How Many Words Is a (Brand) Photo Actually Worth?
When clients and customers see what it’s like to engage with you, it streamlines their decision to choose you first. That’s why it’s always best to show, then tell.
It’s even better if your face is doing the showing and telling.
Why?
Because there's a significant amount of scientific data that proves trust is established hundreds of times faster with a realistic brand photo that represents the person or persons you will be dealing with at a business, over just having text, or text with stock photos.
Your brain understands visual information better than text. It's programmed to see faces in everyday objects.
This is why branded photos and visuals supercharge trust that directly impacts business conversion.
When you align with your brand compass to show - instead of just generically "tell" what it is you provide, you ramp up your positive differentiation from the competition.
We make decisions based on emotion and then justify our decisions with facts.
Our (subconscious) emotional (trust) response occurs much faster with a signature branded image than with simple stock photos or just text.
Then we read the features and benefits to justify the fact that we're convinced by the immediacy of the image we've already based our decision on.
This is also why great packaging and point-of-purchase displays can really move product that wasn't selling before it was conveniently "repositioned" to your eye-line at check out.
People don't always know what they want until it's easy to access and packaged desirably.
Booming cosmetic industry revenues bear testament to this.
There’s a reason why 90% of the covers on any given newsstand have faces on them.
Just don't forget: content that aligns with your brand and what your audience loves, does best, face or no face.
If you want to add a significant conversion rate to your business, show the features and benefits in your brand compass with well-produced original photography and video that helps potential customers experience what it's like to work with you or engage with your product -- before they actually do.
Then, live up to your claim and capitalize on the feedback that you gain when you make capturing satisfaction a trackable metric of your KPIs.
How Many Words A Picture Is Worth?
You may have heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, but there’s real science and a calculation behind how many insights we procure when viewing an image.
Does seeing these grapes…
Make you think of wine?
And dream of sitting in this beautiful orchard…
Drinking in the spoils of this view?
I’ll bet it does now…
3M (the guys who really invented Post-Its), claim that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Which if correct, translates, that you can paint a picture for your audience 60k times faster and more memorably, with an actual picture.
The truth is, we humans don’t do very well with large amounts of text.
Reading is time-consuming and can easily overwhelm us.
It’s no wonder that 92% of Google users click on a link on the first page of results: scrolling through long lists of text is hard and time-consuming.
You may have heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, but in all actuality, according to cognition scientist, Alan F. Blackwell:
A picture is worth approximately 84.1 words.
In his research, subjects created visuals to convey information and then described those images in words.
The average number of words it took them to describe their images was 84.1.
So a picture may not equal 1,000 words, but using an image in place of 84.1 words is still an impressive shortcut. This means less information for your brain to process and remember.
Additional Facts:
Research determined as early as 1894 shows that pictures are more memorable than text.
This eventually became known as the Picture Superiority Effect.
Sixty-five percent of us are visual learners. This means imagery helps 65% of us understand and remember information better than text.
So if you weren’t thinking about wine before reading this, it’s likely you’re thinking about it now.
That’s the power of image and the essence of why utilizing high-quality, relevant images bears fruit when it comes to telling your brand’s story and converting engagement.
*Sources: courtesy of Christine Landry
Her article that lays out what makes images memorable is a must-read for anyone looking to design or redesign their brand visuals.