What can a three-year old show you about marketing?

In order to make those sales, you need to capture people’s attention, and that’s exactly what photographs do - they capture people’s attention. Are you making the most of this powerful marketing tool?

Why is it that we choose to forget so many of the lessons we learnt when we were little kids? While it’s just as well that we no longer eat bugs or finger-paint the walls, there’s some stuff we really should remember.

One of the things we should remember is that picture books are much more interesting than books without pictures. Before you could read, you probably knew your favourite story by the pictures alone.

Or perhaps you couldn’t understand why adults would want to read boring books that were crammed full of words – with not a picture in sight? You thought your brightly coloured picture books were far more interesting.

And you’d be right, books with pictures are superior. This is true for more than just books though; everything with words should have pictures - specially your marketing material.

Why is it so important to have pictures in your marketing materials?

Let’s take a step a back to answer that, and instead ask ourselves why we do marketing? It’s usually to make sales – right?

In order to make those sales, you need to capture people’s attention, and that’s exactly what photographs do: they capture people’s attention. For the simple reason that the three-year old knows; things with pictures are interesting, whereas things with just words are boring.

Think back to your own behaviour online

When you’ve been browsing the internet, have you ever clicked away from a website that was crammed full with text – and no pictures?

You wouldn’t be alone in clicking away from such sites; most people would do the same.

Images add visual relief to information... as the saying goes, a picture really does paint a thousand words, and the picture does more than just grab attention; it also creates a memory.

Why great photographs make your business more memorable

According to research by Dave Meier at the Centre for Accelerated Learning up to 65% of all adults are visual learners. That means that people process information best through seeing it.

This visual learning is important. You see, the reader may not be ready to buy from you right now; but they might want to buy from you in a few months’ time. Or maybe even in a year’s time, and if your imagery has made a strong enough impression, they’ll remember it when they’re ready to buy.

What sort of imagery can you use in your marketing?

The images you can use could be photographs, charts, diagrams... all sorts of things. But there’s something you need to know, and that is that buying decisions are based on 80% emotion, and 20% logic.

Therefore for maximum impact, your images need to convey an emotion that your prospects can relate to, and it’s very hard to do that with a chart or diagram – but it’s very easy to do with a photograph.

The power of photographs

Photographs are powerful because they can convey an emotion in a heartbeat. While words can certainly convey emotions too, it’s not as instantaneous. Photographs have a very powerful pull.

You only have to ask the average three-year old to learn that much.