“If you’re not using images – relevant images – in your content then you are just writing stuff and not marketing it. The best marketing collateral is a combination of great content, images, pull quotes, and callouts that send a clear message of the next step you want the reader to take.

Images make the real difference

Content marketing and visual marketing, use of images, pictures, drawings, art, charts, graphs, surveys all help us connect to and feel ideas and meaning. Sometimes just posting a bold, eye-catching image and a few words is enough. Here are three tips for using images:

1) Choose images that enhance and compliment your content, not overwhelm it.

2) Don’t be afraid to use a series of images that tell the story with your text.

3) Make sure you are using images that are legal and permission based.

4) Use unique images and if you can original or custom images.”

Images can tell the story

“If you watch a movie on mute, you’ll probably understand what it’s about. Likewise, if you only listen to the audio, you’ll get it. While the story is more complete and compelling when the two are put together, you can still get the “gist” from consuming one or the other. Your content is similar. Images can tell the story of your post in parallel with your text. That way, skimmers will still come away with value even if they only see your images and subheads.

Also read: How to get more visitors on your new blog?

People remember images

“Visual communication is where it is at. We learn more, retain more and buy more if we can see “it” rather than just read or hear about it. As a sales trainer I always include a section on “painting pictures with your words” and that is doubly true for marketing and content creation. Our fast-paced highly cluttered world demands that we absorb information FAST and well, one pic is worth 1000 words. (Wait…did I just make that up?!)”

Some more tips for you:

• Be funny: “Use images to show everyone how funny you are! It’s one thing to share handy content, but partnering that content with a hilarious image or gif will not only be more effective at grabbing someone’s attention, it will stick with them like gum in a kid’s hair! Unique (funny, interesting) images that represent the content of the article can draw viewers even if the content isn’t what they’re looking for. Clip-art and stock images just don’t do the trick and are frequently overused. While a picture can say a thousand words, it is far better if the picture speaks with the writer’s voice and not someone else’s.

• Keep it real: “Visual content is a great way to communicate an idea, but make it real, meaningful, maybe even insightful. Resist the urge to post inspirational quotes in images just because you can.”

• Be authentic: Don’t use stock images. Take pictures of your products, customers, employees and vendors so it is authentic!

• Text over images is secondary: Images aren’t just about pretty pictures. They can also be a great way to control the way text is visually presented to the visitor. Unfortunately, having that visual control can often hurt your online marketing efforts. Text in images is largely hidden from the search engines and therefore not able to be a factor in the ranking algorithms. When using text in an image format, make sure it’s secondary text, not the primary text that the search engines would need to determine the topic of your page. If text is valuable for search, keep it out of images altogether