“When I create a piece of content, I try to make sure there’s not any scroll depth at which there’s not something of visual interest. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t want you to be able to scroll down in any of my articles and see nothing but text. I’m that serious about maximizing visuals.”—Andy Crestodina
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Andy Crestodina, CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media, to explore the value of including visuals in your content marketing. They discuss why visuals are so powerful for engaging audiences across channels, including plenty of tips and insights for creating and using visuals effectively.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below.
If you’re looking for more from Andy:
- Check out his immensely valuable book Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, now in its seventh edition! The update reflects GA4 (Google Analytics Four) and includes AI prompts you can use today.
- Dig into Orbit’s 11th Annual Blogger Survey results in this webinar replay. You’ll learn new SEO, AI, and content strategy methods and how bloggers engage their audiences today.
How Visuals Improve Content Performance
Visuals boost your content performance, as demonstrated by large brands that have invested millions of dollars in usability research and creating great visuals.
“It’s easy to measure the impact of visuals on the performance of content. There are examples of it everywhere. If you don’t have enough of your own data or enough historical performance to try to find correlations, just look at what big tech is doing. It’s impossible to overstate how powerful visuals are, and that is evidenced by the companies that know what they’re doing and can spend millions of dollars on usability research.”—Andy Crestodina
Highly visual content performs better in search results and enhances the value and shareability of your content.
“Highly visual content tends to perform better. It will keep the scan reader scrolling through content, it will make things more shareable, it’ll give you more link-worthy visual assets, and you can repurpose those [visuals] in other places.”—Andy Crestodina
Everyone Has Existing Visuals to Add to Content
Revisit your existing assets.
“Step one would be to see what you’ve got. A lot of people have a whole history of things they’ve made. The sales team has PowerPoint decks, there are brochures in the lobby, there might be stuff around. So look around, look at historic stuff. You might be able to go back and find that you wrote things back in the day that had some visuals that you could repurpose.”—Andy Crestodina
How-to content can include screenshots to enhance the reader experience. Andy uses Snagit to annotate screenshots easily.
“What I’m frequently doing is teaching how-to stuff, which often has opportunities to add little screenshots with markup.”—Andy Crestodina
“I use Snagit, and I use it every day. TechSmith made a tool called Snagit. Snagit is for taking screenshots and then adding boxes, arrows, and highlights. You can blur out things if it’s sensitive data.”—Andy Crestodina
Video is also a powerful visual that content marketers can repurpos for many channels and formats. We previously discussed how to create branded video content with Molly St. Louis, and we explored five video types to include in your content marketing strategy in this blog post.
“Video’s a visual, and it’s the ultimate visual. What about a video strategy? What are you doing on YouTube? Do you have any decks that you could repurpose into tiny videos, or give anything short form, or do you want to do some kind of detailed things? Probably a third of my articles I do like a 12-minute YouTube video summary of the article going through everything step by step.”—Andy Crestodina
Contributor quotes are visuals, lend additional perspectives to your content, and can extend its reach.
“A contributor quote is another point of view that makes your content more interesting. It’s often an influencer who might share, making your content reach farther. It’s a chance to do some networking in your own blog. People love to go with quotes, and yes, it adds a visual.”—Andy Crestodina
Andy’s Annual Blogger Survey is a great example of how to visualize original research findings—and this data and these charts can be used across content channels for an entire year.
“What about an original research piece? How about twice a year we do some primary research? Like [my] blogger survey, there’s a lot of data in there. There are a lot of charts in there. Yeah, I had to book my designer for a lot of time to convert all these images into these bar charts and make these bar charts beautiful, but now I’ve got months and months of compelling visuals that I can use across all presentations and emails and articles.”—Andy Crestodina
“After you’ve been doing it for a little while, you can make a visual roundup of all the charts you’ve ever made. One of my most successful pieces, not in search, but in social, is an article called like, 55 marketing charts, or 55 charts that explain marketing.”—Andy Crestodina
LinkedIn carousels can be effective for engaging your audience, and they’re easier to make than you might think!
