Visual marketing is one of the most important components of content marketing and digital marketing generally. Several studies have shown that people respond much better to images, videos, and other visual content than they do to just text. Including those elements in marketing campaigns has increased the engagement and conversion rates exponentially for several brands.

It’s not just about slapping a stock image on a blog, which is the approach many marketers take. Certain approaches work better than others when it comes to getting the most out of your visual marketing efforts, and some could even harm your campaigns.

• What is ROI in Digital Marketing?
• What is a Good ROI for Digital Marketing?
• 10 Simple Rules to Boost Your Visual Marketing ROI
• How Effective is Visual Marketing?
• What is a Good ROI Percentage Digital Marketing?
• How is ROI Calculated in Digital Marketing?
• How do You Show Marketing ROI?
• What Percent of Marketing is Visual?
• What is The Average Marketing ROI?
• Why Visuals in Sales Are Most Effective?
• What is a Good ROI For Online Advertising?
• What is The Meaning of ROI in Marketing?
• Why is Visual Advertising Important?
• How Powerful is Visual Content?
• What is The Formula to Calculate ROI?
• Is Video Content Engaging More?

What is ROI in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing ROI is the measure of the profit or loss that you generate on your digital marketing campaigns. Based on the amount of money you have invested.

In other words, this measurement tells you whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns. If you have a positive return on investment, it means that your campaigns are bringing in more money than you are spending on them.

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Demonstrating digital marketing ROI is important because without measuring this, you are essentially marketing blind.

What we mean by this is that if you do not measure the success of your campaigns over time, then you won’t know what’s working and what isn’t.

And if you don’t measure the ROI of your campaigns, you won’t know for sure if you’re wasting money or spending your digital marketing budget wisely. Measuring digital marketing ROI is also important from an improvement standpoint.

Once you can identify which areas are not performing as well as you hoped. You can work on analyzing these aspects of your campaigns and taking actionable steps toward improvement.

Knowing the ROI of different aspects of your campaigns helps you better understand where you should be allocating your marketing budget for the best results.

What is a Good ROI for Digital Marketing?

The rule of thumb for marketing ROI is typically a 5:1 ratio, with exceptional ROI being considered at around a 10:1 ratio. Anything below a 2:1 ratio is considered not profitable, as the costs to produce and distribute goods/services often mean organizations will break even with their spend and returns.

However, costs and overhead lower than 50 percent of the sales price can see profits on their efforts at lower ratios. Because every organization is different, it’s important to consider the unique overhead costs, margins, and industry factors and standards unique to the sector.

10 Simple Rules to Boost Your Visual Marketing ROI

Here are ten tips to ensure your visual marketing is getting you the most ROI possible.

1. Be unique

It’s easy to just get stock photos and put them up on your blog or use them with little modification, but it will quickly become obvious that you’re doing just that. It will deter visitors from your site if everything they see they’ve seen elsewhere.

If you’re using stock photos, ensure that you modify them so they look unique to your site. Also, explore having some unique design elements to your brand to help keep your messaging top-of-mind for your readers/viewers long after they have engaged with your content. Even if you have to spend some more time or money, it’ll definitely be worth it.

2. Use infographics

According to this report by Content Marketing Institute, infographics have had the biggest increase in usage among B2B marketers in the last four years — now at 67%. There are many good reasons for that. Infographics are unique in the way they allow you to summarize lengthy articles and bulky information into a very compact format. Your audience will appreciate them and come to anticipate them over time, especially if they are professionally produced to very high-quality standards. 

Infographics also have the chance to go viral, in which case you’ll get a lot of backlinks from where they are posted. If you’re able to fix your brand logo in a prominent position, you’ll be getting more brand awareness and recognition over time.

3. High quality 

What’s worse than an article that only contains text and no visual elements? An article that contains pictures or other visual elements that are laughably basic or poorly produced.

