7 Ways to Use Visual Content to Increase Blog Engagement

Driving traffic to blog posts is the biggest challenge for every content marketer today. Every blogger has this question, how to improve the engagement of their blog post. And they will always look for different ways to make their blog post stand out from the crowd.

Using visual content is one of the best and effective ways to grab and keep the reader’s attention. Visuals attract visitors more than text content.

Do you know? Humans are visual by nature. Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than the text and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

According to the social science research network, 65% of people are visual learners.

Visual contents are easy for readers to understand a huge amount of information, and it also easier for them to digest even complex information. That’s why we usually say that “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

Visuals are able to turn your blog post more interesting and more engaging. It also helps to get more traffic, conversion, likes, clicks, and shares. Importantly, Visual content lowers the bounce rate of your blog as well.

Before, we dive into the topic let’s have a look at some important stats about visual contents

• Visual contents are 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content (source)
• 45% of B2C marketers believe visual content is their most important type of content. (source)
• According to Brainrules, when people hear information they will remember only 10% of it three days later, but if they see the same information as a visual they can recall up to 65% of the information three days later. (source)
• According to Adweek, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, and 150% more retweets. (source)
• Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without. (source)
• 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by simply watching a brand’s video (source)
• Research shows that people follow visual instructions 323% better than written instructions. (source)

Types of visual content

There are several types of visual content that you can use to improve the engagement of your blog post. Here we have listed 7 important types of visual content which will help your blog post to go viral.

1. Use eye-catching Images
2. Include engaging Videos
3. Create attention-grabbing Infographics
4. Include interesting Data visualizations
5. Provide useful Screenshots
6. Create great Presentations
7. Use funny Memes and Animated GIFs

Use eye-catching Images

Images play a pivotal role in empowering content engagement. Using high-quality, attractive, and unique images will help you to add value to your blog post, and it will make your blog post even more interesting.

It will help to increase your conversion and traffic as well.

According to a recent study, Articles with relevant images have 94% more views than those without images.

Your image should be relevant to the blog post, and make sure that the blog post cover image conveys the concept of your post content. You should use 4-5 images in a 2000 words article, that will give a visual break for your readers, and it will help to improve the readability as well.

You can use free online stock images but make sure that you are legally allowed to use those images. otherwise, you can create your own blog image with a tool like canva.

Adding text on your images will help to make the images more compelling and make sure to choose dark background images so that the text on your image will be visual enough to read. In addition, ensure that your images are loading faster, for SEO purpose, at the same time don’t compromise on the quality of an image.

Don’t forget to place your brand logo on your image.

Include engaging Videos

Videos are an effective form of visual content than any other content format. Including videos in your content marketing strategy is an excellent way to increase your website traffic.

Basically, the human brain loves videos. Studies show that viewers retain 95% of the information if they watch it on video. On the other hand, viewers retain only 10% of the message when they are reading it.

A good, high-quality, informative videos can attract and engage the audience easily because videos provide all necessary information in a short span of time.

In fact, according to OutBrain, 87% of online marketers use video content.

Adding videos on your blog post results 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs.

According to Eyeview, Including Videos on a landing page can help to increase your conversion rate by 80%.

Videos can help to improve your brand recognization.

Videos are the best, easy way to introduce your products or services to your customers. Also, you can solve some of the audience’s or customer's problems with your educational videos. If you add value to your audience through your videos, people would really like to come back to you more and more.

Related post: 6 steps guide to create an effective video marketing strategy

Recommended post: How to get more subscribers on YouTube

Create attention-grabbing Infographics

Infographics will make your blog post more interesting, and it will surely engage viewers. It helps to see even the complex data in an easy to read format. 41.5% of marketers said that the infographics performed best, and it had the highest engagement rate.

Infographics help you to increase the traffic to your blog post, and it also improves the social media shares. According to a recent study, Infographics are 30 times more likely to read than a text in a blog post.

According to Mass planner, Infographics are shared 3 times more on social media than any other type of content.

