The human attention span has decreased by a third over the last 15 years — giving advertisers and marketers an average of only 8.25 seconds to make an impression before the viewer’s attention is drawn elsewhere. However, the same technology often blamed for decreasing adults’ attention span can provide you with the metrics you need to see whether you need to tweak your marketing strategy to draw in more customers.
Examining your click-through rate (CTR), or the ratio of people who find your content engaging enough to investigate further, is the most straightforward way to determine whether your marketing campaigns are working or falling short. Read on to learn more about how pumping up your visual content can increase your CTR and promote your brand.
How can visual content be incorporated into your ads to improve your CTR?
When dealing with an 8-second attention span, having engaging visual content is crucial to any marketing materials. Not only can a striking visual grab your viewers’ attention, making it likelier they’ll spend more than 8 seconds perusing (or clicking through) your ad, a cluttered or text-heavy ad can scream “skim right by” to many visually-oriented viewers.
In fact, most viewers take in only 20 to 28 percent of the text content on a webpage, all but ensuring a visually unappealing ad won’t be read or retained.
- Pair needed information with relevant images
Three days after reading a certain bit of information, you’re likely to only retain about 10 percent of it. On the other hand, those who read this information in conjunction with a relevant image are likely to retain more than half, or around 65 percent.
Adding high-quality and evocative images to your ads could have an instant impact; but pairing your text with an irrelevant or hastily-chosen stock image is likely to have a minimal effect on your ad’s memorability.
- Use multiple images in social media posts
Taking advantage of the display options available on various social media platforms can make your content significantly more engaging. Facebook posts with two or more images received 1290 percent more clicks than single-image posts, and other platforms (like Instagram and Snapchat) can encourage this collage effect as well.
What other tweaks can you make to your visual marketing strategy to improve your CTR?
- Punctuate the end of your first description line
Even when your content includes text rather than pictures, making this text as visually appealing as possible — and improving its scannability in the process — can be as simple as adding a period at the end of your first line. This ensures the text wraps upward, keeping your description on a single (bolded) line rather than sending part of it to the less-visible box below.
- Appeal to video lovers
If your marketing campaign includes email, you may be able to immediately improve your CTR by 65 percent or more by adding the word “video” in the subject line and linking to a relevant video.