Imagine a world without images. Every Facebook post, every tweet, every web page… just a long list of endless text. And blank Instagram accounts everywhere!

The horror!

Carefully crafted and chosen photographs allow us to show the human side of marketing. Using images makes posts more interesting, helps to get your point across, and breaks up copy in a way that makes text content easier to read and remember. Images allow your posts to stand out as content consumers can trust and come back to.

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PERSONALIZED IMAGES

Many images feel dry and impersonal. In 2019, being a brand that brings the human element to your marketing is going to be more and more important. Consumers want to see that there are real people behind the brands they love, and they want to feel connected to those brands. Try and use images of people or places instead of images of things. Don’t forget about diversity and inclusion; Make sure your images represent the world around you. If you can, take some photos of your company. Make images brand-specific with color and text overlays. Add images that convey an emotion— whether that’s excitement, hope, anxiety, or chaos, tap into what your audience is feeling when they come across your content.

Examples:
A child playing with a ball on a neighborhood street. (real estate)
Friends and family using gadgets to come together. (technology products)
Girlfriends having fun shopping. (retail)

Images should also be optimized for search engines, the perfect size + ratio, optimized and even tested in the real world...

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Articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images. [source]

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Web pages with well-formatted images get higher ranking on Google, than those without images. Also, if your image is generally high-quality and interesting, people will tend to click on the link more.

How to rank in Google Image Search:

• Figure out if image SEO really matters for your market/audience (search your competitors; Google will show images in search engine results only when there’s demand).
• Structure the images with proper ALT description in the code, and a descriptive file name.
• Place images near relevant text content on your web page.
• Choose clear, compelling images.
• Compress your images (use services like compressor.io or tinypng.com); this is one aspect of 'image optimization' (see more below).

Tweets with images can receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. [source]

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IMAGE SIZES

BLOGS:

• Author Image: The key to making a headshot look great in a circle frame is to start with a square photo. At least 500 x 500 pixels.
• Featured Image: Typically ‘larger’ (1000 pixels wide), and only three-quarters (0.75) as tall as it is wide (so that it reads easily as a thumbnail in blog lists and search results).
• Infographic: Typically ‘tall’: 4 or 5 times taller than it is wide. With a clear focus/introduction at the top.
• Images in the middle of the text: To keep the content easy to scan through, use an image that is as wide as the text content but short in height: only a third (0.3) as tall as it is wide.
  

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Make sure your images follow the social media platforms’ sizing requirements. See my social media image size guide. 

EMAIL:

Don’t use too many images, since many email clients block email images. And since mobile accounts for half of all email opens, make sure your images look good (and are intelligible) on small screens). Adding video is an excellent way to spice up your emails (link to videos with images that look like video thumbnails with an overlaid ‘play’ symbol). Finally, hyperlink your images (each image should be clickable, making it easy for your audience to get to your website or social media).

• Header image: Typically horizontal, either ’squarish’ (only three-quarters 0.75 as tall as it is wide) or more narrow (half 0.5 as tall as it is wide).
• Column images: Square images fit well on top of content columns.
  

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Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. [source]

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A/B TESTING

It can be tempting to use our intuition to predict what will make people click and convert. But basing marketing decisions off of a "feeling" can be pretty detrimental to results. Rather than relying on guesses or assumptions, try an A/B test ('split test'). If you want to be sure that one image is better than another (or if images are improving your conversions at all), this test will help you compare how your customers interact with different versions of your content. Find out more about A/B testing here.

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The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. [source]

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IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

Finally, for websites, there is comprehensive image optimization. It consists of different measures that can reduce the file size of your images. It ultimately depends on what visual fidelity your images require. This affects both user experience and search engine optimization.

These are the key steps in image optimization:

• Choose the right format: For example, line art looks better in a crisp, low-color format like 8-bit PNG (or SVG), while photography and gradients tend to look better in JPG.
• Compress your images: Often, multiple images can be compressed in large batches, if they share similar characteristics.
• Adapt intelligently: On smaller screens, you can use smaller (and resized) versions of the same image (and larger ones on desktop screens).
• Prioritize critical images ('lazy load' the rest). For example, load images further down in your content only as the user scrolls down the page.

How can you tell if your website images need to be optimized? Run a test at WebPageTest.org.

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Contact me if you’d like to launch a marketing campaign that leverages top image impact, or to set up A/B testing for any web page, or even for a complete image optimization audit.

-Sandro Alberti
Design

creative@sandroalberti.design

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