As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Most people are very visual and motivated by photos. This is an area that is under-utilised by most businesses when marketing online.
Let’s pick something obvious. If you do a search on Google for “Cowboy Hats”, you’ll get the normal list of web page links but now you may also see a few images in the results. This is a relatively new thing called “Universal Search Results”. It is Google showing results from a variety of different areas such as their image search, YouTube, known authors, map locations and many more.
Universal Search on Google now shows extra results from different mediums, such as photos, video and author results. These appear amongst normal website links.
However, all sorts of products could benefit from online marketing using images. Take a really specialist area, such as Disability Aids. Someone looking for baths for people with disabilities have a very specific problem of accessibility that only a minority of bath manufacturers provide a solution for. Rather than searching endlessly through individual websites for “disabled baths” or some similar search, a user can now go to Google Image search and view images for a particular search across many websites all on one page.
If you look at the top of the screen on a normal Google search for “Disability Bath”, you will see a link at the top, or on the left, that says “images”. Click on that and it shows all the best image results instead of links to websites. Clicking on the pictures will display a larger image and also take you to the web page. If you’re selling a very visual product like shoes or jewellery, or even something like a bath for disabled people, this can funnel visitors to your website in a way you may not have thought of before.
A Google image search for disability baths showing a collection of photos from a whole range of websites.
Some social media webites like Facebook are also very visual and lend themselves to the sharing of images. Displayed in the right way, it is possible for an image to go “viral” and be distributed to far more people than you may be able to target directly. Another social website that is becoming increasingly popular is Pinterest.
Pinterest is a kind of online “pinboard” where users pin images that they like to their own board, that can be shared with other people. This works especially well for products and services like fashion, craft, cooking, interior design, photography and make-up. Pinterest users are overwhelmingly female at around 68% as at May 2012. They are also likely to have a higher than average household income and spend more when they make a purchase.
A Pinterest search for “disabled bath” shows photos that other Pinterest members have uploaded because they recommend them to other people.
Online marketing with images can be an excellent way of creating a whole new collection of website links that potential customers can find your products through. When building your website and working on the SEO for your website, the way the images are inserted will have a significant effect on how highly your images rank in search engine results. Discuss this with your web designer to see how aware they are of this area of internet marketing.
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