Apart from detracting from the article itself, it’s damaging to your overall brand because readers (and potential customers) will get the impression that your company is comfortable with doing the bare minimum. Whether you’re selling products or services, that is certainly an impression you do not want to leave. 

Take the time to develop media that will wow your audience and you’ll see increases in time spent on your site along with your lead generation and conversion rates — if you combine them with compelling copy.

Thankfully, there is a slew of freelance platforms, including design-specific ones like DesignBro, allowing even companies with a small budget to find experienced and creative infographic designers.

4. Fix your metadata

Your priority has to be the audience that will be viewing and interacting with your content, but visual content is also a great opportunity to get SEO benefits. You can do this by ensuring that your filename, alt text and other details are optimized for SEO. 

One way to decide on a naming pattern for your images is to name them in the same order that most of your audience search for your keywords. Use Google Analytics to track the search patterns to see if there’s a change at any time.

5. Be consistent

From the mood of your pictures to the color palette and fonts, you should try to make your posts as consistent as you can. That way, it’ll be easy for your followers to recognize your posts as coming from your brand.

Apart from the aesthetic parts, ensure you have a central theme around which you’ll design your content. If you’re going to be tailoring your posts around humor or motivation, for instance, it’ll help to build a loyal and consistent audience and create anticipation among your customers, which will boost engagement (especially sharing) and boost your overall brand visibility.

6. Grab attention with social media visuals.

Never lose connection with social media platforms. Today they rule. They help to build a large client database, promote your brand and expand your target audience.

Images are the biggest part of social media content. Each post is enhanced with a picture or any other visual. The more engaging image is, the wider audience you can rely on.

Fortunately, crafting promotional elements for various platforms has become easy as pie thanks to a rich variety of premium templates. For example, you can make use of a promotional banners template that comes with unique collages layouts. Such a tool will help your business shine on the web. 

7. Opt for responsive apps

People go mobile. Today their PCs and laptops are successfully replaced with smartphones. It’s comfortable. You can access everything you need on the go. 

Having an app will ease your customers’ experience. Once your customer installs it on his device, your business will become closer to him or her. Utilize different visually appealing notifications to promote your products.

Having an app is great. But it has to feature a catchy design and seamless performance. Otherwise, your customers will say you ‘Good-bye’ and uninstall your app.

Turns out, launching an app is easy and affordable. There are tons of ready-made app templates with multiple customization options and helpful features.

8. Use a consistent style

Using creative, extraordinary, and mind-blowing visuals is great. However, they shouldn’t be out of the overall picture. 

Try to be consistent. Such an approach will help you brand yourself through your visuals. With a consistent style, your company will be easily recognizable among its counterparts. 

9. Insert branded images

Images can work on your business more intensively if they are branded. There are many free and premium online programs that can help you make your images unique. 

It won’t take a lot of time and effort. But branded images will stick in your customers’ memory. They will help you build your brand awareness.

Remember that visual marketing tools are intended to make your project stand out from the crowd. So that avoid ordinary elements and remake them to reach uniqueness.

10. Use flashy graphics

You have surely heard about the ‘3-second rule’. According to this widely accepted on the web rule, a website owner has no more than 3 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. Some web developers are sure you have about 2 seconds prior to losing his or her attention.

For this reason, you need highly interactive and appealing graphics. Using flashy elements works perfectly on promotional needs. Bright and glittering images or their parts 100% suit holiday promotions. 

Marketing tools can’t be dull and boring. They must be creative, informative, and meet practical purposes. Flashy graphics correspond to these requirements, no doubt.

How Effective is Visual Marketing?

The internet used to be filled with blog posts, white papers, and more — all of which seems to be slowly being replaced by flashy images, infographics, and other forms of data visualization.

However, this “change” is nothing new at all. Visual marketing is a concept that has existed for as long as marketing itself has been around. It was popular before the internet ever existed and will continue to be popular long after. A lot of this has to do with why human beings are so receptive to visual content in the first place.

