Robert: Welcome to the Ecommerce Marketing podcast. Today’s guest is Vishal Pindoriya. He is a Senior Marketing Analyst at Sendible, and today we are going to be talking about the importance of visual communication in your social media marketing, because using the correct visual communication can actually increase your reach, engagement, and your sales. Welcome to the Ecommerce Marketing Podcast, Vishal.
Vishal: Hi, thanks for having me.
Robert: It’s great having you. I’m excited about this topic. But even before we dive into the topic, if you can just tell us what you do as a Senior Marketing Analyst at Sendible and also what Sendible is?
Vishal: So I basically manage all of the marketing activities at Sendible. And Sendible basically is a social media management software, and that enables you to schedule out messages, monitor activity on social media, measure your ROI for social media, and also see—also gain insights into your customer’s activities online and what they’re interested in.
Robert: Okay, so that’s very good as far as tools for using in social media marketing. And I guess that’s why you wrote about this article on how you can use visual communication to increase your reach. So, first of all, what do you mean when you say “visual communication” in social media marketing?
Vishal: So visual communication essentially is any image or video that you place online. So it could be your cover photo on Facebook, it could just be images that you post out to your feed or to your audiences online. It’s just anything that entices a customer to go to a particular page and then gain interaction and ultimately conversion.
Robert: Okay, so why should businesses care about choosing images and video in their social media marketing?
Vishal: Uhm, images and visual—video in particular—has a huge pull on social media audiences. 93% of communication is non-verbal. Presentations with visual aids are 43% more persuasive that those without, and graphics also affect us cognitively and emotionally. You can invoke particular emotion if you have a particular graphic, and that may appeal to some audiences. And also, visuals actually are processed by our brains over sixty thousand times faster than text. So if you can imagine, if you’re scrolling through a Facebook newsfeed, you’re more likely to pick up visual images than text.
Robert: Wow. That is very interesting. 93% of all communication is non-verbal?
Vishal: Yep.
Robert: Wow. So I guess that ties in with my next question, which was why do you need to use images or why is using images important? I guess since 93% percent of the communication is not verbal, you want to use images because you’re probably going to get the attention of your target audience. Is it that you’re getting their attention? Or what is it about images in social media marketing that’s going to increase your sales and your engagement?
Vishal: I think, in modern times especially, people’s attention spans have gotten massively shorter. And this is particularly due to things such as social media and content overload, and just loads of information’s out there in the social media space for people to digest. So I think images are playing a more important role in trying to get people into a particular website or gain a particular emotional reaction to a particular image, so they connect and click through to a website.
Robert: Okay, and—I guess, the question is a lot of businesses, marketers, they’ve already had it. They’ve had it before, it’s important to use images, you need to use images, but at the same time, there’s a lot of social media platforms. I mean there’s a lot of platforms out there but there’s specific platforms where you’ve seen having visual communication, having images, having videos increases your conversions.
Vishal: I would say particularly Pinterest, especially if you’re selling physical goods online. It’s increasingly important to be on Pinterest and share all of those images on there, because it’s becoming more of an ecommerce virtual shop window for your small business. Sites such as Instagram, they are quite useful in showing your company culture, and Google+ helps build your SEO. They’re all—if you look at all of the social media sites and all of the user interfaces, majority of the screen’s taken up by images. So I would say Pinterest especially, Instagram is a growing medium, especially to display your company culture, and Google+, and of course Facebook is always there.
Robert: And how do they rank against each other? Like is Instagram—does it have a higher conversion or engagement compared to these other social networks or is it Google+ that has a higher one? Which one comes first and is that even important?
Vishal: I would say it is important. I would say Facebook and Pinterest, they would be at the top two. Instagram is more…let’s say more relaxed based. People are scrolling through and not really engaging in the content or expect to have a conversion. But I would way with Pinterest and Facebook, people are a bit more active online and people are actually searching for things online. So, especially with Pinterest and Facebook. Google+, it still exists. But I would say Google+ is more focused towards building the SEO and helping you within your search ranking. So if people are searching for your product on Google, it will appear on the right hand side with the extended search algorithms with anything that you do post on a particular linked Google+ page.
