I stumbled upon a post called “Why Images Matter to Your Content Marketing” over on networksolutions.com, so this must mean that there are some skeptics over there who think words and words alone are enough to get your message across in your marketing.
That might be true, if you’re an artful designer with some really inventive and unusual ideas to grab attention. But, even at a glance, it’s easy for words in ads alongside articles like this to blend in with the article. It’s like Google AdWords — whatever you think of them and their efficacy, our brains are conditioned to block them out or just ignore them. I forget the exact statistic, but I believe we are exposed to something like hundreds, if not thousands, of ads on a daily basis.
It’s a little like what going to Tokyo is like for most Americans: We’re struck by how neon the city is and all the activity and the unexpected “craziness” that city provides. For example: I vacationed there a few years back and will never forget the time I was passing through a mall and saw a mandrill in a sailor suit performing for fruit.
To everyone there, it was just an everyday occurrence. But me? I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.
All of this is a long way of saying that, yes, you definitely need images in your marketing to keep your content from disappearing into the periphery. There are other reasons, too, Network Solutions points out: “Images also provide an important way to improve your content’s rank in search engines. If you include images in a blog post, for example, be sure to tag the image with the keywords you want your business to be found for when customers do a search.”
If you’re still skeptical, read the full post here.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as IFC’s comedy, film, and TV blogger, he's also a comedy-writing instructor for Second City and an adjunct professor in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media. (He also co-runs a blog behind the DePaul class, DIY Game Dev.) He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
