Why Adding Graphics to Your Content Is Important
Well-written text is crucial for your content marketing strategy, but did you know that graphics and images also play a big role? Using graphics in the right place helps to create strong engagement with your readers. There are a few different strategies for adding graphics to your content, including using royalty-free image websites or creating your own custom images that represent your brand. Let’s look at some of the reasons why adding graphics to your content is important.
Top Reasons to Add Graphics to Your Content
Here are some of the top reasons you should add graphics to your content:
Stopping the Social Media Scroll
Image via Giphy by @madman-films
Images are an essential inclusion for content that’s shared on social media. In a text-heavy timeline, users will pay more attention to a post that includes a graphic or image. Viewers tend to spend more time looking at these images, and this higher interest level is a critical first step in getting that coveted click or share.
Highlighting Key Text
Custom images can help you highlight a key piece of text by setting it against an attractive backdrop. This combines important information with interest-grabbing imagery. Three days after hearing a piece of information, individuals remember about 10% of the content, but retention increases to 65% when a picture is used with text. Viewers retain more information from an image than from either written or spoken words alone.
Include a quote from your content on an image or graphic, and you’ve added value to your content in numerous ways. Not only will your content be more memorable, but it will also become more shareable. That type of content design is an ideal choice for posting to Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. But it also helps to include images that highlight key text in your written content itself. That allows you to emphasize important points and keep the reader engaged for the content’s duration.
Making Statistics Sensible
Image via Giphy by @patriotact
Crafted carefully, your images can take an otherwise confusing or abstract topic and make it instantly understandable. It’s one thing to read about the percentage of a population that’s affected by something, but it’s much more compelling to see that same percentage on an illustration or graph. This helps to emphasize the point. Including images with a complex topic can help make it more digestible for your audience. If yours is the most understandable explanation of a trending topic, it will serve an important need for the readers and become more shareable. The more shareable your content, the more conversions and leads you can expect, as members of your target audience share with their network of professionals.
Illustrating Important Points
Well-placed graphics can complement your written text. If you’re writing a how-to article outlining the proper way to use your product, you can use graphics to give your readers a clearly labeled peek at the inner workings of the good. You can also use graphics to help illustrate the step-by-step process. Carefully designed illustrations can walk readers through anything from meditation exercises to blog setup.
Don’t limit your graphics use to instructional articles. Consider the value of a photo that shows your potential customers the white sands and turquoise waters you’re talking about for a popular vacation destination. Text can explain the details, but photos will properly illustrate the abundance available on the cruise ship’s buffet or show the rocky terrain of a hiking trail. Relevant, carefully chosen graphics will bring your topic to life in a way that plain text cannot, making your piece stand out in the otherwise cluttered landscape of online content.
Providing Sharable Items
Graphics are highly shareable, particularly when they’re designed with this purpose in mind. If you’re producing content about home design and DIY, your images of the finished product are ideal for posting to your website and social media. This is equally true for an appealing image of a finished dish in pieces with recipes and cooking tips.
Think about your target audience and consider how they use the internet. Which social sites are they most active on, and what types of graphics will perform best on these? Stunning travel, beauty, and food photos do well on Instagram. Twitter and Facebook are incredibly diverse, so you have room to succeed with nearly any relevant photo, provided that it finds the right audience. Always track engagement levels for your content so you can determine which types of photos perform best for you.
Breaking Up the Content
Graphics and images serve an essential purpose in breaking up large chunks of content. You may already be familiar with smart strategies such as incorporating subheadings, using bulleted lists, and keeping your paragraphs short. However, these still leave you with a lot of uninterrupted text. Adding graphics roughly every 75 to 100 words can double your social media shares. Consider revamping your content strategy to focus on formats that are heavier on the images.
If you’re looking for a quick and effective way to transform your content marketing, adding photos to your pieces is a smart choice. You can make your blog more appealing on the page, keep your viewers engaged, and make the content more memorable and easier to understand. But it’s not always easy to have that kind of control over your content when you work with a third-party content creator.
That’s why at CopyPress we have our own proprietary CMS, Dante, that our clients have direct access to. When you work with us, you have the ability to view your content before it’s published, make changes to it, and add any photos or graphics of your choice. From there, you can easily publish the content directly to your site. You already have so much to worry about when it comes to running your business. So, for content marketing, we do our best to make it easy.
Schedule a call with us today to see how we can help you boost your content marketing campaign with our unique content management system.
CopyPress writer
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