“When I am out there walking, cycling, or just sitting appreciating the view around me, I am actually looking for opportunities to capture images for my Instagram feed. All I require is an iPhone or an iPod, which helps me capture and post my inspiration right on the spot,” Jamie Oliver, the celebrity Chef and Entrepreneur.

Jamie is not an ordinary chef. If you look at his Instagram followers, you will get the idea of how smartly he is using images to market his brand online. With a humongous following of 412,000+ followers and still counting, Jamie knows the power of engagement, which can be done with the power of visual content.

While the iPhone only takes ordinary images, Instagram further adds a ‘zing’ factor to that ordinary photo and converts it into an extraordinary image.

  • In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images.
  • Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.

You can see images all around the internet and with Pinterest and Snapchat changing the way we used to see images, it is now up to Entrepreneurs how they use the power of visuals to leverage their ecommerce websites.

How Visual Marketing Affects the Natural Power of the Brain

Once upon a time communication between people was done purely on the basis of symbols. People used to share ideas and thoughts based on whose content was rich with meaning and the entire thought was conveyed with a single symbol.

Now, although letters are also considered symbols, they must be placed together with words to make sense, and those words are put into a sentence to understand the context of those words.

The Modern Way to Express Symbols Via Infographics

If you are a modern Entrepreneur, you probably see a humongous amount of Infographics popping up every single day. This is because an infographic is an effective way to convey a large amount of data in one single image. In one way, you can consider infographics as complex information compressed into a format that allows users to grab information at a glance.

New York University psychologist Jerome Bruner has discussed studies that look at the correlation between human brains, visually, and learning. The results show that people only remember 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but about 80% of what they see.

In his The Complete Guide to Understanding Consumer Psychology, Neil Patel adds that 92.6% of people say the visual dimension is the #1 influencing factor affecting their purchase decision (over factors like taste and smell).

Why Visual Content Matters For Entrepreneurs?

To start with Instagram itself is a prodigy. Passing the 300 million user mark and surpassing Twitter and its 284 million active users. As per the Instagram website, there are approximately 70 million photos shared each day on Instagram.

“As an Entrepreneur, I started my second venture on Instagram and from there onwards it was all easy to get orders without spending a dime on marketing,” says Yousuf Rafi, Serial Entrepreneur and Digital Strategist at Branex.

If you are still not convinced about using visual content for your next venture. Here are some more stats. With Instagram, there are 216,000 photos posted, and Pinterest users pin 3,467 images. As for videos, 8,333 videos are uploaded and shared on YouTube and Vine per minute.

If we keep in mind that 277,000 tweets and 2,460,000 posts are shared on Twitter and Facebook every sixty seconds, the numbers make a strong case for Entrepreneurs to use images and leverage their content to promote their activities online.

Last year, folks at Buzzsumo shared results of 100 million articles, the purpose of those articles is to note what factors make content viral. And as you might have guessed it, it was visual content.

However, one mistake Entrepreneurs make while going for visual content is to grab images that appear first on Google and share them on all the various Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter without following a proper strategy.

Some share the low-resolution image, which nearly kills the purpose of going for visual content in the first place.

So, as an Entrepreneur, you might be wondering how you create images that entice your customers to buy from you.

Well, for starters, there are tools that you can use to create fantastic images yourself.

Web-based Tools for Creating Eye-catching Images

You can label Canva as a Swiss army knife for visual content creation, a must for every Entrepreneur going for visual images. Often called ‘the easiest design program for visual markers’ even if they don’t know how to design. You can create Facebook covers or perhaps a Twitter header, this tool will be enough for you to start. And the best thing about Canva is that it automatically optimizes images for every platform.

PicMonkey is another alternative to Adobe Photoshop which lets you quickly edit, touch up images, and create some ravishing collages all without the need to sign up for the process. Just start with uploading images from your computer and you can do most of the Photoshop things like adding a canvas, applying a frame, or even adding an overlay to images right with just a few clicks.

Quotes Cover is one of my personal favorite tools that I still use. The good thing is that you need zero design skills for this tool. You simply add some text, and this amazing tool will create fantastic images out of it. You have control over the background and colors that go with the text, which makes it even easier.

To Conclude It All

We are living in an age where it is nearly impossible to compete. But Entrepreneurs have the advantage of using tools which make everyday things so simple. So if you are a startup, do tell us what tools you are using to save your time because, in the end, sharing is caring.