Introduction
People are consuming more and more content every day, as the influence of social media grows globally. And platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are heavily filled with visuals as it a key element contributing to their popularity.
And about eCommerce, it is an implied statement that “Show, don’t tell”. As consumers like to believe and trust what they can see as it is with brick-and-mortar stores.
And as an eCommerce store, this is a challenge to create striking visual elements to support products and services to provide a superlative consumer experience like in the brick-and-mortar stores.
Hence, Visual commerce is the solution to these problems for Commerce stores.
Let’s first understand what is Visual Commerce.
Visual commerce: The explanation
Visual commerce in its true sense is about using strong and tempting visuals like images, videos, gif, 360-degree views, close shots, and infographics that entice users to engage and convert into customers by augmenting user’s shopping and browsing experience.
The traits of visual commerce rely on authentic user-generated content, artistic product photos & videos, video reviews & product guides, and augmented reality.
These are necessary as users hunt for visual cues in the digital commerce environment to establish trust, examine authenticity, and explore the physical attributes of the products.
Marketers have realized the importance of visual commerce tools in influencing a user’s buying behavior.
We have gathered some reasons as to why it is an important marketing tool.
- Interaction and engagement
Consumers are allured by visuals like images, videos or infographics, and content with visual aid garners more likes, shares, and comments. People love to interact with visuals.
Similarly, content that contains visuals gains 94% higher views as a person can process visual content more prominently such as product descriptions, infographics, and advertising. Also, the visuals are more expressive and this statement “A picture is worth a thousand words” fits perfectly here.
Attractive images, creative infographics, and high-quality videos can all draw customers’ attention to a product or business itself. All this entices the consumers to interact and engage with content pushed by businesses garnering better conversions.
- Shoppable Posts
Shoppable posts are the posts that are tagged with a buying option to the products shown in the photo or video. Shoppable posts contain a link and when you click to buy a product, it redirects you to the concerned eCommerce platform.
The shoppable posts have been a great success among users and more importantly to the businesses. The posts provide a better understanding of the products, display real-life use, visual appeal, easy access, and real-time buying opportunity.
Real-time buying is crucial as many people come across products through visuals and are interested in purchasing but the unavailability of instant purchase option kills this potential conversion.
Besides, Shoppable posts can be integrated into your website by creating a shoppable wall to make it more visually appealing and engaging with enhanced sellable potential.
- Discoverability
How negative it would be for a marketer and the business, where they have a great product but people are not aware of it or can’t find it. This would put all the investments and efforts in vain.
Visual commerce makes your product/offerings more easily discoverable as people tend to engage and explore visual content more than the links and texts and to support this Jeffbullas.com states that videos are shared 1200% more than texts & links whereas Photos are liked 200% more than text content.
Considering these facts and the notion that consumers won’t visit your website daily so, by putting out visuals with your product/offerings plug will make it easier for the audience to engage and interact with.
- User-generated content
User-generated content provides much required intangible value addition to any business, especially in the digital environment and that value is social proof. Consumers always have concerns such as security, inauthenticity, lack of trust, and dissimilarity in what’s shown and what’s delivered.
User-generated content is extremely advantageous to marketers as it saves them the hassle of creating and designing content for promotion. UGC will be created by your customers and it will be more authentic, expressive, realistic, and cost-effective.
Promoting user-generated content has threefold advantages where firstly, you don’t have to invest in creating content as a business.
Secondly, it makes the customers feel rewarded and valued as their visual content is being re-marketed by the business resulting in establishing a relationship and loyalty.
Finally, the audience will see it as social proof for your business and that would result in higher engagement and conversions leading to growing revenue and customer base.
- Average time spent
Visuals draw better engagement from users and this results in more time being spent on your website. But the question here could be how is that advantageous to your business?
Well! We all know google has a ranking system for websites that decides which results to show on the first page and in what order. And key metrics to decide that are Dwell time (time spent on the website), Bounce rate, engagement, etc.
So, the more a user will spend time on your website the better your rankings will be on google’s search engine results page. As a 7th organic ranked result on the first page of google search will only receive 3.5% search traffic (digitalsynopsis.com) and it diminishes as we go further to the next pages.
The future of Visual commerce
The way people are consuming visual content and the growth of online commerce has made the borders wispy between shopping and browsing over the internet.
Visual aid has become an essential element of digital commerce environment for social proof, visual attraction, higher engagement, and enhanced conversions as it influences consumer’s shopping behavior.
It is evident that in future successful marketing campaigns will be highly reliable on using creative graphics, integration of 360-degree view, augmented or Virtual-reality, gamification through images & videos, re-sharing of User-generated photos & videos and most essentially integrating shoppable posts to provide a superior consumer experience.