The old adage “a picture’s worth a thousand words” continues to hold true.
It's true whether you’re looking at the sales and marketing world or interoffice communication. The benefit of visual content is easy to see, as pictures are processed 60,000 times faster than text alone. Quick communication is essential for engaging customers, explaining complex concepts and reporting project success. Adding visuals to more than your sales and marketing assets helps improve productivity and efficiency across the board.
How Visual Content Saves Time
A momentary glance at a picture will provide an idea of what’s going on, but getting the same comprehension through text takes significantly longer. While pictures won’t entirely replace text in any area of your business, adding visual content to your operations helps create a more efficient workflow.
Understanding data trends in the retail industry becomes much easier when there are visuals backing up data insights. Instead of spending a half-hour reading over a data sheet or report, you can take a minute to examine an infographic reporting the information. While infographics may be seen as a B2C tool, 39 percent of B2B marketers share infographics across their social networks for sales and communication purposes.
For field-based employees, it’s even more essential to save time between presenting the information and creating a larger understanding. Presentations using visual content are 43 percent more effective at convincing people to take a specific course of action, such as making merchandise changes or altering a retail execution strategy. Photos eliminate the need for an extensive explanation of what the data indicates. The picture tells the whole story, with some assistance from the field team.
Eliminate Confusion Through Brand Consistency
Pictures also create brand consistency and cut down on confusion when multiple field team employees have differing viewpoints. When the field team creates a text description, they have varying ways of explaining what’s going on, such as different terminology and levels of detail. These explanations may not properly convey the message or use language that is not consistent with your overall brand voice.
By using visual aids, employees have a unified voice and message to create brand consistency and eliminate the potential for confusion. Pictures communicate more effectively than words, especially for quickly expressing key concepts.
Business Agility Through Pictures
Businesses that adapt to quickly-changing situations improve their agility and stay ahead of the competition. If field reps take too much time communicating the need for changes to the rest of the team or the home office, the window of opportunity may be lost. Real-time data represents the opportunity for field teams to modify or completely change their strategy without wasting time going back to headquarters.
Pictures and other visual content help convey the information necessitating the change and present a unified message to clear up any confusion between the team and other departments. It only takes a minute for another department to look at a picture and understand what the field team is trying to accomplish.
