The Internet is flooded with lots of advertisements and promotions. It often happens that those boring text advertisements turn irksome. These ads are simply ignored, and thus it is important to promote brands and products in an interesting manner. An image can speak a thousand words. Anything without an image appears to be like a pizza without cheese. It is thus an amazing idea to market with images. Marketing is an amazing tool that helps penetrate brands among customers.
So as to reach the potential, various tactics are used in marketing. To touch customers, often, their emotions and needs are targeted. With powerful images, meaningful messages can be conveyed that could help connect with customers directly and lead them to buy your product or services. This is an obvious reason why companies are commonly using image advertising mediums for marketing their brands.
What is Marketing?
Marketing includes tactics and activities conducted by companies to promote their brands. This includes the promotion of products and services to the market to meet the needs and desires of customers. By marketing, companies inform customers about their products and services. This includes various processes of creating, communicating, and delivering information about the brands and their products that are of some value to customers.
Marketing uses various tactics for promotion, and this may include digital marketing, print advertising, commercial advertising, etc. One of the most common mediums of marketing used these days is image marketing.
What is Image Marketing?
Marketing is the process of conveying information among customers so as to attract them to purchase the products. Often images are used to convey precise information in an attractive manner. When images are used for marketing a brand or its products, it is simply referred to as image marketing.
Images have a better impression on customers, and thus they are widely used by companies to promote their brand and communicate its information among users. Images can do almost everything in a single shot and consequently are a powerful medium used for marketing. Images are commonly used both in digital marketing and print marketing.
Why image marketing?
Research shows that image-centric ads have a higher retention rate. Image marketing is the most recent marketing trend that is more likely to ensure conversions for companies. In today’s scenario, the Internet is flooded with content, and it becomes very easy to ignore text copies. The excess of information makes them fade away unnoticed. In such a scenario, clutter-less and attractive images can easily grab customers’ attention.
Images are precise and include just that information which is important for customers, and this is the reason why images have a better chance of being noticed. It can engage readers as it can deliver better information in just a single shot. Whether it is social media channels or board hoarding, images are used just about everywhere to promote brands.
Benefits of images in marketing
So, it is obvious why images are used for marketing by leading companies. Promoting your products or services using images is an amazing way to reach desired customers. Here are some of the benefits of using images in marketing:
- Images are memorable
It is a proven fact that images stick in customers’ minds over those long descriptions and blog posts. In a day, customers are likely to see more than 5000 advertisements on average. Among so many advertisements, remembering a single ad can be difficult, but if it is an interesting image, it could remain in the customer’s mind for long.
- It can communicate faster
It is quite true that images have the capabilities to communicate faster. Images are an important source of communicating about brands and products because they can convey almost everything in just a few words. Images have the capabilities to include just the precise information in the most interesting way. Images are easy to consume, and thus they can effectively convey information about the brand faster and easier.
- Images engage customers for much longer.
Whether it is a single image about advertisement on social media or search engines platform or a group of images used to communicate about a brand on a particular website, both of them have the capability to stick users to it. When users are scrolling through pages on the Internet, they are likely to move to another page in just 15 seconds, but when there are images on a particular page, they will surely spend more time.
- Images increase the traffic of customers.
Whether it is articles, blogs, or tweets, when images are included, they attract a better number of users over it. Articles with images can attract 90% more users. Various tweets with images are likely to receive 150% increased tweets. Facebook has also been using images to communicate with users, and the obvious reasons are users’ interest in images. Images attract users in a better way and therefore attract more and more customers effectively.
- Increased conversions
While marketing products on online e-commerce portals, images play an important role. A product with an image is likely to receive more than 67% of users to it. An image included with a product on eCommerce portals can convey everything about the product. This can easily convey all information about the product, like its original colour, texture, and an idea for its size. This makes the purchasing decision of users easy and ensures increased conversions.
Types of marketing images
When images are used in marketing, they are more likely to penetrate the mind of users, thus ensuring a better reach in the easiest way. There are varieties of ways you can use images for marketing. The better the image, the more customers it could attract. There are different types of images that can be used in marketing. Among so many types of images, a handful of the popular ones are quoted here:
- Branded images & graphics
Images can be anything, a straight photo of a brand or a carefully crafted digital image that is not a real photograph. Such images that are visually stimulated through a digital medium or through animation can be referred to as graphics. Graphics are created to add value to your brand or product on your website or for marketing on different channels. These images can be particularly created to convey important information using a graph or through animation.
There are many successful graphic tools that can help create interactive and attractive graphics and brand images. Sometimes expressing information about a brand becomes boring using plain text, and thus to add value to text, it is also explained using graphics. The graphics can be incorporated anywhere on a website or within blog posts.
- User-generated contents
User-generated content or USG is a smart way to promote your brand online. This is a simple process in which customers are asked to share videos and images of the product that they have purchased. This type of marketing acts as word-out-of-mouth marketing in which satisfied customers are seen to promote brands with the help of images and videos. Such types of marketing have proven to attract a large number of customers as it makes purchasing decisions easy to almost 50%.