Well-Designed, good infographics have the ability to generate more backlinks to your website, and it improves your website’s overall SEO ranking.

Here I would like to share my personal experience, In our initial days on social media, we did not get any shares, or likes for our blog posts. As a startup, we really felt discouraged on those days.

At that point in time, We don’t know what to do? and we haven't realized the power of visual content. After some analysis and studies, we decided to create Infographics, attractive blog post cover images (Visual Content).

You know what, It completely turned the table around, our blog posts started getting more engagements, shares, likes, etc. And our followers base increased as well. As a result, our web pages SEO ranking also increases gradually. I know, we have to go a long way, but it really helped us to get started.

Yes, visual contents such as Infographics, blog post cover images are one of the primary social media marketing strategies.

Tools like Piktochart and Canva will help you to create your own infographics. These are really simple, easy to use platforms, and you don’t need any designing skills to use these platforms.

Include interesting Data visualizations

Data visualizations are another form of visual content that will help to improve the engagement of your blog post for sure.

Data visualization is the representation of information or data in a most understandable format. It can be charts, graphs, tables, pictures, diagrams, and maps.

This types of content are easily recognizable and it grabs the viewer’s attention instantly.

Raw numbers are hard to understand. Right?

Graphs will help your viewers to understand the insights, stats easily. You can highlight the similarities or differences with graphs, and charts. It makes your blog post easy to follow, interesting, and more readable.

Generally, Statistical graphs, Charts, type of visual contents are highly sharable in social media, generates quality backlinks, and it engages a wider range of audience. It generates huge traffic to your blog post as well.

Make sure that your graphs are easy to understand and make them attractive, eye-catching visuals with the help of bold colors.

Provide useful Screenshots

You need to provide useful screenshots when you write instructive blog posts, step-by-step guides, or how-to blog posts.

Screenshots are easy to create visuals for your blog post, also it is an excellent way to educate your viewers. It helps your viewers to understand what you are trying to describe easily.

Instead of just saying, you can also add annotations to your screenshots to highlight a particular part of the image. By adding circles, arrows, boxes, underlinings or texts in your screenshot will help you to make your screenshot more instructive and that will help to improve your viewer’s understanding.

Screenshots will help you to make the blog posts more attractive & more engaging. You can use Skitch to annotate your content.

Create great Presentations

Presentations are a powerful form of visual content that engages your viewers with your content completely. It helps to educate your viewers without too much of texts.

Create well-designed, useful, great presentations, and share them on social sites such as SlideShare will help you to expand your reach. Embedding presentations in your blog post will make it more effective.

Make sure that each slide has a message or information with relevant background images, and ensure your presentation must provide an answer to your viewer’s questions.

Also, ensure that your presentation has a great and compelling headline.

Keeping minimum text in your slides, using white spaces effectively, and bulleted points will help you to create attractive presentations. To grab viewer’s attention choose attractive colors and designs in your presentation.

Don’t forget to double check your presentations for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Use funny Memes and Animated GIFs

Memes, funny images, and Animated GIFs help to convey the message in a fun and memorable way. Memes and GIFs are very powerful visual contents, and it will make your blog post more interesting.

These type of visual contents grab the audience attention easily, and as you know, these are the highly sharable visual contents on social media platforms.

Ensure that the memes, GIFs are relevant to your topic and use them only when it feels appropriate.

Create memes that are easily understandable by your audience and don’t overuse them, because it may distract the viewers from the topic.

Conclusion

Including these 7 visual contents wisely on your blog post will help you to attract more viewers, and it also increases the engagement of your blog post.

Visual contents are very essential for blog posts success, and a blog post with great visual content will stand out from the crowd.

You can add images, graphs, charts, videos, infographics, and annotate screenshots in your blog post, that will make your blog post more interesting. In addition, it will make your blog post easily digestible for your visitors.

I hope these 7 Ways to Use Visual Content will help you to create an engaging blog post with powerful visual contents.