Part of the reason why infographics are so popular is that visual content itself is amazingly effective. A number of important statistics shed light on this concept:

• Visual content is processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text-based content. This is true even when an image and a block of text are both conveying the same basic idea.
• 90% of ALL information that is transmitted to the human brain throughout the course of a day is visual. Verbal communication is always important, but visual information will always be king.
• Studies indicate that 40% of people actually respond far better to visuals than they do to text. Everything gets easier — from how that person accepts an idea to how easy it is for that same person to follow directions.
• Almost ALL human communication is nonverbal — to the tune of 93%. Despite the fact that we’re one of the only creatures on the planet to actually develop verbal communication as we define it, it still isn’t (nor will it likely ever be) the primary way that we share ideas with one another.

The CMO Council reports that, 65% of senior marketers believe that visual marketing is THE most important element with regards to how their brand story is communicated to the masses. Thirty-nine percent of those marketers feel like they need a bigger budget for visual collateral than they already have, while 35% are continually searching for a better way to manage those visual materials across their entire enterprise.

None of this means that visuals are a replacement for your text-based marketing content. Rather, you should use visual marketing materials to complement written material and lift up your ENTIRE campaign across the board.

What is a Good ROI Percentage Digital Marketing?

A 5:1 ratio is in the middle of the bell curve. A ratio over 5:1 is considered strong for most businesses, and a 10:1 ratio is exceptional. Achieving a ratio higher than 10:1 ratio is possible, but it shouldn’t be the expectation.

Your target ratio is largely dependent on your cost structure and will vary depending on your industry.

How is ROI Calculated in Digital Marketing?

We’ll cover how to measure ROI on marketing spend using these 10-key digital marketing measurement metrics. Tactics vary when it comes to campaign ROI calculation, so understanding these marketing ROI metrics is a smart place to start.

We’ll tell you about the benefits and limitations of each metric and how they can contribute to the calculation of ROI in marketing.

Most of these metrics are not direct inputs for calculating marketing digital ROI but should help you get a broad sense of whether or not your digital marketing investments are resulting in profitability.

1. Unique Monthly Visitors

This metric tells you how many people are coming to your site on a monthly basis. It is very broad in the sense that without digging deeper, we don’t know how valuable this traffic may or may not be.

This is tracked directly in Google Analytics, so there is no need for calculations. To get more specific, we can segment the traffic by source (paid, organic, social, etc) and then look at value-based metrics on these segments (more on this later).

Generally speaking, to gather data for ROI, analytics is a smart way to get started.

2. Cost per Lead (CPL)

This metric tells you, in a general sense, whether or not your digital marketing efforts are profitable. Cost per lead is usually associated with paid traffic since you don’t technically pay for organic traffic.

This is calculated directly in AdWords (and other advertising platforms) and is often also called “cost-per-conversion”

• It is up to you to make sure that your conversions align with what you consider to be a ‘lead’. Over or undercounting can result in skewed cost-per-conversion data if it’s not set up properly.

On the organic side, you aren’t paying on a per lead basis. Instead, you’re paying for SEO strategy and content marketing.

These efforts result in lead generation over time, but it can be difficult to tie back to a per lead cost.

3. Cost per Acquisition (CPA OR CAC)

This metric tells you what you are paying to acquire an actual customer –not just a lead. Paid campaigns can view this in virtually real-time, and while this metric doesn’t directly apply to SEO efforts, you will (ideally) be able to blend the two lead sources together to see your actual Customer Acquisition Cost across all of your digital efforts.

You don’t need a CPA calculator to gather this simple metric. CPA/CAC is calculated by your total digital marketing spend divided by your number of acquired customers.

• CPA/CAC = Total marketing spend / Number of acquired customers

4. Return on ad Spend (ROAS)

This metric tells you the revenue (instead of profit) earned for your ad spend but doesn’t factor in other costs such as the cost of goods sold. ROAS is a useful metric if you are able to tie revenue directly to digital marketing efforts. Return-on-ad-spend is useful to a degree, but you need to fully understand your profit margin to know what ROAS percentage you are profitable at.

