Why You Should be Leveraging Visual Design in Your Business
In our recent blog post on content creation, we mentioned the statistic that the human brain processes images 60,000x faster than text, and that the average person only reads 20-28% of the text on any given page. We know that these statistics might seem intimidating to any companies that haven’t traditionally invested as much capital in their visual assets, so we wanted to take a deeper dive into why visual assets are so vital to audience engagement and how you can leverage visual assets to bolster your business strategy.
Visual assets get a lot of love in the design space, but we want to stress how vital your visual presence is when it comes to achieving your business goals. So we’re going to break down how you can leverage visual design in a variety of business interactions. These span a broad scope under the business umbrella including marketing, sales, business development, and customer service.
It’s important to remember that adding strategic design to your existing business practices doesn’t just mean plastering stock images all over your content. Adding visual elements can mean reorganizing your information in a visually appealing way, strategically using fonts styles or weights (bolded, italic, etc.), adding subtle visual assets like arrows, recoloring content to shift emphasis, or something as elaborate as a full infographic. As we unpack the different ways in which you can leverage visual assets to support business goals, we also want to address why strategic visual design reinforces business goals. While there are many contributing factors to why a well-designed outreach email or sell sheet will perform better than one without visual assets, we’re going to focus on the top few.
1. Visuals actually help people learn and process information more efficiently
As Learning Design researcher Richard E. Mayer suggests in his principles of Multimedia Learning, visuals help people learn information more effectively and efficiently. Ultimately, that means a customer can learn more about your product or company, and remember that information better if a visual asset is leveraged to support that learning. There are many contributing factors to this efficient learning process, one of which is the addition of color or other design elements to help viewers distinguish between background and foreground information, as well as to establish a visual hierarchy of which pieces of information are more important than others.
2. Visuals are often responsible for your first impression
As we said above, the human brain processes visual information much faster than textual or auditory information–60,000x faster to be exact. That means your customers will process any design elements on your website, sell sheet, or cold email faster than any accompanying text. Ultimately, this means it can be up to your visual design to make the first impression on behalf of your company.
3. Visuals can support the memorability of your brand
A research study at MIT found that the human brain can identify images seen for as little as 100 milliseconds. This rapid identification allows customers to quickly achieve a high-level understanding of what they’re looking at and where to look next. Pair this rapid identification with the fact that images, graphics, etc., are consistently more engaging than text alone, and you’ve cultivated a more memorable and meaningful interaction with that customer by leveraging visual assets to grasp their attention and memory.
Alright, now that we’ve hopefully captured your attention and have your buy-in when it comes to leveraging visuals, let’s get to a few examples of where you can incorporate more visuals in your business!
Outbound lead generation:
Business cards & Email signatures
Sell-sheets, one-pagers & infographics
Pitch decks
Inbound lead generation:
Web design
Marketing magnets
Content marketing
Social media posts
Customer service:
Video & VR demos
Infographics & explanatory graphics
Customer loyalty & engagement:
Pitch decks
Newsletters
Blog posts
Social media posts
Email campaigns
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Interested in leveraging visual design for your business?
