Visual Content is Eyeball Bait
The human eye is the most used muscle in the body. Bore the eyes (not with a hot iron silly) but by presentation is equally as fatal. Bore your audience and you’ve lost them. Period. It doesn’t have to happen.
Visual Content Empowers
A Dilbert cartoon from 2000 humorously showed us the all too common business malady, “PowerPoint poisoning”. In the cartoon, Dilbert’s boring presentation poisons the one person in the audience still awake. Funny.
Most of us have experienced a presentation that felt like slow death. Sitting through even a short presentation containing no visuals is painful and the presentation judged poorly. But for the Presenter an inability to engage an audience could be a career death sentence. If a boring presentation’s critical message is lost among, say, an audience of VC backers or if a critical need for staff funding goes unmet, a visually bankrupt presentation could have serious repercussions on an individual’s advancement, judged capabilities and even livelihood.
Thoughtful images give proposals a competitive leg up by increasing in person engagement or distant readability. Either improves the likelihood that the message’s central thesis is understood. Images can take the weight off text alone to communicate successfully and in fact, should carry the weight of the communication. A picture really is worth a thousand words.
Lost in Transmission
Similar to websites a decade ago, a vibrant social media presence is today’s business prerequisite. Almost 80% of small businesses have company pages. Many small and media businesses opt to maintain their own social media presence. Being an active contributor is part of the DNA of social media success. But staying active is a lot of work. Writing and curating content of value to online readers takes real time and commitment. As any professional writer will attest, “writing good ain’t easy.” The last thing you want to risk is your blog post or article not getting read because of a lack of visual bait and visual glue.
Visual Content is Eyeball Bait
With visual content’s ability to communicate tens of thousands times faster than text, no blog or article should NEVER not (double negative duly noted) contain images. Images help get the point of a post across in a second. Visual content crosses over into deeper levels of conscience tapping memories and experiences. Visuals go beyond cognition to strike emotional chords. Images placed throughout an article keep readers engaged until the last word is read.
For marketers, using visuals for visual’s sake should be avoided. That’s valuable web real estate you’re ignoring. And while you don’t want every image on to sell, you should never not (there it goes again) have some visuals that sell or brand or promote on active duty at all times. Visuals are just too value.