If we think of digital marketing ROI as ROI = (Net Profit/Total Cost)*100, then Return-on-ad-spend is ROAS = (Revenue/Total Ad Spend)*100.

• For example, say you spend $100 on ads and get $300 in revenue as a result, but your product also costs $100 to make.
• Your ROAS would be 300% [(300/100)*100] but your ROI would only be 50% [(100/200)*100].

5. Average Order Value (AOV)

This metric tells you how valuable your paying customer is in each instance that they purchase. AOV is most useful for E-Commerce stores, but services and B2B can use the next metric instead.

For E-Commerce, we can multiply the AOV by the repeat rate to get an even more valuable metric, Customer Lifetime Value.

6. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

This metric tells you what you can afford to pay in ad spend to acquire each customer profitably. LTV is important to know because it applies to every kind of business.

• E-Commerce can get an exact calculation for LTV.
• Other industries will need to come up with a looser projection, or could possibly use historical customer data to predict what LTV might look like.
• Read a case study on how Starbucks calculated their LTV

7. Lead-to-Close Ratio (LTCR)

This metric tells you if your leads are of high quality, whether your sales are efficient, and also helps project your digital marketing ROI.

Your Lead-To-Close Ratio is simply your total number of leads divided by how many leads have been closed.

• LTCR = Total number of leads / total number of closed leads

Projected ROI Formula 

Let’s look at how we can arrive at projected digital marketing ROI if we know our Lead-to-Close Ratio (LTCR), Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), and Cost Per Lead (CPL). (Some companies don’t have a true “COGS” but can consider other variable costs here.)

Example: We have a lead-to-close ratio of 4, meaning that we close 25% of our leads.

• Our cost per lead is $10. LTV is $200 and our cost of goods sold over that lifetime is $80.
• We’ll shorten the formula by assuming that our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = LTCR*CPL.

In our example, this gives us a CAC of (4*$10) = $40.

• From above, ROI = (Net Profit/Total Cost)*100
• Projected ROI = [(LTV-COGS-CAC)/(COGS+CAC)]*100
• Projected ROI = [($200-$80-$40)/($80+$40)]*100
• =($80/$120)*100
• =66.7%

8. Branded Search Lift

This metric tells you the increase in brand awareness over time as a result of digital marketing efforts.

You can calculate your branded search lift by tracking the number of search queries that include your brand name per month. Over time, as you continue to track this, your branded search lift is simply how many additional monthly searches your brand receives.

In most cases, this isn’t only the result of search marketing, but all of your digital advertising campaigns.

9. Average Position

This metric tells you which ranking you receive by search engines for keywords, on average.

For organic, you can average position in Google Analytics, and in the publisher platform for paid.

• An average position of 1 would mean that you show up as the top result for every single keyword.
• If your average position is dropping closer to 1 over time, then your SEO and content marketing efforts are starting to have positive results.

A lower average position will usually lead to higher click-through rates, which means more traffic. If your SEO strategy was targeting valuable search terms to rank for, then you will likely see increases in revenue as well.

10. Non-Brand CTR

This metric tells you how well your SEO campaign is performing. For this purpose, you can track it in Google Search Console.

Non-brand CTR also applies to paid search ad campaigns, where Google and other advertisers reward high CTR ads with priority positioning. In this case, it’s tracked in AdWords and other publishing platforms.

This metric doesn’t tie directly to leads, revenue, or ROI from internet marketing – but in many cases, you will see a positive correlation between them.

How do You Show Marketing ROI?

The most basic way to show the ROI of a marketing campaign is to integrate it into the overall business line calculation.

You take the sales growth from that business or product line, subtract the marketing costs, and then divide by the marketing cost.

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

So, if sales grew by $1,000 and the marketing campaign cost $100, then the simple ROI is 900%.

(($1000-$100) / $100) = 900%.

That’s a pretty amazing ROI, but it was picked more for round numbers than for realism.

