Your brain processes images 60,000 times quicker than text. It’s no wonder that over the last few years Facebook and LinkedIn have visually enhanced their user interfaces, and the popularity of sites like Pinterest and Instagram has exploded. Whether you’re in charge of marketing careers or products, having a visual strategy can help you stand out from your competition and drive more traffic to your site.
Our marketing team recently attended the Mixwest Conference, an annual two-day conference that focuses on marketing, social media, design and tech. Krista Neher of Boot Camp Digital opened the conference as a keynote and presented on the topic of how significant visual elements are for marketers. To be successful on the visual web you need to have images on your website and social networks, as well as participate in image-based social networks.
An interesting observation she made is that when it comes to images of people, it’s not just polished stock photography, but authentic photos of “real” people that are making a bigger impact. Case in point – according to Neher, Lululemon experimented with professional and real photos and found that the real photos had a 5-7% increase in conversion rates. Lesson here is that realistic stuff is more likely to attract people now, rather than the professionally crafted images.
One of the key takeaways for our team, especially since we’re in the process of revamping our website, is to make sure every page of your website has a “pinnable” image. In other words, if someone tries to share a page of your website on social, is there an image that pulls into the thumbnail?
Check out this example from our job seeker blog, Help Wanted:
Example 1 shows what happens if someone tries to share our blog post on Pinterest – the user can’t because there are no images to pin. By adding a quick and simple graphic (example 2), we were able to fix that issue. Same holds true for LinkedIn:
In addition, when thinking about images, Neher expounded, “It used to be that images supported the content. Now, images should by themselves tell the story.” As she points out, not having images limits the ability for our Members and others to do the marketing for us.
Have you added more visual components to your recruiting and employer branding strategy, or do you plan to? If so, please tell us more by commenting below!
