The power of social media marketing is undeniable. Social media is one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach your audience, connect with potential consumers on both personal and business levels, and promote your business.
The billions of social media users make it the best platform to reach your audience and expand the reach of your business.
Social media has more to offer than any other kind of traditional or even digital marketing platform. Whether you have an online business outlet or a physical shop; social media marketing has the power to revolutionize your brand.
If you don’t know about the benefits of social media marketing, here they are;
- It is more cost-effective than many other kinds of digital marketing
- It can enhance brand awareness
- Social media can assist in building a loyal customer base
- It generates more leads and improves the conversion rate
- It educates your targeted audience about your business values
- Social media can help to expand your brand
To enjoy all of these benefits, you must work on every domain of your social media marketing, including text, videos, audio, and images. However, this article will only discuss the role of images in social media marketing and how you can utilize them in your campaigns.
Importance of Images for Social Media Marketing
Images are more powerful, valuable, and effective than thousands of words. That’s why marketers focus more on pictures than written content. So let’s see what role images play in social media marketing.
Enhance User Engagement
Images in social media marketing are a great way to keep viewers engaged. Marketers post images on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms that are relevant to the brand.
Posting product images can help you get likes and shares. When the images are shared, more people view your products, and some of them can take an interest in them, and a few of them can buy your products.
Remember, the pictures should be eye-catching to draw the audience’s attention to key features of a product and tell the story of the brand. As a result, the images that highlight the key features get more shares on social media, and more users engage with those images.
Enhance the Worth of Your Products
Adding a visual element to your products, services, or brand can make them stand out from the competition. Marketers believe that the right pictures can also give worth to your products that consumers may not have considered before.
If you are a designer or hire professionals, you can take advantage of your photo editing skills. These skills can give your products that extra edge when it comes to attracting consumers with more aesthetically pleasing images.
It can also increase the conversion rate of customers who may have been on the fence about investing in your brand before.
Develop Brand Recognition
One of the leading reasons to invest in social media marketing is to develop brand recognition. Images can help you achieve this goal. They can be used in social media campaigns to make your posts more engaging, memorable, and shareable.
Images have been shown to increase engagement by up to 93%. They can also help you get more followers on social media and increase the number of clicks on your ads or ordinary posts.
Images in social media marketing have been around for a while, and they have evolved with time. The trend now is to use them to make your brand stand out from the crowd. It can help if you make sure that your images are eye-catching and relevant to what you are trying to promote.
Win Customer Loyalty
Businesses can’t survive if they don’t have a loyal customer base. The walking customers can be good for some time as it can enhance the sales, but for survival, businesses need those customers who regularly buy their products or services.
Building a loyal customer base is a challenging task for companies. But they can achieve this goal if they properly utilize images in social media marketing. When the customers can relate to those images, it can build a connection between the customer and businesses. The sense of this connection makes them loyal customers.
Images are the key to sparking emotional reactions and attracting and retaining customers. A suitable visual representation of your brand in image form can help you win customer loyalty. Moreover, they are the key to attracting and retaining customers.
Generate More Leads
If you are having issues with leads even by regularly posting content on social media, but the audience is not taking your content seriously, you need to add images to your content.
They are one of the effective ways to generate leads. In fact, tweets with images receive almost double more retweets than those without images, and Facebook posts with images see the same trend.
Studies found that high-quality and relevant images directly link with lead generation. The marketers are aware of this fact, and that’s why they focus more on pictures than written text.
Evoke Emotions
If you want your product or marketing images to leave a long-lasting effect on your consumers, you should evoke emotions in your targeted audience. The images have the power to evoke emotions in your audience.
For example, millions of people tweeted about the Syrian immigration crisis during the war. No one took it seriously, and almost the whole world ignored this crisis. But when they saw a picture of a kid who died while crossing the sea. That kid’s picture caught everyone’s attention.
It was just an example of the power of images and how they evoke emotions. When it comes to marketing, the photos have a similar impact. When you’re creating images for social media, make sure to keep your target audience in mind.
And learn what kind of emotions you want them to feel when they see your picture. Joy, happiness, love, anger, sadness, fear? Once you are aware of the emotion you want to evoke, brainstorm ideas for images that will help you achieve that goal.
Sell Products
Retailers place images of their products on their websites. It’s because they know that it works. This same principle also applies to social media marketing.
Research has found that when people see images of products on social media, they are more likely to buy them. But, on the other hand, when you only write about your products, no one believes your words.
People don’t trust products until they see them. Words can tell people the benefits of those products, how they look, and even why the consumers should buy them. But they are insufficient in arousing their interest.
Your audience can read your whole blogs and long-form articles about your products, but they won’t purchase them until they see how the products look. The images help them decide whether they need those products or not.
After knowing about the importance of images in social media marketing, you need to understand how to get images for social media marketing. The next portion of this article is going to answer this question.
Find Relevant Images
You should ensure the relevancy of the images you are going to use. Not every random marketing image is beneficial for your business. The irrelevant images can get likes and shares, but they provide no benefits in the end.
Therefore, you should only share pictures that are relevant to your brand. Even if you share memes and make them relevant to your brand, you can get instant and better results, and those images can be more effective than dozens of high-quality and motivational photos.
A great way to find these images is to create a photo library of your own. This can be done by taking your photos, finding free stock photos online, or purchasing stock photography. Make sure you have the right to use all of the images in your library and that they reflect the tone and values of your brand.
Another way to get an idea about images and find the relevant images is using the reverse image search engines. The use of picture search offers a lot of benefits in social media marketing. Only a few marketers perform image lookup, but they are more beneficial than anything else. It gives the results of all similar images to your input query.
When you put an image as a query on the image search engine to get the more similar results, it will scan your image and show you all the similar images on your screen with the links to the web pages where they are uploaded.
You can analyze those images and contact their owners for permission to use them. It can also give new ideas that you can use to design your own images.
Use High-Quality Images
The product or every other kind of image is useless until they are not showing your audience what they want to see. That’s why you should only use high-quality photos, as those images help you in different ways.
First of all, high-quality images show even the small details of your products. Secondly, those images build your reputation in the market as people believe you don’t compromise on quality. Lastly, higher-quality images raise interest in the audience and convince them to buy your products.
However, if you don’t use high-quality images, you could be doing more harm than good. Low-quality and blurred images can make your brand look unprofessional and ruin the impact of your message. They can also cause your audience to lose interest in your content quickly.
You can find high-quality images on any photo stock platform. Using those platforms you can search with your keyword. If you don’t want to use stock photos, you can design your own images.