Calculating Campaign Attributable ROI

The simple ROI is easy to do, but it is loaded with a pretty big assumption. It assumes that the total month-over-month sales growth is directly attributable to the marketing campaign. For the marketing ROI to have any real meaning, it is vital to have comparisons.

Monthly comparisons – particularly the sales from the business line in the months prior to the campaign launching – can help show the impact more clearly.

To really get at the impact, however, you can get a little more critical. Using a 12-month campaign lead-up, you can calculate the existing sales trend. If sales are seeing an organic growth on average of 4% per month over the last 12-month period, then your ROI calculation for the marketing campaign should strip out 4% from the sales growth.

As a result, it becomes:

(Sales Growth – Average Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

So, let’s say we have a company that averages 4% organic sales growth and they run a $10,000 campaign for a month. The sales growth for that month is $15,000. As mentioned, 4% ($600) of that is organic based on historical monthly averages. The calculation goes:

($15,000 – $600 – $10,000) / $10,000 = 44%

In this example, taking out organic growth only dropped the number from 50% to 44%, but that is still stellar by any measure. In real life, however, most campaigns bring much more modest returns, so taking out organic growth can make a big difference.

On the flip side, however, companies with negative sales growth need to value the slowing of the trend as a success.

For example, if sales dropped $1,000 a month on average for the previous 12-month period and a $500 marketing campaign results in a sales drop of only $200 that month, then your calculation centers on the $800 ($1,000 – $200) you avoided losing despite the established trend.

So even though sales dropped, your campaign has an ROI of 60% (($800 – $500) / $500) – a stellar return in the first month of a campaign allowing you to defend sales before growing them.

What Percent of Marketing is Visual?

Content marketers were asked to compare approximately how their use of visuals in marketing changed between 2018 and 2019.

In 2019, 74% of the marketers we surveyed stated that more than 70% of their content contained some form of visual. This was a 10.5% increase in visual content use from what these same marketers claimed was the case in 2018.

In other words, the use of different visual formats has seen a significant increase over the past year.

We were also curious to understand how content marketers defined visual content. More specifically, we wanted to learn what types of visuals were used most frequently in 2019.

The results were quite similar to previous years, with 40% of marketers claiming to use stock photos most frequently. After stock photos, 34% of marketers claimed to use original graphics such as infographics and illustrations, followed by 14% claiming to use videos and presentations (including formats like webinars and slideshows).

The use of video and presentations saw the most significant increase compared to previous years where only 7% of respondents were making use of these two visual formats. Virtual training and communication will likely continue to increase as a means of engaging internal teams as well as external audiences.

Charts and data visualization were the most frequently used by 8% of marketers. Multi-page documentation such as white papers and ebooks were used the least frequently.

Less than 1% claimed to use GIFs as their primary form of visual content, a major drop from previous years where more than 3% of marketers claimed to make use of GIFs and memes most frequently.

Despite using stock photos most frequently, when asked which type of content actually performed best, the data shifts a little bit. The winner when it came to actual results was original graphics such as infographics and illustrations at 40%. This was followed by videos and presentations at 24%.

Only 13% of marketers claimed that stock photos resulted in the best outcome, followed by 9% claiming charts and data visualizations were the most impactful.

Multi-page docs proved to be the best performers for 7% of marketers, and GIFs and memes came in last at 3%.

What is The Average Marketing ROI?

According to Neilsen, the average marketing return on investment is $1.09.

 – The top 3 marketing media with the highest average return on investment are email marketing, search engine optimization, and direct mail.

 – Tracking the source of sales to be able to calculate return on investment from your marketing initiatives is critical to being able to improve the effectiveness of your marketing spending.

Why Visuals in Sales Are Most Effective?

Experienced sales teams know how difficult it can be to describe a concept as opposed to showing prospects what they will gain. That’s why visual engagement solutions are crucial in creating a tangible belief in the benefits being offered.

Sixty-five percent of people are visual learners. Yet in 2016, only fourteen percent of marketers used live video.

