With an increasing emphasis on social media marketing, and a decrease in consumer’s attention spans, images are important… to say the least. People are more likely to look at an internet meme than read a lengthy article. In fact, between 60-85% of people describe themselves as visual learners (Trend Reports). Businesses are catching on and making changes to embrace this new age of thinking. Ideas such as adding images throughout articles (maybe even some animated gifs), or infographics are becoming increasingly popular. So what can you do to keep up?
Break up text with images
Whether it’s a blog, e-book, website, or email, you simply can’t have a long string of text. Most people will decide immediately that they do not have time to read the whole thing, and it appears exhausting. Breaking up the text with images to emphasize your point will give readers a moment to reflect on and better absorb what they just read, as well as motivates them to read on. Remember – visual learners!
Improve SEO
An easy way to boost your site’s SEO is by including images with relevant keywords. For best results, use these keywords in:
- The file name of the image
- The title
- Alt text
- Description tag
- Hashtags on social media sites
These are they types of things Google looks for when crawling and indexing your site.
Make it mobile friendly
Today it is essential to make your site, email, etc. mobile friendly. The fact is, MOST people are going to be looking at it from a mobile phone.
A couple options to ensure a positive viewing experience would be to either create a separate mobile version or make your page responsive. Here’s a good article with more examples.
Embrace social media
Create a blog post? A new page on your website? Use a program like HootSuite to easily share this content to multiple social media sites in one click. Images, of course, are key here. People scrolling through Facebook are much more likely to stop for an image than an exciting headline. Draw them in with the photo, and close the deal with your great content.
Less is more
Consumers are so overwhelmed with flashy content, that some companies are backing up and creating a simpler approach. Take Apple for example – their clean and simple products and advertising are refreshing and to the point. The lesson here is while images are very important to include, don’t go overboard!