When images and videos of products are shared and published by the customers themselves, it promotes the product in a way that could attract other customers to trust it and buy it. Such marketing tactics are often used by companies on their websites or on their social media pages. In such types of marketing practises, companies often ask for users’ feedback with photographs and videos and use them as a marketing tool on their personal websites. It is the most authentic way of marketing that could represent a brand or its products on online channels.
- Infographics
Infographics are actually a visual representation of text, data, or information. It is a graphic that could clearly and quickly present information included in a text. Infographics are a common medium of communicating information because they are known to improve the ability of humans to gain information. Infographics are known to be an important mode of image marketing because they can effectively increase web traffic by more than 12%. When included between the text in a blog or on a website, it increases the percentage of readers and consumers coming to a page. Text can be boring, and thus by including graphics that could represent the text, one can make it easy to read and consume. Infographics are easy to create as there are so many successful tools and software that could effectively create meaningful graphics.
- GIFs
GIFs are smart moving visuals that are often taken from a movie, TV show or moving parts of images of a clip of a video. GIF is also referred to as graphics interchange format. These are animated visuals that are often included for the promotion of brands on various digital mediums. These animated graphics were first used in the 1980s but are now commonly used for marketing.
There already exist so many GIFs on the Internet that are used daily for normal communication, but one can also create a customised GIF to represent a brand or a product. These types of GIFs are commonly used for the promotion and marketing of brands. There are different tools that can help create GIFs. Such tools can be both paid and unpaid. The creation of GIFs with software has made this process quite easy. These tools can be used easily without much expertise.
5. Stock photos
Stock photos are photos that have already been created to be used in other places. Some photos have been licensed to be used for particular purposes. These photos are already owned by some companies and thus need to be purchased for use. The other types of stock photos are easily available online, and anyone can pick them.
Different types of stocks photos are:
- Public domain photos – These types of images can be used however by whomever.
- Rights managed photos – The rights of such images are already preserved, and one needs to purchase it from the owner to include it only one time anywhere, be it on the website or on a blog post.
- Editorial use photos – The use of such images is limited to editorial purposes. These images can never be used for another purpose, such as a print ad or commercially for product promotions.
- Royalty-free photos – Such images are available to be used anywhere, but they can’t be further sold or edited.
- Creative commons photos – Such images are available to be used for free.
Among all the available stock photos types, one can choose the suitable one to include for product marketing. Sometimes, it is hard to find stock photos that exactly match to promote your brand, and in such cases, it is advised to go for the creation of images on your own.
It is one’s personal choice to use the most appropriate and suitable type of images for marketing. It is important to create an attractive and effective image for marketing products and services because effective images are likely to attract consumers and will make them buy the product.
How to use images in marketing?
While creating strong marketing strategies, images must find an important place. No promotional tactics are completed without images as they are the most popular way to promote in the current scenario. Images are widely used in almost every marketing strategy. There are multiple ways with which images can be included in marketing. Here are some of the ways of adding images in marketing:
- Social media images
Social media has always been a common medium of image transfer. Some of the social media networks such as Instagram and Snapchat exist to transfer images. There also are other platforms like Facebook and Twitter that also appreciate the transfer of images with or without information. The use of images on social media has always been a common way to connect with one another. It has always been used for the promotion of brands and products.
While posting images to represent your brand on a social media business page or on your timeline, it is important to take care of the right dimension supported by a particular social media platform. Wrong placement of image or incorrect dimension can make your post of low quality, and thus it is important to follow guidelines for posting images.
- Email images
There are numerous emails that a user may receive each day. Among so many emails, only a few are actually opened. If your mail is opened by the user, it is important to ensure that he stays there to read what is included in the email. By including interactive images, GIFs, and product photography, it is possible to hold the user to your mail for long.
Right, attractive images are capable of attracting users even in emails. This is the right type of marketing that can ensure users’ interest. Images are capable of keeping your users engaged for long and thus help them know about your brand.
- Blog posts images
Blog posts are usually texts that can entail anything about the brand, its product, or its information. Blog posts often are long, which can make them boring but including interactive and related images between the posts makes the read rather interesting. When readers get across the images of products or GIFs, they will get attracted and will remain to read the blog posts till the end.
Images like infographics, explainer photos, product images, bar charts, or direct screenshots can help engage your reader to inform them about the brand and its product.
- Product images
While promoting a product on digital media, it is important to include high-quality photographs for your products. Make sure the photographs represent the products wisely. These must be high-quality photographs taken from professional cameras. If taken from the personal camera, make sure that it does not miss the quality. When product-representing images are included, it will make users trust the product and buy it.
If you are promoting a product that is digital, for example, web application or digital software, one can make use of a screenshot to promote it. Promoting with GIFs is also a good choice. Often UGC is also a way for product marketing. A perfect image can illustrate how a product will appear after the purchase of the product.
Conclusion
Images are a strong instrument to promote brands. A carefully crafted image enhances the marketing skills of companies because a perfect image can entail almost everything about a brand and its products in limited words. Images are widely used for marketing in today’s scenario because they are easy to consume and thus help penetrate the right information in customers’ minds without much effort. Images are the perfect mode of marketing that could help reach a wide spectrum of customers easily.
There are various techniques of image marketing, and one can choose the most suitable as per their personal choice. When the right images are used for the right marketing, it could ensure reaching the potential customer and thus result in long-lasting conversions.