In today’s online world, a visually underpowered sales interaction has a 50-50 chance of failing to adequately engage its audience. Even worse, it can lead sales teams to miscommunicate or encourage prospects to focus on more easily consumable alternative messages.

Even in a digital world, it’s critical to beat your competitors’ ability to visually engage with the same prospects you’re courting. You must help prospects discover the products and services they need, demonstrate those solutions in a compelling way, and upsell advanced capabilities with further benefits. In order to accomplish all that, your sales teams must become experts at exploiting visual engagement as a sales tool.

Here’s how to build their technique:

• Explain to your sales teams that truly personalized visual engagements produce outstanding, effortless sales experiences.
• Have your sales teams use visual engagement solutions to transform the selling process into a more naturally collaborative, cooperative, and stimulating relationship.
• Your ability to produce amazing customer experiences creates a significant competitive advantage and will help you close more deals faster.

What is a Good ROI For Online Advertising?

A good advertising ROI is between 25% and 50% and above. Return on investment is driven by advertising strategy. Every advertising campaign begins with strategy and is decided with clients. Strategy combines goals, budget and tactics to reach the target. Tactics are the wild card and are determined by budget and goals.

A study by Nielsen Analytic Consulting looked at the results of traditional advertising. Campaigns that generated sales within three months of the investment returned $109 for every $100 spent or a 9 percent ROI.

But the ROI for online advertising was $218 returned for every $100 spent or a 118 percent return.

If only the stock market had those kinds of results.

Keep in mind that Nielsen is citing an average. The data doesn’t specify if the “costs” include soft labor. Specific campaigns may deliver well above or well below that average. They may also depend on the business category and competition.

Strategy determines what is done in an ad campaign. The strategy will decide how ROI (Return on Investment) is achieved. Strategy decides the target, what locations and types of activation are used to reach the audience to meet the goal. The strategy will vary by Goal and if the Goal changes, so do the Strategy.

What is The Meaning of ROI in Marketing?

Marketing Return on Investment (ROI) is a term used to describe the profitability of an organization’s marketing efforts.

For every $1 you spend, how much are you generating back? This is the question that you are trying to answer by calculating your ROI. Given that one of the core purposes of marketing is to drive sales, it is critical to understand the relationship between your costs associated with marketing and its yield. The answer will help you determine if your marketing strategy is working and which marketing activities are most effective.

Measuring your ROI is the definite way to assess whether your marketing efforts are working and where to allocate the budget.

Why is Visual Advertising Important?

The human brain can process visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text. Considering that the written word has only been around for a very small part of human evolution, this makes sense. When it comes to marketing, this means that content created with visuals is naturally is more engaging and interesting for users.

Tweets with images, for example, receive up to 5x times the engagement of those without. Articles with visuals receive 94 percent more views. It is clear that customers like visuals and prefer the content that contains them.

The right visual will complement your materials and support the points you want to make. You do not want to pick images that are just there to fill space. These images will seem out of place and will not add value to your material. Instead, think about the ideas that you want to communicate to users and find images that will help to cement these messages.

Your visuals should also tie in nicely with your brand so that people can easily make the connection between the two. For example, color schemes and language of the visuals can be valuable ways to personalize images and enhance their value.

Remember also that images can help form associations for users with your brand. When customers see images of real people using your products, it becomes easier for them to imagine themselves doing the same thing. Similarly, when they see images of your employees, they begin to feel as though they are building relationships with people instead of just an entity.

Selecting the right image for your content does not have to be a challenge. Here are a few guidelines to help you make the right choice:

• What stories are you trying to communicate to the audience?
• What type of image could help draw people further into the content?
• What images fit well with your brand?

Images are powerful motivators, encouraging readers to engage with your content. Understanding how and which visuals help you accomplish your marketing goals will help you make the right choices for your site, resulting in positive growth for your organization.

How Powerful is Visual Content?

