Consumers want more visual content, and businesses that provide a more aesthetic website user experience will see a rise in traffic and conversions. More visual website content can also improve search engine rankings as users spend more time engaging with your site.
How visual is your website? “An estimated 84 percent of communications will be visual by 2018,” Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream wrote in an Inc. article. This is a clear call to action when it comes to adding more visually engaging content to your site.
From increasing time on page and website dwell time to improving conversion rates, here are the top visual content tips every business owner should employ.
Direct Your Audience
Simply launching a website doesn’t guarantee traffic. There needs to be a number of optimization steps in place, such as directing your audience on a very defined journey throughout your site.
From landing on your home page to purchase page, visual content plays a large role in how consumers move through your site’s sales funnel. “The best marketers in the world know that there is a psychological process that must occur for prospects to whip out those credit cards and turn into buyers or even hyper-active buyers,” R. L. Adams of Entrepreneur explained.
For example, you can use a variety of images on the home page to entice site visitors to learn more. From there, visitors will find plenty of visual video content, ratings, and reviews on the brand, product, or service evaluation page.
Next you can funnel visitors from that page to the “order now” purchase page. If you simply use bland visual content and run-of-the-mill copy, you are not maximizing your sites potential. Direct your audience to where they should be.
Get To Know Your Audience
It is an understatement to say that consumers are important. However, many business owners fall short of really getting to know their target audience. This can result in a not so personal interaction on your website.
Interestingly, it is easy to pull a number of target audience demographics from Google Analytics, such as age, gender, location, device type, interests, and more. These demographics help build a powerful visual content strategy that converts site visitors.
How do you deliver more personal visual content via your website? Create buyer personas for all your products, services, and overall marketing message. This can assist business owners in keeping the branding consistent while giving your target audience a reason to continue browsing your site.
Personalize and Evoke Audience Emotion
A personalized marketing message is a must these days. It helps business owners connect with their customers in a meaningful way, as well as trigger those emotions to make a purchase.
In fact, personalization and emotional connection can make a one-time customer into a loyal advocate of your brand for years. Make Visual content can make this happen. For instance, The Bump, a pregnancy site, uses emotionally connecting images to build their following.
There are a number of ways to use visual content to conjure audience emotions. For instance, using location based visual content to make a meaningful connection with users in that specific area. You can also connect personally and emotionally using trends of a demographic, like if you had a heavy millennial audience base.
Optimize Your Visual Content Properly
To introduce more visually appealing content, it is important to understand a few SEO basics. Otherwise your images, gifs, videos, infographics, etc. can slow your website load time, as well as introduce a poor user experience.
To keep your visual content doing more good than harm, optimize images. Image size is especially important for ecommerce sites. For instance, ecommerce websites have hundreds of images, but if those images are not compressed and optimized, the page load time will become a serious issue.
The type of WordPress hosting server you chose also plays a role. If you have compressed and optimized your site images, but speed is still an issue, you may have exceeded your server limits provided by your website hosting service.
The reason the above is important is because you should only be using high-quality visual content. Depending on your industry and niche, your images may be the only thing that matters, like the diamond industry for example.
Make Visual Content A Priority
Consumers want more visual content. They also want visual content that is engaging and connects on a personal level. Make this a priority and enhance your site’s user experience. You’ll see more traffic, more engagement, and more conversions.
