Perks of Visuals to Boost Online User Engagement During Valentine’s
Valentine’s Day is special for many, so what’s new? The fact that the Internet has given great opportunities to businesses to reach more customers around the world. It has also given marketers and designers the chance to excessively engage with users through their written and visual creativity. Entrepreneurs can thus expect a valuable return on investment (ROI) on such special occasions.
A form of ROI is online user-engagement, but this doesn’t simply mean the “likes” and the “shares” your content gets. True engagement is when:
- Customers prefer your brand over others in the pool
- People don’t simply click, they buy your products too
- Shares and likes convert to greater brand recognition
The definition of user engagement changes depending on the kind of business, and the stage of growth it’s at. For example, a blogger who just started off will want more social media shares and comments so that she can apply for Google AdSense. On the other hand, a large company like amazon.com wants people to purchase products from its website.
Online Customer Buying Habits
Know that, Valentine’s Day shoppers spend 30% of their Valentines budget online. So to make a successful strategy for your business to customer communication (B2C), it’s necessary that marketers and entrepreneurs understand the changing buying habits of people during this month.
Below is a table that shows the percentage of Valentine’s Day shopping budget spent on usually bought items.
| Item | (%) of total Valentine’s Day budget |
| Candy | 47.5 |
| Flowers | 34.3 |
| Cards | 52.1 |
| Jewelry | 17.3 |
| Dining / Eating Out | 34.6 |
| Clothing | 14.4 |
| Gift Cards | 12.6 |
| Other Gifts | 11.2 |
As you can see from the above cards and candies are bought the most. Also, couples search for dining options in online local directories. And as most women expect flowers on this day, 20% of total flower transaction happens on Valentine’s Day.
Knowing all this, how do you attract customers online?
The Perks of Visuals in Online Marketing
“The trend towards visuals in inescapable”, says Jay Baer. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google Plus are amazing social media websites for image-based marketing. YouTube is where all the content comes live via entertaining and interactive videos. He continues, “…everything that people are paying attention to has pictures and videos.” So “if your brand doesn’t have a visual content strategy, you better get one and fast.”
Benefits of visuals in marketing:
- Images and videos are quicker at grabbing target audience attention
- Human brain processes visuals 60,000 x faster than text
- Visuals generate more engagement on your blog and/or website
- Viral visual content brings a lot of inbound links from other web pages
- Visuals help increase followers and subscribers on your website
- Data becomes attractive through visual design elements
- Images, videos, illustrations help retain online users for a longer time
Find below 20 valentines day visuals to boost online user-engagement. Tell us if we’ve missed any.
