram, or working with TikTok influencers for video marketing, are all strategies to get your leads down the sales pipeline.

Tips for effective visual marketing strategies

The most effective visual marketing strategies take advantage of trends and psychological behavior of audiences, as follows:

• Say no to stock images. White stock image websites are popular sources of pictures for your blog posts. They usually lack authenticity and originality and do not contribute valuable information to your content. They also look spammy because most websites already use stock photos. There’s a high probability that many other websites have used the same stock photos you do.
• Image and text balance. Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing & Media Relations at Ninja Transfers suggests, There must be a balance between text and visual content like images and videos on your website. All text and no visuals make your website look saturated, while all visuals and no text do not give your audience any helpful information.
• Use what works best for each platform. If you manage various socials, it is important to consider the type of visual content that works best for each platform. For example, images or carousels work best for Instagram, while short-form portrait videos work best for Tiktok posts.
• Personalize and connect. Believe it or not, your audience knows the authenticity of your content. This is why over the years, the use of stock photos has been highly discouraged, as they come across as inauthentic. To personalize and connect with your audience through visual cues, try using original screenshots of your work or your website, personalized illustrations, infographics, or videos of you or your products and services.
• Stay consistent with your brand. Brand consistency is vital for every organization. Staying consistent with your visual imagery, values, personality, and services as an organization helps make you a recognizable entity that helps promote public awareness and increased customer loyalty.

Andrew Pierce, CEO at LLC Attorney, “Staying consistent with brand identity is something that all organizations must not ignore. But this doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to change. A brand identity is a foundation and serves as a stepping stone to develop your identity in line with current market trends.”

Wrapping up

Just like humans care for their appearance and image, the same applies to your organization’s website. It serves as the ‘face’ of your brand, and it is crucial that your audience gets all the necessary information in an easy-to-digest manner the moment they see your website.

Images, videos, infographics, and the like are essential visual marketing tools to make your website more attractive to loyal customers and potential buyers, so staying consistent, being authentic, and serving relevant visual cues are essential to attracting your perfect buyers.