If you have a business with an online presence, it’s essential to have a blog where you can deliver high value to your customers on a regular basis. Still, some businesses struggle with keeping readers and bringing in new ones.
There are many issues that can drive readers away from your blog, like an irregular posting schedule or content that doesn’t resonate with your visitors. Maybe you aren’t clear enough on your audience, or what they want to hear from you.
The best online blogs take the user experience and customer journey into consideration. They provide high-quality images and relevant content that make reading enjoyable.
Including visual content in your blog strategy can help to improve its overall performance. In this article, we’re sharing some key tips for how to create a great blog post with eye-catching visuals.
The Importance of Visual Content in Marketing
Transitioning to visual content can be challenging, especially if you’ve made a large investment in text posts over time. However, if your blog isn’t performing the way you’d like it to, it’s time to pivot.
Maybe you’re studying your analytics and noticing that your bounce rate has increased. Or maybe you’re just not seeing a strong ROI from your content marketing efforts.
So here’s the question you should be asking: how can you draw more readers to your posts, and keep them on your site? How can you ensure that your readers are getting the full value for their time?
The answer is through visual content.
Visual content is essential for blog posts now. Statistics indicate that the brain retains 65% of image-rich information after a three-day period, while it only retains 10% of information without images.
This could explain why social media marketers have moved toward using more and more visual content. On top of that, it demonstrates why the top social media platforms (such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube) all have major visual components.
People want to see more pictures and video because visual content is simply easier to consume compared to text.
With that in mind, what you shouldn’t do is add images randomly throughout your content and posts. The key is to include relevant and value-adding visuals that will help enhance the user experience.
If you’re talking about the importance of using Instagram for your business and you include a meme of Kylie Jenner… that’s not exactly going to help your reader retain information. But if you include an infographic about the growth of businesses using Instagram, it will be much easier for your audience to visualize the value that you’re providing.
The Types of Visual Content to Include in Your Blog Post
Wondering what types of visual content you should be including in your blog posts? Let’s take a look at some of the best kinds.
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to showcase statistics and data into a visual image that is easy for viewers to see. Another good thing about infographics is that they’re sharable.
An infographic that is well put together and provides valuable information is more likely to be shared and seen by more people. Creating an infographic to go with your blog post can lead to more visitors on your blog if you embed the post link to your social media when you share the infographic.
Infographics work particularly well on platforms like Pinterest, where you can add a link to drive readers to their corresponding blog posts.
Images
Use images throughout your blog posts. According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images actually get 94% more total views.
Images enhance your blog posts and help your audience finish the articles. When using images, make sure that they are relevant to the text and are high quality pictures.
You can easily find free high quality images on websites such as Stocksnap.io. Then, you can put them together in a nice graphic with words using Snappa.
Video
Video has surged to the forefront of visual content on social media and blogs alike. With platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels leading the way, you can use video to drive readers to your blog. Or, you can embed video in your blog posts themselves.
If you have the time to learn video marketing, you can reap great results. Embedding videos with your blog post will help your readers absorb more of the information and will help spread your content to more people by posting it on YouTube.
See how BoostrapBay garnered over 750 000 views with only 16 videos.
Screenshots
Sometimes explaining a step-by-step tutorial with words can be difficult, and there is miscommunication present between your text and the reader. A better way to explain a step-by-step tutorial is with screenshots that the reader can follow along with.
Not only are you giving your audience a nice visual piece to look at, but you’re improving their user experience. This will minimize your users’ time spent figuring out what you’re trying to say.
Want to take your screenshots to the next level? Provide arrows and indicators on the screenshot to help show your users where exactly you want them to navigate to.
Data Visualization
Explaining the growth or decline of numbers can be extremely dense and boring. Using data visualization graphics such as charts and graphs can better educate your readers and will reduce information overload.
Explaining numbers in text is hard to visualize, so providing a graph demonstrating patterns and change can help tremendously and will prove to be much more effective.
Memes
If you’re looking for an informal and trendy way to visualize your content to your audience, memes have emerged to do just that. Although memes are considered informal in most situations, a relatable or humorous meme can create that “viral” effect just like an infographic.
Examples of Brands Using Visual Content
There are many excellent examples of brands using visual content on their blogs. Let’s take a look at a few of the best.
