We’ve all been witness to a piece of content that’s achieved viral status on the internet, more often than not it’s of some sort of animal in a compromising situation whose plight is spread over the internet for our sheer enjoyment. However, look closely, and amongst the comedic memes and videos there’s some great pieces of marketing content being created and achieving also viral status, but what makes this content more successful than others?

Today all marketers know that content is king, and today visuals are wearing the crown. Visual content is more successful than any other type of content marketing and adopting these into your marketing strategy is a great way to bring you one step closer to the coveted ultra- sharable, viral content.

Why do we love visuals so much?

Humans are programmed to process visuals faster than written text, 60,000 times faster in fact. We’ve developed our love of art since the days of cave painting, and honed our skills over thousands of years until we reach modern day living where we now love to communicate with one another visually through a plethora of screens.

Visual Statistics

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
We process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
40% of people respond better to an image than 1,000 words.
700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute.
Pinterest image boards generate more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.
Photos on Facebook receive more engagement than text, videos, and links.
It takes 50 seconds to read 200-250 words, but only 1/10 of a second to process a visual image.

What Type of Visual Content Should I use?

An infographic is a visual representation of information and data. They are a highly successful way of incorporating visuals effectively into your content marketing strategy, they combine complex statistics, appealing visuals and text in a distilled way which is easy for your audience to digest and, most importantly, share. Create an Infographic who are experts in infograhphic design explain that;

“Infographics and charts are growing in popularity as they enable the summary of complex data into a compact and engaging design that holds the attention of your audience”

Benefits of Infographics

Each infographic is visually unique, this makes them more tempting to engage with, when compared to a typical article.
Since we have an instinctive tendency to gravitate towards visual communication you chose audience will automatically gravitate towards reading and sharing your infographic.
Data can be difficult to comprehend; presenting it through visuals is a great way to share your information in a way that is universally understood.
Infographics are great for SEO. Google knows how much audiences love visual content, so prioritises infographics in its search engine result pages.

Infographics make sharable content

We are sharing more online per minute than ever before:

Twitter users tweet 277,000 times
Google receives over 4,000,000 searches
Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of information

Each of these tweets, comments and searches is an opportunity for your infographic to be shared, and when you consider that Infographics are liked and shared on social media three times more than other any other type of content you’d be mad not to include them in your strategy!

What’s more, sharing information about your company through infographics it could increase your traffic by at least 12%. This figure shows how easy it is to attract customers using high quality visual content.

Social Media
Blogs
Email Marketing
Website Page

Tips for creating an irresistible infographic

Choose a topic that answers your audience’s queries. Content must always be relevant to your demographics’ needs or it won’t be shared.
Check out the competition, don’t take advice from existing infographics which have seen limited success, You can learn just as much from failures as replicating successes.
Choose a snappy heading. Headlines including the word "who" generate a 22% higher click through rate than headlines without it.
Only include up-to-date information, double check your facts and figures to ensure you are seen as a trustworthy source.

The Future of Visual Content

Infographics make complex data simple and visually appealing, and need only the minimal amount of text to convey the message you’re communicating. Once the content is created, it will grow itself through natural online sharing, leaving you to bask in the glory! It’s worth noting that failing to invest time and effort into visual content may leave your written content at risk of being overlooked in favour of something that appeals to your audience’s likes and needs more.

In today’s society we are living in the age of information saturation. Everywhere we look we are bombarded with marketing messages. It’s important to cut through the chaos of millennial living with carefully curated content that engages audiences in an instant.