When was the last time you saw a real estate site trying to sell a house or apartment with just a few pictures of the residence in question? I don’t know about you, but I never have. Sure, pictures are an important part of the process; I’ve seen slide shows and videos used to good effect. But you’re always going to see the explanatory text.
And there’s a reason for that. You can’t always tell from the pictures that the kitchen’s been entirely redone with upgraded appliances just last year. You can’t tell that the carpeting is less than six months old. You can’t tell that the home is centrally located near schools and shopping. You can’t tell that the house has central heat and air. You can’t tell that the apartment complex includes gorgeous walking trails, a fully-equipped exercise room, a heated swimming pool and Jacuzzi – I’m sure you get the idea by now.
The words and the pictures must work together to get all these points across. Some things are easier to convey with pictures, while others make more sense to put into words. And even if you could convey certain things in pictures, you’d want to put them in words anyway since that’s how the search engines find them – and by extension, that’s how anyone searching for what you’re selling will find them.
Okay, so what about art? Isn’t that the quintessential case where you can mostly use images? Um, no. Maybe you think you can’t equate the auction of construction equipment with the auction of fine art. Christie’s certainly doesn’t; they hype their auctions a lot more than the construction equipment company described here!
In his article, Gorell linked to a page of the art auction house’s web site dedicated to an upcoming auction on twentieth-century British art. Sure, there’s a slide show highlighting pieces with an image and a short description, but there’s more. There’s contact information, links to an auction calendar, and text about the auction house itself. Christie’s describes its experience in this particular category of art sales, how its auctions have done in the past, whose work they have sold (I didn’t know Sir Winston Churchill was an artist!), and more. If even an art auction house doesn’t rely on “just pictures” to sell their products, why should you – and why should your clients?
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