Hubspot Blog
The Hubspot is a great example of a blog which uses visual content effectively. Hubspot is a blog that discusses topics such as marketing and sales, so most of their content is information-heavy.
Hubspot’s blog visuals create a streamlined user experience and help to break up the data and information shared in each post. This makes it easier for readers to take in a large amount of important data quickly.
Hubspot uses visuals to help guide their users to the end goal. The types of visuals that Hubspot often adds to its blog include screenshots, third party examples, and infographics.
AdEspresso Blog
AdEspresso’s blog uses a great balance of branded graphics, screenshots, and data visualization in its blog posts. This platform focuses primarily on digital marketing strategy, implementation, and important stats.
Each featured image on their blog is crafted specifically for the brand. Note their use of branded colors and fonts to keep all visuals consistent across every touchpoint.
NastyGal Blog
NastyGal is an eCommerce store that sells women’s apparel. While they sell clothes online, they also have a blog called NastyGalaxy, which discusses topics around music, culture, style, and female advice.
The biggest takeaway from this successful blog is their strong emphasis on visual content. Each blog post is accompanied by several images, gifs, and memes that are highly relevant to the post itself.
NastyGal is growing at an incredible rate and their use of visual content is certainly a contributing factor to their worldwide success.
Best Practices for Images in Visual Content
When you include images in your visual content, there are some important best practices you should be following to get the best results.
Create a Branded Look
First, create a branded look for your visual content. As mentioned above, AdEspresso’s blog images are a great example of a branded look that’s seamless across its blog content.
Another fantastic example is the Elegant Themes blog. It’s a visually rich platform that offers readers a pleasant blog experience.
Your branded images should use your brand fonts and colors on a consistent basis, and fit seamlessly into your brand colors. If you have a great brand style guide, use that to guide your imagery.
Try to Include Images for Important Sections of Your Blog
Wherever possible, include visual content in the most important and impactful sections of your blog posts. This will help to solidify the information you’re sharing, and it will give your readers visual cues and takeaways as they absorb the information.
Make Images Easy to Share
Finally, make images easy for your readers to share on social media. Using images that are optimized for each platform is a great starting point (and if you need help with that, it’s easy to customize images on a platform like Snappa).
We’ve created size guides for shareable images on Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Instagram Stories.
Add Alt Text to Your Images for SEO
For search engine optimization purposes, be sure to add appropriate alt text to the images you embed in your blog posts. The alt text should include SEO keywords and phrases for the blog post wherever possible. This will ultimately help your posts to have a better chance of ranking.
Best Practices for Blog Featured Images
Finally, using well-designed and blog featured images in your blog posts is an important step toward building visual content that draws readers in. Here are some best practices for optimizing your featured images.
- Like all branded images for your business, these should have a consistent look and feel, with branded colors, fonts, and images that fall in line with your brand’s tone.
- These images should be optimized for WordPress, or the specific blogging platform you’re using, so they’ll look their best.
- Your featured images should always relate to your blog post topic. That’s true whether you’re using stock imagery or a custom-designed graphic.
- Make sure to add SEO keywords to your featured images, too.
Final Thoughts
Text-centric blog posts have always been a central part of a fantastic content marketing strategy. But these days, audiences are looking for more visuals in the content they consume.
By adding visual content such as graphics, images, infographics, and video, your website visitors will be more likely to keep coming back for more.
Don’t worry about the time investment involved in adding more visual content to your blog posts. In the past, it was time-consuming and expensive to add graphics and images to your blog. But now, easy-to-use software tools can close that gap in an affordable and simple way.
Visual content can make a tremendous impact on your blog posts. Incorporating great visuals into your content is just becoming more and more essential over time.
Now that you know the impact of visual content, it’s important to start taking advantage of its benefits. Enhance your high-value blog content with visual resources that will take it to the next level.
Use a tool like Snappa to help you quickly and easily create custom, branded visual content for your blog posts.
With our custom graphic builder, you can make your own images that are optimized for each online platform—not just your blog. It’s easy, fast, and you don’t need to hire a graphic designer to make visuals that look great.
You can get started with Snappa for free here.
How do you use visuals to improve your blog posts? Have you noticed a difference? Let us know in the comments below!
