Into the visual Age

The need for compelling and unique content is a fact that everyone is aware of but what is it that makes a content unique and compelling?

Content does not mean having pages and pages of information, unless it caters to an audience that is research centric and is looking for in-depth information. Today we are seeing a lot of information sharing happening in the more effective and meaningful way.If we look around…what is common between the social networking sites such as Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Tumblr..?

It is “Content sharing”

But what sort of content is being shared?

I see content that is relevant to the audience, is attractive, can be easily shared, liked, and commented upon. And what is common about the content? Almost all the content posted and shared in the social networking sites are images; images with perhaps a few lines of text, and sometimes not even that. But still they are a major hit with the audience.

What I am trying to say is, in order for content to be meaningful and to have a positive impact, it need not be long and verbose (barring some specific cases) all it needs to do is to deliver the message effectively. Images and infographics are a splendid way of spreading information that is appealing, relevant without being excessive, and can be easily shared.

In my opinion, marketers and SEO specialists need to re-look and repackage their content strategy because of the changing needs and shorter attention spans of the target audience. One of the best ways to do this would be to highlight the USP and special offers through visually appealing pages, and aid the visuals with a few well written persuasive lines. The idea is to make it easy for potential customers to know about you at the shortest possible time, and then guide them to a relevant page from where they can take the desired action; it could be buying, subscribing to your newsletters, or even wanting to know more.

Optimizing images by applying SEO best practices would be one of the ways of ensuring that your content strategy is a success. The benefits of going visual is manifold, not only the images say a lot without taking up too much time, it is so very easy to share and  attract the attention of prospects through visual content.

It is time to think about how to optimize web pages using visuals in such a way that the visuals alone can persuade and convince potential customers to convert into paying customers. Our thinking needs to change; most of the content that websites today have is, textual, with some visual relief, how about turning that logic around completely? How about pages with majority visuals with some textual content?