It’s a fact; 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual – brands that embrace visual content see a return on investment. Savvy brands focus on making their content “picture perfect”, attracting more readers, leads and business.
What’s visual content?
In today’s interactive rich media environment, images and video drive much more emotion and engagement than text ever can. Consumers consider clear, detailed images to be very important and believe they carry even more weight than the product information, full description, and customer ratings. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without and overall, visual content has a 40% higher response rate.
King of visual content
By 2014, online video could account for 50% of all internet traffic. Watching videos online has become a mainstream activity and with mobile devices and tablets it can be viewed anywhere, anytime. The number of online video users is expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016. Videos offer versatility as they can be embedded in blogs, websites and online stores. Video product reviews produce better conversion rates. Without doubt YouTube is king of visual content but the likes of Vimeo, Hulu and Blip.tv are all scrabbling for a slice of the video market.
Less words, more Pinterest
A picture paints a thousand words and on Pinterest it’s important to describe your brand in just a few. The photo-sharing website has more than 70 million users and is rapidly becoming a valuable sharing tool for brands. 500,000 businesses use Pinterest as a “virtual shop window”. It can be used to create multiple boards with images that can engage and inform audiences. Boards can showcase seasonal trends and contain visual content to educate followers how to use your products.
Website search synergy
Your website’s imagery needs to be fully optimised to make it visually findable. 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business whose images appear in local search results. You must also consider having joined up social media visual imagery. For example, Mashable pins to boards on Pinterest that fall into the same categories as the articles they publish on mashable.com. They take it one step further and aim to send users back to their website by hosting a weekly photo contest – users are directed to a specific link.
Instant engagement on Instagram
Instagram is an online photo-sharing, social networking service with 150 million active users. Brands such as Starbucks and MTV are the most successful Instagramers. Video offers a new way to showcase a brand’s products for up to 15 seconds; it’s particularly popular amongst the fashion community, highlighting new lines and trends. People who love your brand also want to see more of your people too. For example, consider posting images of staff to humanise your brand or spotlight your own photographer/sharer.
Facebook fans love photos
On Facebook it’s all about the fans and you can upload and share photos that feature your customers. More than 350 million photos are uploaded per day on average to Facebook and they’re liked twice as much as text updates. But there’s a difference in how they’re shared. More photos are shared on Facebook using mobile devices than PCs. Posts with videos attract three times more inbound links than plain text posts – it’s a quick way to generate a wider following
What next?
Undoubtedly, marketing strategy is becoming dominated by visual content. These insights should help guide you in embracing visual content more fully or at least give you the confidence to open the door into that visual content space.
Sources:
www.marketingtechblog.com/visual-content-social-media/
www.whatis.techtarget.com/definition/rich-media
www.blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33423/19-Reasons-You-Should-Include-Visual-Content-in-Your-Marketing
www.econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62184-why-your-brand-should-get-creative-now-with-visual-content-marketing
www.cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/55_brands_rocking_social_media_with_visual_content
www.econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63359-10-interesting-digital-marketing-statistics-we-ve-seen-this-week
www.econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63097-10-interesting-digital-marketing-stats-we-ve-seen-this-week-57
www.chipthompson.com/19-fascinating-statistics-case-visual-content-marketing/
