10 Reasons Why You Should Care About Visual Content Marketing



1. We are suffering from information overload

Every day the average person is bombarded with the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of data.iIn the middle of this information age, the ongoing increase in data has led to changes in the way users deal with new information.


2. We have less time to make an impact

Research conducted by Microsoft has shown that:

10 seconds

The time you have to clearly communicate your proposition if you want to gain a few minutes of a user's attention.ii iii


Added to that, data collected by Chartbeat has shown that 55% of users who view a page spend less than 15 seconds looking at it.iv Those first few seconds are really important. However, you can't just relax after that.


The graph above is an interpretation of Microsoft's research by the Nielsen Norman Group.v It shows that the probability of a user leaving your page is greatest in the first 10 seconds – and this probability doesn't significantly reduce until after 30 seconds.

3. Speed is no longer a technical problem

When it comes to consuming content in our age of information, speed matters. In the pre-broadband era, users had to deal with a restricted download speed. Under these conditions, plain text and HTML were the fastest way to consume information online. Nowadays, the average global download speed is 22.05MB on desktop and 11.3MB/s on mobile.vi



4. Our brains process images much faster than tex







Traffic signs are designed to convey all the necessary information in as little time as possible. If they were to rely on text alone, they wouldn't be fit for purpose.


The second example takes only a few seconds. Why? It's all down to how your brain processes information. The mechanics of it all can be a pretty complex process to explain, and since this isn't a dissertation, let's keep it simple.


A traffic sign is just one symbol that conveys meaning.



6. Visuals also help to increase understanding




7. Visuals help to improve engagement on a website



As a practical example of this, consider the below:



8. Visual content improves the Retweet rate on Twitter


Twitter has released research based on the analysis of over 2 million Tweets in the hope of understanding what fuelled a Tweet's engagement. According to their findings, the use of image-based content provided a significant increase in the number of people who took action and decided to click 'share the Tweet' on their timelines. xi


  • The inclusion of a video increased Retweets by 28%
  • Tweets that included photos achieved 35% more Retweets

9. Visual content increases shares on Facebook





Participants were given random statements such as "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" for them to respond "true" or "false." In 50% of cases, images were attached to the statement without necessarily confirming whether it was true or not.

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We are wired – through evolution – to process images faster than text, so when we combine written and visual content, there's a significant increase in understanding.



Danny Ashton is the Founder and CEO of NeoMam Studios, a visual content agency based in Manchester, UK. They specialise in designing infographics and interactive experiences, but their primary aim is to use the visual format to get real people to take actions that meet our clients' end goals.

Written By

Danny Ashton