滨迟鈥檚 this weekend in the UK, and as a champion of small businesses we鈥檙e here to help you make the most of your online presence and build your business. When we talk about small businesses we mean anything from internet start-ups, small recruitment firms, food truck companies, cafes, to makeup artists, builders and plumbers. No matter what kind business you run, you need an online presence to attract and retain customers.
The content of your social posts, blogs and websites is important, but there鈥檚 one simple trick to increasing your engagement and impressing your readers – always use images. There鈥檝e been a number of studies done in 2015 that show when an image is used in marketing content, engagement increases considerably. As people we are very visual and that is still the case when we鈥檙e online.
Some of the facts:
- The brain processes images 60,000x faster than any other information
- 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual
- 40% of people respond better to visual information than text
Source:
Where should you be using images to increase engagement?
Social media
, using images in Facebook posts can increase engagement by 418%, and can result in 62% more clicks on Twitter. So using an image is a no brainer!
When you鈥檙e planning your social media posts you need to consider whether the post will work with an image. If so, make sure the image is relevant and works with the content you鈥檙e sharing.
Blogs
A states that 鈥淢arketers who are leveraging visual content are seeing significant increases in their blog traffic.鈥
When deciding on what images to use for you blog consider what the blog is about – the most important thing is to make sure the images are relevant to the blog and add something to the written content.
You also need to think about how many images to use in each blog – this will depend on how much you鈥檝e written. 滨迟鈥檚 great to use an image to break up every 3 to 4 paragraphs as it makes the blog more readable.
Website
When picking images for your website the guidelines are very similar to blog and social. The image should always be relevant to your business, product or what the page is talking about. But as well as the type of image being important, the quality of the image is also key. In a study by MDG Advertising showed 67% of consumers said image quality is 鈥渧ery important鈥 on an ecommerce site when making a purchase decision. So if you use a low quality image it could impact on your business reputation and how much your customers trust you.
Top tip: For your blog and website it鈥檚 also important that your images are tagged properly so they can be indexed by Google – this will greatly increase the visibility of your content on Google. You need to make sure the information is filled out accurately 鈥 this should be easy to do through your content management system.
For help choosing images for your business check out our blog Buying images for your small business where we share tips on finding the right image, and where and how to buy them.
Need some great small business images now? Take a look at our hand-picked image category.
Other blogs you might find useful
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