These days, many businesses find it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to find a way of breaking through the clutter to get their target audiences to notice them. While our prospective customers and clients are more connected than ever to the brands and businesses they follow, it is increasingly more difficult for these brands to stand out in the crowd and convince people to take action.
There is, however, a pretty simple strategy that will help you break through that clutter, get your audience to pay attention to you, and even persuade them to share your message with their own communities.
That strategy involves using visual content and images to tell your story. Sounds simple enough, right? But aside from including a photo in their blog posts or Facebook updates, we’ve noticed that many businesses never get beyond this first step to develop the visual content that will push them to the next level. So we’ve developed this simple plan to start you off on the path to inbound marketing success by using images to boost search results.
Images to Include in Online Marketing:
- Call to Action buttons – Rather than including a simple “contact us” link in the text of your page; a “Sign Me Up” button in a bold color will lift your conversion rates and get your audience to take action.
- Memes – As shown in this blog post, a descriptive image with an intriguing message will garner far more attention in cluttered social media news feeds and online publications than even the most compelling text headline.
- Infographics – These in-depth visual graphs and charts offer a simple way to provide a large amount of complex information to your audience. And they are very quick to read and easy to share, which will do wonders for your inbound links and brand awareness.
How to Promote your Images:
- Publishing: The first, and generally most important, place to include your visual content is on your website and/or blog. Be sure to include social media buttons so that your readers can easily share your images and content with their own networks.
- Promoting: Second to hosting images on your site, you would then want to push them out through your social media channels (primarily Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter; though you may have others in the mix as well). This will allow prospective readers to stumble on your content within their own channels; and makes it easy for them to help you spread the word.
There are far too opportunities for marketing images to include in this post, but we’d love to hear how you integrate images in your own marketing programs. Please post your creative ideas and uses in the comments below.