Content is king in digital marketing, with written words still ruling today. But a content marketing trend has become so mainstream it’s hard to ignore its value: visual content.

No wonder Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social networks worldwide. Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest are also catching up. Visual elements like images and videos dominate these social media channels, with some of them getting viral.

All-text-without-visuals is a thing of the past—visuals reign in content marketing nowadays. For your campaigns to stay relevant to the times and your audience’s ever-changing needs, beef them up with the right mix of text and visuals.

Marketers see the valuable impact of visual content on growing their business. In the 2018 Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, B2C marketers chose pre-produced videos (45%) and illustrations or photos (29%) as among the most effective content marketing types for meeting their company’s specific goals.

In the future, visual content will still be the bread and butter of both B2C and B2B content marketing campaigns. Marketers plan to use more pre-recorded videos (77%), images (68%), and live videos (63%), according to a 2018 Social Media Examiner report.

If your peers in the digital marketing industry can do it, so can you. Here are four specific ways a visual content strategy can help you achieve your business objectives.

Raising brand awareness

According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners – they can retain information better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words. That’s why UX planning must be a critical element of content marketing strategy.

Additionally, the Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2018 survey found that 83% of consumers who have watched a branded video would consider sharing it with their friends. More shares mean more visibility for your brand.

Want your audience to remember your brand? Use visual content to increase your brand recognition and recall. For one, you can put a watermark of your brand logo in all the visual assets you use online. When an image gets viral, people can easily associate that with your brand.

Check your company website or e-commerce site, as well as your landing pages. Are they just static? Make your brand easier to remember by updating them with compelling photos, videos, and other visuals. Just don’t overdo it.

Increasing website traffic

By 2021, videos will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic worldwide, based on the latest forecast by the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

Video production costs a lot of money, but it’s a necessary investment to attract more people to your website. If you hesitate to make videos a part of your content marketing strategy due to budget concerns, consider how much your business will lose in terms of website traffic. Videos have been the rage these days—embrace it.

Engaging customers through visual storytelling

Adding visuals to written content makes your content marketing campaigns more interesting and keeps your audience engaged. Rather than having long blocks of text, for instance, several images that break them up makes your content easier for people to skim and digest.

According to BuzzSumo data, Facebook posts with images had 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Meanwhile, including images to Twitter updates resulted in 150% more retweets than plain text updates.

Visual content also helps you to keep your site visitors on your landing page. This raises the click-through rates to other parts of your website and the visitor’s engagement with your brand.

Why do people prefer to engage with visual content? With just an image that resonates with your audience, you can elicit joy, sadness, shock, fear or anger. That’s how powerful visual storytelling is.

Improving conversion rates

Ultimately, higher brand awareness, site traffic, and customer engagement from a successful visual content marketing strategy can all lead to increased lead generation and sales.

Video content, for example, is a key driver in the buyer’s journey. The 2018 Wyzowl Video Marketing Statistics Report notes that video has become “a decisive factor” that convinces consumers to purchase or download a product or piece of software.

The report found that a brand’s video influences 81% of viewers to buy a product or service. Also, 95% of people learn more about a product or service by watching an explainer video.

What is The Formula to Calculate ROI?

The basic ROI formula is Net Profit / Total Investment * 100 = ROI. Let’s apply the formula with the help of an example.

You are a house flipper. You purchased a house at the courthouse auction for $75,000 and spent $35,000 in renovations. After-sales, expenses, and commission, you netted $160,000 on the sale of the renovated house. What is the ROI?

Your net profit is going to be what you netted ($160,000) minus what you spent ($75,000 + $35,000), so it is $50,000. Your total investment is also what you spent ($75,000 + $35,000), which is $110,000.

ROI = Net Profit / Total Investment * 100

ROI = 50,000 / 110,000 * 100

ROI = .45 * 100

ROI = 45%

If only house flipping was that easy. Keep in mind that you can certainly lose money on an investment. If there is a loss, the formula will yield a negative number. Here’s a simple example:

ROI = -1,000 / 5,000 * 100

ROI = -0.2 * 100

ROI = -20%

Is Video Content Engaging More?

