Industry: Staffing
Content: Custom graphics
Highlights: 225% longer visit durations, 53% lower bounce rate
Marketing stats indicate written content is significantly more successful when paired with images – up to 10 times more effective, according to a recent Digiday study. But is it realistic to expect graphics to drive better content results, and fast? Will blog content actually perform 10 times better when you add illustrations?
Marketers say written content is up to 10 times more effective with visuals
In short – Yes. Results from one Brafton client show that original visuals have a powerful impact on engagement with results like:
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A 50% decrease in bounced visits
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Over 150% more pages per session
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Visits that lasted over 200% longer
From plain text to picture perfect
This staffing agency published articles by Brafton writers on its blog twice weekly. The client saw success with the initial strategy, but we wanted to make sure the visitors we worked hard to attract were engaging with the message – not just skimming the text and moving on to something else. To get readers to stick around for the story, from start to finish, we knew the content needed to resonate with readers at a glance.
Strategy, phase 1:
We made some upgrades to to improve the reading experience of each article, including pull-quotes and inline relevant Shutterstock images to give emphasis to the most important parts of the story.
This approach measurably increased traffic,engagement and thought leadership. However, our content marketing strategists saw even more untapped opportunities to get readers to engage deeper.
Strategy, phase 2:
We enlisted our designers to create custom feature graphics to accompany the blog posts – and we saw a number of positive results.
Here’s how custom visuals work on an article-by-article basis: When the content writers are finished editing articles, they send them to a designer on the account. This person is also familiar with the client’s brand and style guide and creates a custom visual, such as an info stat or an illustration, to include in the body of the article.
Want to learn more about this process?
Here’s a closer look at the process with some examples of the finished product
This case study shows the results clients see with this one-team approach
Custom visuals provide attractive results
After a week of A/B testing plain text articles and those with feature graphics, we compared the articles’ performance – and the impact was obvious. Articles with custom graphics had:
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54% lower bounce rate & 58% lower exit rate
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225% longer visit durations
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Viewers looked at 156% more pages per visit
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6% higher conversion rate
Given the initial results generated by a small sample of articles with visual content, we strongly recommend this client make feature graphics part of their ongoing content strategy with Brafton.
Questions on how your brand can work these into your content marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.
