How important are visuals to your marketing copy? In particular, how important are powerful visuals?The going rate of word to image is supposed to be 1000:1, but I think that is an old wives' tale. When you grow up, you discover that you can go swimming within 30 minutes after eating and that pictures are over-rated.
This is not to say that pictures are not valuable. Let me explain. If you were to challenge me to sell something using a small display ad or a one-page website and I could use only pictures or only words, I would pick words. I could sell something with all words. Maybe not as well or efficiently as with a skillful blend of words and images, but all words could work.
All pictures would not. Pictures need words to work in persuasive documents and even explanatory documents.
The problem I see in medical marketing is that many people are trying to make their imagery as bland and dreary as their corporate-style ho-hum writing. I know one large medical device company that has incorporated into its brand blurry black-and-white images of doctors. Stylish, perhaps, but not visceral. Nobody looks at them and feels any emotion other than a mild confusion as to why a company trying to promote technological accuracy would put out-of-focus images in their literature.
I recently looked at a product manual that tried to explain some tricky technical maneuvers (the "put this here," "attach that here," and "turn the dial this way" kind of text) using photography rather than line drawings. Line drawings works well for that. Photographs are accurate, dismally so, but hard to follow.
The point is that good visuals should evoke emotions (if you're trying to promote something) or convey relevant information (if you're trying to explain something, the classic how-to text). Anything else is a waste of good real estate.
Look at the photograph at the top of this story. It's funny. It's gross. It's weird. It makes you want to look a couple of times. You get a message with that photo and you know what it's about. It probably will not win any awards and it's unlikely to go viral on the Internet, but if you saw that photograph in a brochure, you would remember it.
That a visceral visual.
Now not all visceral visuals are gut-wrenching or weird. If you are writing a brochure for anesthesiologists, you have to realize that these fine men and women have considerably different interests than most of the rest of us. They love pharmacology. They love formulas. They like to see diagrams of molecules. The point is, when you market to people, you have to know what their particular visceral visual is.
The "need diet" lady is a pretty generic visceral visual and she would work very well for overweight women eager to lose weight effectively. To anesthesiologists, a molecule drawing might be visceral.
Visceral visuals are good support but they are not a good focus. Use them to support a message, but not be a message.
So where do you get these visuals? They're all over. You can find some on stock photography. You can hire a photographer and create your own. You can turn a designer lose with some images and PhotoShop and make some clever images of your own on the computer.
As a medical marketer, you have to be willing to use these powerful images to help bolster your text. The text is what sells, promotes, or informs. But the visual helps drive that home. And there are some other good reasons to use visuals:
- The legal eagles do not quite know what to do with visuals. Lawyers will focus on your verbiage the way a chain saw focuses on a tree limb. But lawyers have not yet realized that they could possibly police images. As long as you're not plagiarizing an image or publishing something offensive or illegal, your lawyers probably won't try to edit them.
- On the other hand, your target reader most likely does know what to do with a visual. He'll check it out first and foremost and it may be the "hook" that gets him to read. So these are powerful tools that do not really get scrutinized by the kind of people who are trying to save the world from marketing.
- Visuals can carry a pretty hefty emotional charge. It is often difficult in medical texts to get that much emotional power into text … but you can do it with a picture.
- You can test images, just like you can test text.
Right now, there is such a rush to make all medical materials as bland as possible that I wonder if healthcare professionals are all asleep right now. If you want to stand out, grab some visceral visuals … even if it's just a diagram of a new molecule … and infuse your written text with power.
