We humans are visual creatures, and sometimes the best way for us to learn or understand a new concept is to actually see it. After all, that's why they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words," right?So if humans love visuals, why not leverage that fact on your blog and in other content creation? Here are six great ways to make your inbound marketing content more visual.
6 Creative Ways to Improve Content With Visuals1. Include High-Quality, Professional-Looking Photos and Images: Have you ever clicked through to a blog article that was all -- and only -- text? If the article didn't make you yawn during the first sentence, you probably didn't even make it to the first sentence. Blog posts, ebooks, and web pages that lack any sort of visual element are extremely uninviting to the eye. At the very least, include some kind of relevant and engaging photo or image on every page of content you create. In fact, research shows that images actually improve the performance of certain types of content in terms of engagement, such as on Facebook, emails, and even press releases. Please, just pick something that looks high quality and professional. It doesn't have to be an expensive stock photo. A Creative Commons image will usually do just fine.
2. Create Infographics: Consider including infographics as part of your content creation strategy. People love them, and it's not difficult to understand why. Infographics provide a ton of valuable information in an easy-to-digest and interesting format. Talk about value! Just be sure to choose a topic that your target audience would find valuable, and make sure it encompasses these ten traits like the following infographic from Tatango does.
3. Use Data/Content Visualization: Creating infographics is a lot of work. If you don't have enough data for a full-blown infographic, that doesn't mean you still can't present that information in a visual way. Simple data visualization, like the example below, can do wonders to improve a blog post or other piece of content.
The bonus? Your visualization doesn't even have to include data. Content visualization works, too! Here's a great example of what we mean. This visualization from Elliance doesn't highlight any data, but instead, it helps to visualize and explain a concept. Brilliant!
4. Produce Videos: Short videos can be a great visual way to support your content, and there are a number of situations that lend themselves to this type of visualization. Need to explain how to do something technical? Avoid a complicated text explanation, and instead consider creating a quick how-to video to describe it. Want to demonstrate how your product works? Make it more compelling with video! You can also use video in other unique ways, such as visualizing data in a more engaging way. Check out the example below from Erik Qualman for inspiration.
5. Use Eye-Catching Headers and Styles to Break Up and Call Out Text: Another very easy way to instantly improve the visual friendliness of your content is to simply break up and organize your text. You can do this by using headers to separate concepts or ideas, numbered lists or bullet points to make points easily scannable and digestible, and bolded text to call out and emphasize important information, such as statistics or major points (just as we've done in this very post!). Using these tactics will make your content instantly more attractive and inviting to your viewers.
6. Create Slideshows: Slideshows can be an effective way to present content and information. Quick tips, examples, and data can easily and effectively be formatted into a slide presentation to make the content much more engaging and sharable. Simply upload the presentation to a site like SlideShare and embed the content into a blog post. Consider the example below.
What other ways can you make your content more visually stimulating?
Photo Credit: Ahmed Sinan