Video marketing isn’t easy, but when done well there’s no better way to convert viewers into customers. Over 70% of marketers claim that video produces more conversions than any other content. That is because video is more engaging, more memorable, drives more traffic, and holds almost every other advantage over text.

The average consumer watches roughly 206 videos a month, and 59% of senior executives said that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video. The video marketing takeover is inevitable, so let’s take a look at the numbers behind what’s making it so successful.

1. Videos Grab Peoples Attention

When you running digital ads, half the battle is getting people to look at them. Think about what grabs your attention when you’re scrolling through a website. Is it a bland, generic text ad or a magnet-like video? Your eyes are attracted to movement, so the movement that videos produce naturally draws peoples attention.

Video ads also pique interest more than a standard static ad. People are over 27 times more likely to click on an online video ad than a static banner ad.

2. Videos Engage Viewers

Not only do videos grab people’s attention, they keep it. Videos are one of the most engaging mediums you can use. They strike a deep connection and illicit strong emotional responses that make people want to share, comment, and like. Videos get 1,200% more shares than text and images combined. People love sharing content on social media and more importantly: people love sharing videos.

If made right, videos can take information and make it easy to interpret in a short amount of time. It’s been said (wryly we think) that a one-minute video is worth to 1.8 million words.

Your brain can also process visuals much quicker than it can text. About 90% of the total information transmitted to your brain is visual. On top of that, your brain can process these visuals 60,000 times faster than text. The human brain is not only more used to seeing visuals but is also better at interpreting them.

3. Videos Drive More Traffic to Your Website

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: videos are great for SEO. A video can bring as much benefit to your site regarding SEO as multiple web pages. Companies that use videos on their websites have 41% more web traffic from searches then sites that don’t use video at all.

Video also drives organic traffic up by 157%. You can also take advantage of this increased traffic by placing videos on the landing pages of your website. Embedding videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 80%.

Search engines are taking videos more into account and ranking them higher than ever before. When people share your video or link back to your web page, it creates an inbound link. Inbound links are an important factor in your SEO ranking. The more inbound links your site has, the more authoritative your site looks to Google.

Also, videos are more likely to be shared and in turn, generate more inbound links. Because of this, videos are 45 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google than text results.

4. Videos are Memorable and Improve Brand Recall

Have you ever found yourself reading an entire page of a book and all of a sudden realizing that you have no idea what you just read? You then have to waste time going back to re-read something that you’ve already seen before. This phenomenon is called regression. Regression can be frustrating when reading written text, but videos almost eliminate it entirely.

Studies show that viewers retain 95% of a video’s message compared to 10% when reading text. Also, according to Hubspot, 80% of customers remember a video they viewed in the past month.

Videos allow you to package the information you’re trying to get across into a short narrative that will engage viewers in a way that text can’t. This makes them more memorable because people are far more likely to remember a story than a list of facts.

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Using video also plays into the strengths of the majority of the population. Most people need visual aids to learn, and 65% of people consider themselves to be visual learners. Videos accommodate this learning style and help people retain information better than they would a large wall of text.

5. Videos Help Increase Buying Intent

The success of any marketing campaign is based on conversions, or in other words: how many people bought or expressed interest in your product or service. Videos do a great job of pushing customers closer and closer to purchase.

A positive experience from a customer with a video ad can increase purchase intent by 97%. Also, 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.

While you can increase your conversion rate by using video marketing, you can’t just make any video and stick it out there hoping for favorable results. Your video needs to plug into your buyer’s pain points, presenting your product as the compelling solution to the pain. But if done well, video is more effective than text in communicating marketing messages.

Conclusion

Visual marketing is one of the most effective ways of passing a message across to customers and prospective customers and helping them retain the information. The strategies above will help businesses optimize their marketing systems and ensure they get the maximum return on investment from their marketing efforts.