Robert: Okay, so probably you would advise businesses to still use multiple platforms. So they can still find ways to use Instagram, Facebook, and Google+ at the same time. They necessarily don’t have to stick to just one because maybe having, you know, a diversified marketing strategy, or just having multiple marketing channels in social media, is probably good for the business.
Vishal: Yeah. I would say so. I’d say different social networks show a different face to your brand. So you can engage with people on Pinterest in one manner, but you can also engage with them in a completely different manner on Instagram. So it depends what you’re looking for and what types of audiences you want to attract.
Robert: Okay, so we get—we now get that it’s very important to have visuals, have images, have video in your social media, but are there specific rules? Or can you just go on social media and just start choosing all sorts of images, all sorts of video—is there specific template or rules that you need to follow when you’re doing this?
Vishal: I would say the rules come sort of in two-fold. So one is the image of the content, does is align correctly with your brand? Does it convey the message that you want it to deliver? Is your logo or any identifiers places on the image? I would say that if you’re uploading an image online or posting it to Facebook, you always brand that image with your company’s logo or a key identified of your company. Because if that image is then shared across to other creation accounts, your branding is still present. So that then just gets carried forward.
I would also say that is the image sized to the correct dimensions for optimal impact? So different social networks have different sized thumbnails, and if you are posting to different social networks, it’s a good idea to have multiple versions or different sized images with the ideal dimensions of your network. You can actually find a sizing guide on our blog, sendible.com/insights, which lets you know the correct dimensions of each of the social networks. The correct sizes that you can then post out to those multiple networks.
Robert: Okay, and since you mentioned earlier that 93% of communication is non-verbal, do fonts fall into this when it comes to visual communication?
Vishal: Yeah, I would say so. It’s a manner in which you’re trying to interact with them, so you could just have, let’s say Comic Sans, a playful font, or a more impactful font with a bold lettering. It all plays an impacts.
Robert: okay. And are there any tools that you could use when it comes to using images in social media?
Vishal: Well, Sendible is great for images. We actually have an integration with a leading web-based, graphic designed tool Canva, and that basically enables you to use quite visually stunning images that could be imported directly into Sendible and then schedules to go out. We also have integrations with cloud integrations like Dropbox or Google Drive, so you could access images easily. But I would say if you are using a web-based tool, you can use Canva, which will create the images for you. It’s a drag and drop interface, which you can drag and drop your Lego into it or any of the stock images that they do sell you. And if you don’t use a web-based tool, I would say use Photoshop. Photoshop is your key to actually saving your images correctly and branding your images as well.
Robert: So, explain a little bit more about Canva. What is Canva? How can people access that?
Vishal: So Canva is its own separate application, but Sendible has integrated into it. And it’s basically Photoshop for your web browser. So you can drag an image onto a template. You can arrange it with different, multiple images, or you can put text or your logo onto the images and have them imported into Sendible to go out.
Robert: Okay, and Canva, that’s spelled C-A-N-V-A?
Vishal: Yep. That’s correct.
Robert: Okay, Canva. Oaky, so, yeah, thanks Vishal for coming on. You’ve provided a lot of information and you’ve just shown us how images and visuals and video are actually very important in your social media marketing, maybe even generally in your whole marketing. Just because, as you mentioned earlier, that 93% of all communication is non-verbal.
How can people reach you, find out about Sendible, learn about Sendible, use Sendible? If you can just provide that information.
Vishal: So if you head over to sendible.com, you can then start a free thirty-day trial of our software, and that will just basically enable you to schedule, monitor, measure and grow your activity online through our various automation tools. So sendible.com and you can also request a demo there. Every Wednesday, we also have webinars, which one of our sales advisors goes through an hour long tutorial of how to use the software.
Robert: Okay. And are you on Twitter?
Vishal: Yep. You can reach Sendible at @sendible, and myself @VishalPindoriya.
Robert: Okay, Vishal, is there any other thing you’d like to say about images, visual communication? Is there one last thing you’d like to share?
Vishal: I would just say go through it, send—you will see a spike in your social media activity the moment you start posting relevant images for your audience.
Robert: Okay, that’s great. Again, like Vishal just shared, 93% of communication is non-verbal so all businesses out there should go ahead and try to test, use images, with the goal of increasing their sales, engagements. So go ahead and try it. Thanks, Vishal, for coming on, and we’ll talk to you later.