“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This expression is true now, more than ever, as a massive shift has happened in the way we communicate online. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have ushered in visual marketing. and we are now consuming Visual Social media. Whereas traditional social media is based around text, visual social media is all about visual. But this is not affecting just social media, visual content on sites, and blogs are fueling our desire for beautiful imagery and sensational design. Businesses are engaging graphic specialists and even graphic departments to keep the track with this emerging trend.
Shortening the message
What has lead to this trend? In the early days of networking, marketers used blogs, writing over a thousand words to express company values and inform about new products. Then, Facebook took the role of publishing messages to the selected audience, with no more than a few sentences. Shortly afterward, Twitter took the throne offering instant messaging with up to 140 characters tweets. But audiences became impatient and their attention span decreased, which pushed the marketers, content creators and graphic designers to develop new strategies and new, shorter forms of communication. Now, having a glance over a photo or infographic is enough to understand a brand’s message.
Another big promoter of this trend are new mobile technologies. More and more people engage with social media via smartphones. Taking pictures “on the go” is far more practical than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.
Measuring visual conversations
Images have a great potential to dramatically increase conversion rates and can be a powerful cue to guide people’s behavior. Various studies have shown that using high quality, emotionally evocative, demographically tailored photos are the most successful strategies for sales increase. Featuring consumers and using detailed images are also good ways of making more profit.
A question arises – how to measure this increase in conversion rates? Yesterday’s social monitoring tools are no longer compatible with the emerging visual platforms of today and new methodologies must be involved. There are several brands on the market that not just offer measuring systems for visually driven conversions, but also make it easier for consumers to convert using images. I will mention just a few of them.
Curalate combines the social signals of Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Facebook with proprietary image-recognition algorithms to identify the images that matter most for the target audience. It can be considered as a visual analytics for the visual web that tracks ROI from picture to purchase.
Photo Credit: Curalate
Its Like2buy feature helps brands drive additional traffic from Instagram to specific product pages on their website, thereby reducing the number of steps a consumer needs to take in order to make a purchase.
Reveal offers the easiest way to drive commerce from blog content. Implementing this feature into blog content, consumers can discover and shop the products they love by simply pointing to them in pictures.
Photo Credit: Curalate
Fanreel allows brands to collect user-generated images, display those images on their website, and connect those images to specific product pages in order to drive ecommerce traffic/revenue.
Photo Credit: Curalate
Olapic uses user-generated content and turns it into brand’s most valuable e-commerce asset.
Its Predictive Consumer Generated Ads platform makes it easy to gather and curate the best consumer-generated content, and engage with users to gain rights to use their photos in ads. Using the intelligence of the Olapic platform and PhotoRank™ algorithm brands can predict which photos will have the most impact before starting the campaign.
Photo Credit: Olapic
Ad retargeting is a platform that collects user-generated content and integrate them with brand’s product SKUs to re-engage consumers.
Photo Credit: Olapic
Considering the rise of visual e-commerce and all related platforms offered on the market, brands can not diminish the importance of visual content any more. It is crucial for every brand to embrace this trend if they want to succeed in 2016.
Author Bio:
Dorotea Knežević is a community manager and a content marketer at TheBrandiac. She is trying to predict human reactions on visual and textual stimulation, in order to evoke positive brand emotion. Get in touch with her via e-mail and Facebook.
