Visualy and Brain

High quality visual content can have a major impact on your conversion funnel. From studying brain scans to tracking eye movements, researchers have discovered that visual content is simply processed differently than text. Visuals communicate more information, more effectively.

Part physiology and part art, the reasons for this reality are varied. What it means is that no matter where you market your products or services—from websites to billboards to print—including visuals should be a core tactic your communications strategy. In this post, we’ll explore a few principles driven by statistics that help us understand why visuals are such a big driver for sales and content marketing.

Photos and videos appeal to our brains

Let’s get technical for a moment and acknowledge the fact that we’re built to process visual cues far better than text-based ones. Quoting from a Nieman Reports interview with Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University:

“Processing print isn’t something the human brain was built for. The printed word is a human artifact. It’s very convenient and it’s worked very well for us for 5,000 years, but it’s an invention of human beings. By contrast Mother Nature has built into our brain our ability to see the visual world and interpret it. Even the spoken language is much more a given biologically than reading written language.”

That reality means photos, videos, and related tech gadgets play well with human audiences overall—not just humans in a specific demographic. Another study, by 3M, put this observation in more measurable terms, finding that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Further, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.

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