It’s always been said that a picture can paint a thousand words, but if you are a manufacturing business that produces very technical products or solutions, visual communication can be crucial for prospective customers.
You may know that your product is the best out of your competitors, or can have a positive impact on your customers business, but trying to explain that in marketing or on a website can sometimes be difficult. That’s where good visuals come in.
Why it’s important more now than ever
When someone is making a decision, there are a lot of factors that people take into account, but if they can’t find the answer straight away or don’t understand, they are likely to move on quickly.
As a whole, people’s attention spans are reducing. Over the last 20 years, attention spans have dropped to their lowest, averaging at about 47 seconds. So imagine you only have 47 seconds to get across why someone should invest in your products? That could be a hard task if you start getting technical.
If you’re not explaining yourself clearly, a person who doesn’t understand may just start looking for another company, even if your business is the best. You can compare so many more suppliers now, using search engines or even AI to narrow down the search.
Another thing to remember is not everyone in the buying process is technical. Someone may have been tasked to find a better or cheaper alternative without fully understanding the technical aspects of what they are looking for.
So how can you best sell what you do?
Visuals can help simplify technical information
According to Canva’s Visual Impact Report, visual content sparks memory coding 74% faster than dull content and 91% of people believe visuals are better than text.
Trying to explain your products using imagery, videos or infographics can help potential clients understand what you do in a more engaging way.
Images
Using images of your products or services in action can help people visualise what they actually do. For example, if you sell software, you could do mockups of it on a computer screen so people can see what it looks like. Or if you have a physical product, showing existing customers using it or your team using it gives a much better visual that trying to explain just using text.
Having your own photography rather than AI or stock imagery also helps showcase your products are real. Stock imagery is really useful, but can be a bit vague or lack the personality of companies with their own photography.
Videos
Do you have someone in your business who can explain what you do really well and with passion? Getting that person in front of a camera or doing a voiceover to a video can be a really engaging and much better way to explain than just a large paragraph of text. Videos of your products in action or an explanation of your business works great on websites and especially on social media.
For example, if you have technical specifications for products, why not create a small video giving an overview of the basics, which then directs people to the datasheets for more information.
Infographics
Do you have a lot of statistics to support your work? Rather than just listing them out, having a mix of visual graphs, icons or graphics and comparison tables draw attention to the importance of this information.
If you have key USPs, you could list these on your website with images or icons rather than just bullet points. Or if you have an impact report with some key statistics, you could pull these out into an infographic for social imagery.
Clarity can speed up decision making
If you can get to a point where you can clearly explain what you do, what your solution is for someone and why they should work with you, decision making can become much quicker. A potential customer won’t look at your website and have more questions than when they started or get bored looking at all the complicated information and switch off.
This also works for printed materials or online brochures or catalogues. If you send out a document which is very word heavy, not styled correctly or doesn’t have many visuals, it can be hard to take that information in. If you show this to someone who knows nothing about your business, they might not be engaged enough to want to know more.
Here’s what NOT to do
Dense text
Large paragraphs of text without breaks or hierarchy can put people off reading it. Especially in PDFs or on websites. If you wrote what you could say in a 2 minute video as a block of text, it could end up being huge.
Over use generic stock and AI imagery
Using imagery, videos and infographics will help your visual communication, but you need to make sure you’re using the right imagery. To explain your technical products or services, you’re best using your own imagery. If you start using generic imagery that doesn’t show off your products or looks too ‘stocky’, you could give off the wrong impression. Despite AI images getting better, most people can still spot them (especially the bad ones). If you’re trying to show off your product, such as a specific machine or tool, using an AI image of it makes it look like it doesn’t actually exist.
Make your visuals complicated
Visuals are great if they are clear and easy to understand. If you start to make them complicated, you could end up confusing people more. Before starting with videos, diagrams or infographics, think about what clients need to know, the USPs and how this would benefit someone. Then start to think about how you could show this visually. Don’t over complicate it for no reason.
Do you have a technical business that would benefit from better visual communication?
We specialise in helping technical businesses to simplify their messaging and make it clear what they offer. Contact us for more information.