One thing that the internet and its soft copies can’t beat is the tangible feel of that hard copies have. Readers could look at your flyer, turn it over, share with their friends and family, and so on. But that’s not the only benefit which they have. Print media also have the added advantage of being harder to get distracted from than a computer or phone screen. And this is important because a recent study showed that the average attention for a person now stands at a mere 8 seconds. One way to ensure that people are paying the right amount of attention to your print materials is using visual communication.

Visual Marketing: The Basics

From time immemorial, human beings have always been visual learners and communicators. That’s not likely to change anytime soon. It’s just the way our brain operates. And by adopting an adequate blend of text and visual elements you can take advantage of this fact for your business.

People also tend to remember visual information better. When a person hears a piece of information, they are only likely to remember about 10% of it 3 days later--not very favorable circumstances when you’re trying to lead someone towards a sale. However when the same piece of information is mixed with some visuals, people retain more than 65% of it after the same amount of time.

This is the advantage that visual communication can afford you. People will spend more time looking at those images than they spend looking at the text, so taking the time to include relevant images will definitely pay off in long term success.

With Visuals You Can Show Rather than Tell

You know the old adage, “Show don’t tell”? Visuals allow you to do that. The next time you embark on creating your marketing materials you can try to convey the main idea in a sentence or two and then spend the remainder of the time thinking which parts of your message can be conveyed via images. What is the minimum amount of text that can convey the all the important information along with visuals? That’s what you should be asking yourself.

If marketing is nothing more than simply pointing out the directions towards making a purchase, then this is the approach you should take. Why? Because another study shows that people follow directions 323% better with a combination of text and illustration than they would with text only.