How can illustrations increase the effectiveness of your content?

March 2, 2021

How can illustrations increase the effectiveness of your content?

Trends in the content marketing industry change quickly, but the importance of illustrations has remained constant for years. While 23.7% of content marketers admit that design and visual content is their biggest challenge, many of them have predicted that more than 50% of businesses in 2021 will rely largely on visual content. Using illustrations is a proven tactic to keep readers engaged and is one of the easiest ways to break up heavy content for an audience. Yes, written words may be the bread-and-butter of a marketer’s content marketing strategy, but illustrations build a narrative to make the piece easily digestible.

Here’s how the right illustration can boost content retention and consumption:

It narrates a story

You’ve probably heard the age-old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. In the content marketing gospel, this quote is a life lesson marketer swear by – and for good reason. Illustrations are fun to look at and easy to decode. Once you have decided on the theme of your brand story, sketch out silhouettes of characters that will take the form of your narrative. A combination of words and images has been proven to be more effective to process information than words alone.

It enhances your SEO efforts

Did you know there’s a whole secret world of image SEO? That’s right, Google keeps a close watch on the visuals in your article too. When stock images or infographics don’t meet the brief, customized illustrations with SEO-friendly captions work extremely well. These fluids, abstract, yet life-filled drawings can be used to reflect your brand’s voice and convey a message effectively.

It helps repurpose content

In this age of information overload, people are already taking in more information than they can process. At times like these, illustrations help break the monotony. Imagine you’ve put your heart and soul into creating a comprehensive e-book that’s 8 pages long. While it may have gained plenty of traction during the launch, you’d hate to see all that effort go to waste. You can repurpose the content format into short emailers, social media posts, or blogs for your website.

It allows brand personification

The concept of brand personification involves creating custom illustrations that help establish a connection between your brand and the audience. Putting a human, animal, or anime face to your brand is one of the best ways to bridge the gap of affinity. If brand personification makes sense to the business as it did for brands like Amul, M&M, and Wendy’s, use it to allow the public to identify with your brand.

It makes content more absorbable

Our brains process content surprisingly quickly, of which visual content is consumed 60,00 0 times faster than text. The reason behind using illustrations is to curate a compelling brand message even in the absence of words. A good design, an appropriate color base, and the power of emotion can make even the driest content digestible.

Remember, illustrations can customize your brand and give it a unique voice. The best way to ensure that your illustrations fall in line with your brand is to encourage in-house designers to come up with a narrative and an illustration style. While this may take time, the result has the power to create ripples among your target audience and increase brand recall like never before.