We spend a substantial portion of our day consuming an incredible amount of content. We scroll, skim and forget; retaining only the most memorable information. Reflecting on our behavior provides insight as to how the content your firm produces is consumed. In this article, we will address a question that many accounting firms struggle to answer: how do you engage an audience that is overloaded with information?
In our digital age and visual world, it’s simply not enough to merely produce content. Today, firms must focus on producing content that is engaging. One way of achieving this is by adding visuals to your content. All the content you produce will benefit from visual enhancements.
- Users engage at a rate 5x higher when a photo is included, per research by Brand Networks. The marketing company completed a 6-week twitter campaign where they alternated between posts with photos and text-only posts. They found that tweets with images received more clicks, more favorites and more retweets than the text-only posts.
- Facebook updates with images have 2.3x more engagement than those without, per data collected by BuzzSumo.
- 94 percent of content with visuals get more total views than textual content, according to this Forbes article.
- Our brains conceive visuals faster than any type of content. A study by Visual Teaching alliance found that our brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than any text.
If you’re looking to take your content to the next level, aim to incorporate a visual element in each communication. Whether it is an email campaign, social media post, press release, web update, print advertisement or proposal – including a relevant graphic can:
- Break up text.
- Help content stand out and make it memorable.
- Grab reader’s attention.
- Communicate a complex idea.
Not only must the graphic be relevant, it must also be strategically placed. For instance, people typically consume information left to right. To avoid breaking this consumption pattern, images within a blog post should be aligned right.
We review content for many of our members and generally see too many words, especially in proposals. Aim for short paragraphs with many headings and bullet points. The less words the better! If you can show something instead of saying it – even better. When conveying a message that involves numbers or statistics, a chart or infographic is a great way to visually organize the information.
When selecting an image, take precaution and ensure you have adequate permission to use it. You can purchase images from iStock or shutterstock for as little as $15 per image. Purchasing a standard license will give you permission for unlimited digital reproductions – meaning you can use it on your website or e-mail campaign as many times as you want. If you want to purchase an image and use it in a print advertisement there is often a cap at how many impressions the image is covered for. Other places to find images:
- Royalty free images and videos you can use anywhere, Pixabay images are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons.
- CPAsNET members can download and use image from our graphics library.
If you need assistance finding, purchasing or using imagery, call us to learn more about how CPAsNET can help!