No matter what your business, you probably have competitors. And you probably have a lot of them. So how do you get more customers? How do you grow your business? How do you increase market share? According to HubSpot, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their businesses.
Utilizing the right images in the right way is critical. Here are 17 tips to using great photos to capture the attention of your audience.
- Images must be high quality, but that doesn’t mean they have to be expensive. Here is a list of free stock photo sites to get you started.
- Play to your customers’ emotions. When they look at your website/post/ad/landing page/email/etc. what do you want them to feel? Pick an image that showcases that emotion.
- Utilizing customer testimonials? Instead of showing your product or a plain background, show a photo of your happy customer instead.
- According to Jeff Bullas, blog articles with images get 94% more views. Always use an image in your blog posts!
- BuzzSumo analyzed more than 1 million articles and found content with an image every 75-100 words received double the social media shares. No need to keep your images to just one.
- Using images can help improve your website’s SEO; Google uses your images’ alt tags to decide what the image is depicting and uses this information to rank your content. Plus, one fourth of all search traffic happens on Google images today.
- Be sure to compress your images. Google will rank your site lower if it takes too long to load. Compressor.io is a great tool.
- Use images in social media posts. Social media platforms see posts with images as more engaging and will show them to a larger audience.
- People will also engage more with posts that include images. For example, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.
- Make sure your social media images are sized correctly for each platform. HubSpot offers a great guide.
- Whenever you use an image, make sure it is relevant and feels personal. Content is so easy to create these days, that it means there’s also a lot of low-quality content out here. Consumers want to see real people behind brands.
- Use images of people vs. things whenever possible. A study by Nielsen showed that images of people performed much better than objects.
- Take pictures that give people a look behind the curtain. Show how you create your product, show employees working, demonstrate your company culture.
- Add images to landing pages vs. just having a form. Think about the emotion you want to convey. Are they worried, and you are solving a problem? Are they curious to learn about something new? Using images that relate to the emotion they are feeling will help increase your conversion rate.
- In emails, you may use several images, but make sure one takes center stage.
- Including videos in emails can drive fantastic results. The best way to do this is to take a video thumbnail and link it to the video. Wistia found a 21.52% increase in clicks from image to video thumbnails.
- Test images whenever you can. Emails, landing pages, etc. give you the opportunity to test which images generate the best results.