“[LinkedIn carousels] are fantastic. I think it’s interesting UX, because the visitor’s scrolling down, and then they scroll side to side. The New York Times app does that, lots of news apps do that. It’s easy to create, easier than you might think. So if you just make a PowerPoint deck that has all those pictures in it, and maybe go to properties inside it so it’s more square or something, and then export that to a PDF file, that’s it. Upload the PDF file, and it will automatically parse it into a little gallery.”—Andy Crestodina
Consider paying professional illustrators or cartoonists, like Tom Fishburne, The Marketoonist. GrowthLoop (disclaimer: I support their team with content creation) partnered with Marketoonist for this recent LinkedIn post.
“Usually, people I’ve worked with don’t go out and commission any kind of visuals. But multiple people I know and that I’ve been working on presentation decks with have paid one-time usage for [Marketoonist] visuals for marketing things.”—Erika Heald
Making the Case for Visual Content
There are so many ways to add visuals and work around potential internal constraints or restrictions.
“When you’re given a rule, like ‘Hey, you don’t have any visual content resources, and you can’t do them yourself,’ then you need to figure out how you can get around that, because it’s a silly rule that’s in place.”—Erika Heald
“When you do these kinds of things, then this might be one of the ways that you can actually get across to the team that if you had more resources, adding in those branded visuals could have enough value to merit using those internal design resources.”—Erika Heald
Consider how visuals can be created to support well-funded programs, like PR.
“Sometimes you can get buy-in for your ideas if you position them so they check several boxes. We don’t have a budget for design, but we’ve got a budget for PR. Guess what works in PR? We can create some compelling visuals that I can use in my pitch to that trade publication. I think we need four infographics a year. That’s going to help take it out of the comms budget, because I’m going to be pitching articles to association websites or targeted blogs.”—Andy Crestodina
Visuals also support SEO, which can boost lead generation and overall awareness.
“Visuals actually support SEO. This is rarely discussed, but if you have a visual and you’re writing a guest post… SEOs all want to get links from other websites. You can put links in the article, but sometimes people take the links out. But the one link that never gets removed from an article is the image source link. So when you have visuals, you have an excuse to put that content into other websites.”—Andy Crestodina
“If you use an SEO tool and check the anchor text of the links to their website, if you do this on my site, orbitmedia.com, you’ll see that there are dozens of links to my website that say image source.”—Andy Crestodina
“I frequently show people frameworks or the templates that I use for things, or even make the templates available. It is fascinating to see those little images show up everywhere. Like the brand voice chart that I did for the Content Marketing Institute, I have seen that specific chart everywhere.”—Erika Heald
Emails perform better if the subject line references a visual.
“If you send an email and the subject line in the email references a visual, in my data those emails have higher open and click-through rates. Put the word chart or visual or infographic or video. When the visual indicating word appears in an email subject line, that email will likely perform better.”—Andy Crestodina
If you share someone else’s visual on your channel, credit them.
“Anybody that is considering… stealing is a strong word… but using [a visual] without attribution…. You’re making a mistake, a marketing mistake. You are diminishing your results, because mentioning the creator of a thing is not just ethical and legal and important to do as a good human, but it makes them invested in that post.”—Andy Crestodina
Visual Content Creation Tools
Throughout the conversation, Andy and Erika discuss a few tools they’ve used to source or create visuals:
- Snagit
- Canva
- Unsplash
- Beautiful.ai
Additional Content Marketing Tips and Insights
Listen to the full recap for more insights, including:
- Why you should make your content experience like a social media feed (22:58)
- Why LinkedIn Newsletters are the best strategy today in B2B marketing (24:05)
- What Erika and Andy feel about memes and GIFs in blog posts (36:01)
- Whether you should include attribution for Canva (39:08)
- How to approach accessibility with your visual content (45:47)
- How to balance content quality with quantity (53:25)
