You might think of the photos and graphics on your website as mere set-dressing—and that’s certainly all they will be if you fill your site with stock photos and unmemorable imagery. But how your site looks is far more important than you imagine. Customers don’t just want to browse websites—they want to experience them.
Photos can help you:
- Easily explain complex information.
- Communicate ideas quickly and memorably to your audience.
- Generate more social media shares.
- Drive traffic to your site from search engines.
Clearly, powerful imagery should play an integral role in your B2B strategy. But that’s only possible if your photos are up to the task of boosting your site’s conversion. In this write-up, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about growing your traffic and brand presence with images.
But first, let’s explore some statistics about images…
The Power of Images in Driving Engagement
In 2015, Buzzsumo took a deep dive into the world of photo content and its impact on engagement, traffic, and shares. What they found should be enough to make you rabid about the power of imagery and what it can bring to your business. Consider the following stats:
- Articles that include images every 75-100 words get twice as many shares as content without images.
- Facebook posts with images receive 2.3x the engagement than posts without visuals.
- Tweets with visual summary cards receive 3x the engagement.
- Picture list posts are simple and contain relatively written content but receive massive shares and engagement.
In short, images are critical to creating engaging, shareable, memorable content—and can help you appeal to visitors with relatively low effort.
Next, we’ll look at 6 proven ways to boost your site conversion using images intelligently.
How to Boost Your Website Conversion Using Images
Tip #1—Appeal to emotions
People usually invest for emotional reasons. If you can make prospects feel confident about your services or attached to your products, even subconsciously, they’ll be much more likely to buy. For instance, if you’re selling couches to a business, using images which only show the furniture itself in a void won’t connect with your buyers emotionally. However, if you include photos which show people relaxing on those same couches, you are illustrating the effect of the product, promising that it will bring comfort and appeal to any space.
Tip #2—Create a mascot
This might seem like a funny suggestion, but site mascots can be great for branding. They help solidify and humanize your brand in the mind of your visitors. But how does a cartoon help a B2B platform convert better? Here are a few ways:
- They solidify your marketing motif.
- They have a striking branding effect.
- It’s easy to create an emotional impact.
Ensure that the mascot you choose communicates well with your audience and appeals to them, as the wrong mascot can be alienating.
Tip #3—Add a human touch
Similar to the idea of using a mascot to humanize your brand and capture emotions, you should consider including models to illustrate your website as much as possible. This can help your visitors see themselves and their customers in the narrative of your sales pitch, making it feel more real and relatable. However, a word of caution: this is not the place for over-edited or heavily stylized photos; your goal should be to have models that look natural to avoid distracting your buyers from your products. Tools like autoRetouch allow for natural retouching of model photos without the risk of overdoing it. Making this small but relevant change can boost your site conversion by 85%.
Tip #4—Think outside the box
While you can do plenty of work to make sure that your brand “voice” is unique, it’s much easier to make sure you stand out from the crowd with a distinct visual identity. Make your website memorable by incorporating new techniques that display your products in interesting ways. For example, did you know that using a 360° spin effect on your product photos can boost conversion from 5% to 40%?
Tip #5—Utilize testimonials
93% of customers say they read reviews online before making a purchase, and reviews on average lead to an 18% boost in sales. Why? Well, most people want a second opinion before they can feel confident in their purchases. When they see other happy customers, it makes them far more likely to trust your products. You can harness this interest in reviews even more by showing your visitors how pleased other buyers have been with your products and creating visual testimonials to boost your conversion rates.
Tip #6—Stop using stock photos
Yes, they’re convenient. Yes, they’re affordable. There are many reasons why marketers reach for stock photos when they need to fill a visual gap in their website—but there are just as many reasons not to. Number one? By necessity, stock photos aren’t unique to your brand. There’s always a chance your visitors will have seen them elsewhere or even used the same images themselves when building a website, which will make it obvious that you’re leaning on generic photos to save a buck. Always assume your audience is connected and educated and will not see stock photos as professional or compelling. If you need to use stock photos, select them intelligently and stay away from anything that looks mundane or overdone. However, wherever possible, we suggest investing your time in the original photography.
Bottom Line
By building a powerful visual strategy for your B2B brand, you are speaking to your audience in multiple languages—both textual and visual—and helping to make them understand the value of your products on a more instinctive and subconscious level than with words alone. You can use unique visuals to help yourself stand out from the crowd or, conversely, doom yourself to a generic web presence with stock photos. We recommend always testing modifications to your strategy to see what speaks best to your customers and get the maximum potential out of your B2B network.