With everyone yelling their marketing messages all over the place, it’s become easy for customers to simply ignore it all. 

To get their attention, you have to entertain them. How do you entertain them? Visually.

Visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text, so in our world of short-attention spans, the phrase “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” has never been more true. There are plenty of ways to capture the attention of your current and potential customers using digital images.

• Instagram is a photo & video-sharing app that has more than 300 million users who are sharing images and videos with each other daily.
• Pinterest is another app with a heavy focus on visuals. It’s more than 70 million users share links to articles, websites, recipes, etc. with a heavy focus on images. Cara recently wrote a post about using Pinterest as a small business.
• YouTube has become one of the most popular websites in the world with it’s video sharing capabilities. Lisa recently talked about using YouTube on our blog.

So how can you use these tools to entertain your customers? Posting an image of your ad won’t cut it. You’ll need interesting content. Behind-the-scenes pictures, employees having fun, doing funny things with product in the store… the focus is on entertaining, not selling, so have some fun! Customers will think of your store positively & the content will keep your brand in their minds. If they like your content, they’ll share it with their friends. Those friends will then look into your store online to learn more about it and you’ll have new brand ambassadors before you know it.

Other ways you can use images to entertain:

• Emoji: An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc., in electronic communication. A prime example is a smiley face icon. They’re used frequently in social media posts, text messages and in emails.
• Gif: Animated gifs are fun little images that have also taken the internet by storm. There’s an ongoing debate how to pronounce the word. The guy who invented the term pronounces it like JIF the peanut butter, but I’m on team gif as in “gift.” Gifs are an image type that support animations, so your images can move. They’re kind of like a short video without the sound. Unfortunately, Facebook currently doesn’t support animated gifs. Twitter, however, is an excellent place to share them. Here are some example gifs:

      

How long have you been looking at those two gifs? See? They have the power to capture the attention of your audience.