There’s no doubt about it: we live in a visual, digital culture that is passionate about consuming images, videos, and art. Here’s what you need to know about visual commerce – and why you should be harnessing its power – if you want your brand to succeed in today’s marketplace.

What is Visual Commerce?

Visual commerce is any image-based technique a brand may use to convert customers. User-generated photos, virtual dressing rooms, product videos, and curated customer-created social media content would all fall into the category of visual commerce. Visual sells, as evidenced by these statistics:

• Online content that includes images produces 650 percent more engagement than text-only posts
• Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites, and 150 percent more retweets than those without
• Images are amazing for customer retention. When people hear information, they remember only 10 percent of it three days later, yet when they see it, they retain 65 percent of it
• One-third of all online activity is spent watching videos

What is a Visual Commerce Platform?

With a visual commerce platform, you can easily manage your visual content, post it across the web, edit it, curate it, and analyze key metrics. With a variety of visual strategies to take advantage of, platforms to use, and visual content to share, managing your brand’s visual commerce can be overwhelming. This platform simplifies the process and gives you more control over your content, providing features such as:

• Flexible photo uploading
• Image display options
• Video sourcing from Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks
• Optimization of content with a smart ranking algorithm
• Image hot spots
• A/B testing
• Omni-channel functionality
• Reporting and analytics
• Cloud storage
• …and lots more

Why Should You Use It?

A visual commerce platform not only makes your job easier, but it also will help convert your prospects into paying customers. Here are a few ways one can increase your conversion rate.

People Love Visual Content

As evidenced by the stats above, visual content is how and where Internet users are spending their time. For example, 500 million of Instagram’s more than 800 million users are active on the platform every day. If you want to engage with Internet users how they want to be engaged, then go visual. Use a visual content platform to curate and share images, videos and more, and you’ll cater to potential customers effectively.

Choose Relevant Content

Effective advertising is all about using the right content to appeal to the right people at the right time. Being immersed in your brand can make it hard to see beyond your focus and recognize what customers actually want to see. A visual commerce platform gives you insight into content that other people are creating, sharing, and looking at so you can create promotional content that is relevant and meaningful to customers – not ads that they find unappealing or unrelatable.

People Trust Recommendations from Other People

Rather than believe something they’re told by a brand, shoppers want to hear something from real people who have experienced the product or service. In fact, studies show that 90 percent of consumers placed the most trust in word-of-mouth marketing from people they know. Word of mouth marketing results in five times more sales than paid marketing. This will enable you to collect and share user-generated content. This allows your customers to give recommendations to other potential customers, convincing them to purchase.

Build Loyalty

When you collect and share customer pictures on your site and social media platforms, it shows you that you value them. This sense of being valued can strengthen your relationship, boost their sense of loyalty, and encourage them to buy from you again and again, as well as recommend you to friends. Consider combining your visual commerce with a loyalty program that rewards customers for user generated content for maximum benefit.

Images Motivate Purchase Decisions

When it comes to deciding what they’re going to buy, people value images. A recent case study also showed that when a company added images of products to its website, the conversion rate increased by 10 percent. Additionally, studies show that when images are large and clear for customers, sales increase by more than 9 percent. Guide customers’ behavior by introducing visual commerce.

A visual commerce platform can make it easy to create and share visual content that generates leads, drives engagement, and encourages conversions. Ultimately, relying on visual commerce may just be the make or break between a business that thrives and one that fails in our fast-moving, digital world.