In today’s digital world, private and independent schools face tough competition in attracting attention from potential students and their families. To stand out from the crowd, it’s crucial to make the most of marketing strategies that can you help drive traffic to your school’s website.
In the sea of sameness and endless information, it can be difficult to stand out. While this is challenging, it’s not impossible to target your ideal student and family. One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your school blog is by incorporating visual content into your posts.
In this article, I will be discussing what visual content is and how it can help you drive traffic to your school’s website.
What is Visual Content
In the world of digital marketing, as a private school administrator, you are always looking for ways to stand out and get noticed online. One effective way to do this is by incorporating visual content into your blog posts. Visual content refers to things like images, videos, infographics, and more. These make your blogs more attractive and appealing to the eye, which can help keep visitors on your site longer. This, in turn, can improve your search engine rankings.
Types of Visual Content for Blogs
Private schools can use many types of visual content to attract more traffic to their blog.
- Data-driven visuals
- Animations
- GIFs
- Videos
- Screenshots
- Illustrations
- Video testimonials
- Video Tours or 3D walkthroughs
Visual content provides a great brand personality, authenticity, and brand awareness. It’s essential to keep your brand personality and elements like colors and fonts consistent when creating visual content. This will help strengthen your brand’s authenticity and awareness. In this article, I will explain why visual content is important for boosting traffic to your blog and give you practical tips for using it in your content strategy.
Let’s get started!
Why Content Marketing is Essential
The importance of content marketing cannot be overstated. By creating valuable and engaging content, you can attract three times more traffic than paid search. Once you have built an audience, you simply need to focus on keeping them engaged with your blog by producing irresistible content.
A visual representation of this can be seen in the image below.
Interesting Facts
Here are some interesting statistics about why most blogs and marketers are pumping out huge amounts of content daily and how content marketing is crucial for boosting traffic;
- Nearly 7 out of 10 people always read content to create awareness about brands
- Almost 43% of marketers claim that they use visual content for blogs or landing pages
- 8 out of 10 of readers appreciate businesses that create customized content
How Visual Content Can Boost Traffic to Your Private School’s Blog
Captivates the Student and Their Families’ Attention
Visual content can play a big part in attracting a student and their parent’s attention and bringing more traffic to your school blog. Even the top private schools need to grab the attention of students and their families with visually appealing content, as it can help showcase their programs and elite education opportunities in a more memorable way, which can lead to increased enrollment. Images, video content, infographics, and other visual elements can break up long blocks of text, making your school’s blog more engaging and visually appealing. You can keep students and their families interested in the blog post longer, encourage them to explore more of your content and have them share your posts with others when you use visual content correctly.
Depending on your school’s programs and services, there are many ways to incorporate visual elements into your private school blog.
You can use the following:
- high-quality images that complement your written content
- create infographics to visually represent data
- embed videos
- humor to add a touch of fun
Research from 3M shows that our brains can process visual information up to 60,000 times faster than text. (Souce: 3M Meeting Guide - 1997)
Example: This blog image about private school enrollment uses a visually appealing featured image that draws in the reader and sets the tone for the content.
Enhances Readability
Visual content can greatly enhance your blog’s readability and attract more traffic to your private school’s website. It helps students and their families understand the information more quickly and easily and can also help make your content more shareable on social media.
Students and their families are more likely to engage with a blog post with great visuals, which is also easy to read. This is especially important since most students and their parents tend to skim content online, so using visual content can help draw their attention to important points.
Adding images, videos, or even simple bullet points can create natural stopping points for the reader’s eyes and help them focus on the key points of the content. According to Jeff Bullas, blog posts with images, screenshots, or videos receive 94% more views than those without. So, even if you have a blog about private school-related topics, make sure to use visuals to break up paragraphs and make it easier for your visitors reading your blogs.
This blog post from Social Media Examiner uses images to break up the text and make the content more visually appealing.
Visual Content Increases Engagement
Visual content is a powerful tool to increase engagement and boost traffic to your private school’s blog. Visuals are more appealing and easier to consume than plain text. They can also help convey complex ideas and information in a more accessible way.
Being highly visual creatures, humans respond to visual information faster and more effectively than text. So, it only makes sense that incorporating eye-catching images, videos, infographics, and other visual elements into your blog posts can grab your students and their families’ attention and keep them engaged. According to HubSpot, almost 5 out of 10 marketers prefer using visual content on their blogs.
By including visually appealing content like images, videos, and infographics, you can make your blog more accessible and engaging for your student and their families. Creating high-quality visual content can help you grow your audience and keep them coming back for more.
Visual Content Can Make Your Blog More Accessible and Appealing
Incorporating visual content into your blog can greatly enhance the user experience and improve your search engine rankings. When your parents or students are presented with visually appealing and relevant content, they are more likely to stay on your site longer, consume more information, and return for more.
Optimizing your visual content, such as images and videos, with relevant alternate text (alt tags), captions, and file names, can help search engines better understand the context of your content. This can lead to higher search engine rankings for relevant keywords, increasing the visibility of your blog.
Additionally, when other websites and blogs use your visual content (with proper attribution), it can generate valuable backlinks to your site. These backlinks signal to search engines that your blog is a trustworthy source of information, which can further improve your search rankings.
For instance, a blog post about “The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Infographics” that includes eye-catching infographics to explain complex marketing concepts can receive many social shares and rank on the first page of Google for the keyword “marketing with infographics.”
Expands Social Media Reach
Visual content makes it more likely that people will share your blog post with others on social media. People like to show others things that they find valuable. When your blog post looks good and is eye-catching, people are more likely to share it with their followers. This way, your post reaches a bigger audience and could get more likes, comments, and followers.
Moreover, social media algorithms usually give priority to posts with visual content because they tend to get more engagement. This means that including visual content in your blog post can increase the visibility of your post on social media and make it more likely that people will see and engage with it.
You can also reach more of your target audience on social media by sharing your visually enhanced blog posts directly with those who are most likely to be interested in your content. By choosing the right link preview for your blog post, you can encourage more potential students or their parents to visit your site. This strategy can help you increase both your traffic and lead generation efforts, making it a double win for your marketing team.
Visual Content Boosts Dwell on Site
Visual content makes information more relatable, which means people spend more time on the website and engage more with the content. This leads to an improvement in the time people spend on the site, encouraging them to come back for more.
Creating visually appealing content, like videos, can also lead to more clicks. You can also use the same video content for paid promotions on social media to reach a larger audience.
For instance, if your blog post talks about school culture or curriculum and instruction, you can add a video showing that. You could also include video testimonials from current or past students and their families.
Summing Up!
The importance of visual content in attracting more visitors to your private school’s blog cannot be overemphasized. By offering relevant and useful visual content, you can increase the chances of your blog being shared on social media, drawing in more students and their families and boosting traffic to your website if you’re looking to grow your private school’s blog and reach a wider audience of students and their parents. It’s time to start investing in visual content and see your traffic soar! Contact me today for a free consultation and see how I and everyone at Cube Creative Design can help you and your school grow.
