From Facebook posts by old friends asking you to try products that “really work,” to those email subscriptions you’re sure you never signed up for, people are constantly bombarding you with information from all platforms. Everyone wants your attention, and it’s up to you to determine what makes the cut. Our eyes can only process so much—and our brains can interpret even less.
Related: What is an infographic? A comprehensive guide
This fact is well-known to marketers, who constantly work to create new and exciting content to be consumed by target audiences. The job of marketers is growing increasingly more difficult as the days of simply creating interesting, insightful, witty, easily understood yet informative content are over. On top of everything their positions entailed before the age of social media and email campaigns, marketers now have the additional task of differentiating themselves from everyone else who is trying to do the exact same thing.
So, how is it done? How can one business’s content stand apart from the overabundance of black-and-white text being hurled at consumers across the globe?
The answer lies in visual content—like infographics. We’ve compiled a list of 32 stats and facts that demonstrate the importance of visuals in your marketing messages. These stats can help you disseminate content that is read instead of skipped.
How do we process information?
- 90% of information sent to the brain is visual. (MIT)
- 65% of people are visual learners. (Pearson)
- When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Brain Rules)
- 99% of all sensory information is filtered out by the brain almost immediately. This means that only 1% of information actually gets through to the brain. Infographics are in this 1%. (QUE Publishing)
- Visuals with color increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. (Saurage Research)
- People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than those following directions without illustrations. (Springer)
- Eye-tracking studies show internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page. (NN Group)
- 81% of people only skim the content they read online. The average user reads 20-28% of words during an average visit. (NN Group)
Why should you use infographics?
- Infographics can increase web traffic by 12%. (Demand Gen Report)
- Posts that include images receive 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. (Webdam)
- 30% of marketers use original graphics, such as infographics, more than any other type of visual content, including videos and GIFs. (Venngage)
- When asked which types of visuals had the highest engagement, 42% of marketers reported that infographics and other original graphics were the most engaging. This was higher than any other form of visual content. (Venngage)
- Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. (Quick Sprout)
The importance of visual content in social media
- Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x more than other any other type of content. (NN Group)
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. (Buffer)
- 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%). (Social Media Examiner)
- 37% of marketers say that visual marketing is the most important form of content for their business. (Social Media Examiner)
- Facebook posts with images get over double the engagement than those without images. (BuzzSumo)
- In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75 to 100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images. (BuzzSumo)
- On LinkedIn, images generally result in a 98% higher comment rate. (LinkedIn)
- Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks than those without. (Buffer)
- Facebook posts from brands that included images earned 87% of all engagements. (Quintly)
How does this affect marketing?
- Infographics were the B2B content marketing tactic with the biggest increase in use from 2015 to 2016, up from 50% to 58%. (CMI)
- From 2015 to 2016, the use of visual content by marketers increased by 130%. (Venngage)
- 71% of marketers claim to spend less than 5 hours per week making visuals. 11% spend over 15 hours per week, and 18% spend between 5 and 15 hours per week. (Venngage)
- 29% of marketers report that the biggest struggle they face when creating engaging visuals is being able to produce well-designed visuals. (Venngage)
- 36% of marketers predicted that they will spend more than a third of their entire budget on visual content in 2017. (Venngage)
- 53% of marketers stated that 91-100% of the content they published in 2016 contained visuals. (Venngage)
- 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated. (MediaPost)
- 65% of marketers say that a lack of time or staff resources are the biggest challenges to creating effective visual marketing. (Chute)
- 58% of marketers say they are looking to consolidate platforms and processes to increase visual marketing output and effectiveness. (Chute)
- Publishers who use infographics see traffic grow an average of 12% more than those who don’t. (Anson Alex)
The statistics speak for themselves: visual content is essential to capturing and holding the attention of potential readers. As the data shows, however, over 17% of marketers spend more than five hours per week creating visuals in order to brand their business and disseminate information. Five hours per week spent creating infographics is five hours per week not spent improving your business.
So how do you keep up with the stunning visual content of competitors but also spend significantly less time in the creation process? The solution is Lucidpress: a web-based design platform that empowers even the most novice of designers to create impressive visual content. Using our simple drag-and-drop formatting will help you spend less time branding your business and more time building it.
