Why You Should Create Visual Content For Your Small Business
- Logan Wells
- Mar 5, 2021
- 4 min read
Effective small business marketing should attract new customers, have existing customers coming back, all without breaking the bank. To successfully promote your small business, you must focus on improving your visual content. Information delivered visually will resonate with your customers at a far higher level than text alone. Investing in visual marketing can be crucial to your overall strategy.
You might be thinking that your business is not visually oriented. Well you need to understand that people are visually oriented, so if your customers are other human beings (they are), you must find a way to make your product or service visual. Humans are visual creatures and are more likely to engage with content that is visual.
Visual Content is Preferred by Your Customers
People's ability to remember imagery is remarkable. Studies show that when a customer hears a piece of information, three days later they will remember 10% of the information. However, introduce visual content and they’ll remember 65% of the information (Brain Rules by John Medina, 2018). Imagery beats text because reading is so inefficient for the human brain.
54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support. (HubSpot, 2020). Business to consumer (B2C) marketers say visual content is the most important type of content today (Social Media Examiner, 2018).
Visual Content for Social Media
Social Media is an amazing marking tool for small businesses, and images and video are fundamental to practically all social media platforms. Using more visual content is an effective strategy for increasing engagement with your brand. Buffer conducted a study which found that tweets that include imagery received 150% more retweets than text only tweets (Buffer, 2013). Facebook posts with images see 2.3x more engagement than those without images (BuzzSumo, 2015).
Businesses that are on Instagram get up to 37% of their total social media impressions from Instagram Stories (Social Bakers, 2018).
85% of Facebook and Instagram users watch video on the platforms with the sound off (Digiday, 2016). This again shows that visual sensory is paramount, and audio is presumably in a secondary position for digital marketing.
Virtual Content Marketing Trends
Dynamic imagery has seen a boost in popularity in recent years. In 2015, YouTube began supporting 360-degree videos and Facebook followed suit shortly after. 360-degree content and virtual reality marketing both have massive future potential for your business.
In 2019, 42.9 million people in the US used a VR product, and 68.7 million people used an AR once monthly (eMarketer, 2019). A quarter of VR users believe it has a strong potential for brands and marketers (GlobalWebIndex, 2018).
A Magnifyre case study found that 29% more people viewed a 360-degree video than the same video in traditional 2D format. They concluded that 360-degree imagery increased impressions and the click thru rate (CTR) was significantly higher (Magnifyre, 2020).
Retail is an industry that has been adopting virtual reality technology. According to Lowe's Home Improvement store, “how-to” videos that were shown in virtual reality (VR) had a 36% higher recall by viewers compared to people who only viewed the YouTube video (HubSpot, 2018).
Volvo’s XC90 experience is a great case study on the adoption of 3D Virtual Reality in Marketing. The auto company allows users to take a virtual car ride using an app on their phone. While VR may not replace a test drive, this teaser could help bring more people to dealerships to see the car in person (Volvo, 2020).
Virtual product trials, demos, and store walkthroughs allow people to experience your brand and products on their own time. There are no "store hours" in this regard, as customers can interact with your products while your physical store closed. This convenience gives VR the power to draw in new customers from anywhere who may not have heard of your brand before.
Marketing with 3D Virtual Tours
A 3D Virtual Tour is a great way to use visual content to gain a local marketing edge. A professional virtual tour of your small business can set you apart from your competition. Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65% (The Manifest, 2019). This demonstrates that adding dynamic imagery to your marketing material increases customer engagement. I believe that using the words “Virtual Tour” in an email subject line can boost open and clickthrough rates by a comparable amount.
A Google Study found that people's interest in local businesses doubled when the company had a 360 tour on display (Oxera Study, 2015). Google research found that 75% of people are more likely to use a business with a virtual tour in their listing, over a similar business without a virtual tour.
Research shows that people spend 5-10X longer on websites with an embedded virtual tour than those without (Laurelstech, 2019). A 3D virtual tour can be a powerful marketing tool that drives more customer traffic to your brand.
Interested in a 3D Virtual Tour for your small business? CLICK HERE to visit our webpage and get a quick quote!
Komentar