Online marketing has increasingly grown since its inception in the early 1990s. For a long time, it was mainly constrained to search engines. Since 2005, however, social media has taken on a much greater importance. Instrumental in that growth have been such sites as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest.
YouTube is the most popular video hosting and sharing website. The other three have been main purveyors of powerful images.
Twitter is mostly for text, but savvy tweeters have found ways to make their images shine through the service. Facebook, however, has largely become a place where people share their images through their smartphones, giving rise to a whole new way of connecting with people. Pinterest is itself a phenomenon. Built entirely for sharing images, marketers have used it to embrace the challenge of sharing product images and driving traffic to their websites. It’s working.
People like to see what they are buying before they buy it. That’s why the J.C. Penney and Sears catalogs were so popular a few years back. Now, shopping catalogs appear online, and people are flocking to them.
Images are great marketing. They allow your customers to see what you have to offer, to get a view of what they are about to purchase. If people can see it, they can determine its value more clearly in their minds. And that’s why images are such powerful marketing tools.