People have so many options about where to spend their time on the Internet, it’s critical to develop a highly visual presence with photos and videos on your site to make your creative content stand apart from competitors.
Engaging visitors is challenging if you’re not Web-savvy, but it’s essential to your company’s growth. Businesses with bland or poorly designed Web content that fails to present any photos or videos risk losing a viewer’s attention immediately. Their exit is just an easy click away.
Community conversations drive the growth of your brand and individual users have the ability to evangelize your products. But they first must believe in the design around those products and feel comfortable in the forum where that conversation is being shared.
Building social connectivity
Even if you’re not a Facebook aficionado or Twitter all-star, it’s time to embrace the power of social media for Web-marketing purposes. Danielle Cormier of Constant Contact says optimizing social content with keywords on social networks like Facebook and Twitter helps cycle your content through the Web.
Also use social networking sites to clearly present photos and videos so it’s easy for anyone to learn about your company’s key messages in something like a video description or photo cutline. Visual learners best digest content this way.
Your site needs to balance product or service descriptions with the visual media that highlights the impact of what your business provides to the public. It will help them experience all that your business stands for. Those visuals need to be alluring, since the Internet is overrun with what marketing coaches at Sendible Insights describe as “many people skimming through content to extract what they’re looking for.”
Of course, coming up with visual content is difficult without a full-time digital media team or the budget to hire photographers. Stock image sites like Shutterstock can solve that problem, with affordable, customizable visual stock footage available to augment just about any story on your site. When those short-attention-span viewers are captivated by something visual, they share it with the world and drive more attention to your company.
Video information drives sales
YouTube is very easy to use, and linking to videos from your site is also simple. First of all, it’s free. But rather than attempting to be the next viral sensation, you ought to focus on content that tells viewers a meaningful, colorful story about your business.
SearchEngineWatch.com offers tips to gauge video viewership analytics and how to “uncover patterns and optimize” video content based on user habits. Improving your company’s cross-channel marketing is easy through video. Viewers start on a video, watch the content, read the description and then are sent to a landing page on your main site.
The Social Media Examiner reminds use that great marketers are great storytellers. The explosive growth of YouTube and popular social sites like Pinterest and Instagram provide a benefit for savvy marketers who hope to connect with a range of audiences online.
Be savvy. Be bold. The tools available on the Web today enable smart marketers to tell stories more creatively and visually than ever before.
