About 55% of brands plan to prioritize more visual content in 2016, according to CMI’s B2C 2016 report. How can you lift your brand’s visual marketing efforts in collaboration with existing content marketing efforts? This post explores creative ways to add visual impact to leverage your overall content.
What draws a person’s attention to good content marketing? Is it a catchy headline, a strategic process guide or an eye-catching visual? Chances are that you’ll attract higher click-throughs for content with high-impact images, videos or infographics on social feeds. About ⅔ of all social media posts use images, according to Quicksprout data.
B2B marketers, according to Content Marketing Institute, are also increasing their use of images, videos, infographics, slide presentations and archived webinars as visual accompaniments to their written content marketing. Most of the major tactics are seen below from CMI’s 2016 “Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends – North America” report.
What we see and remember
There is so much textual and visual stimuli coming at us every day that it makes it hard for our brains to distinguish between the good and the bad, or to even remember the content. In his New York Times bestseller “Brain Rules,” author John Medina found people remember only about 10% of any given information a few days after first hearing it. But if that same information comes paired with a relevant image, people remembered about 65% of the information a few days later.
For marketers, that’s an important statistic. That’s why branding is so important in the overall content marketing process. People will tend to remember, say, a product’s discount deal because of an image or a visual logo that accompanies the deal.
You can use that same thinking in your content marketing. Images and infographics are key to your success. The old phrase “a picture is worth 1,000 words” is still apt today. Sharing complex information in visually exciting charts, graphs, GIFs and images can be a far more efficient way to reach your audience than through words and type.
Make your content visual
Here are three quick ways to jump-start your content with visual boosts:
- Take pictures of everything: As a content marketing pro, you should be capturing images of everything your company or agency does. From people pics to finished products, to company logos and colorful offices, take images. Gather them in a digital inventory, with categories, and you’ll find that you’ll soon have a treasure trove of content for you in blogs, social media content, slideshows, webinars and more.
- Create infographics augment your written content: Take the same information your content writer has painstakingly put together, snip out a few of the highlights and create visuals to match the findings in those highlights. That’s infographics at work. Your art or creative department should by now know how to create one or more for you to use in blogs, social feeds and image inventory. (Are you running solo? If so, then check Hubspot’s guide to creating infographics.)
- Share video with your audience: Your phone is a video recorder. Find some natural light, a comfortable setting and shoot some video. Speak clearly in 90 seconds to communicate a thought, plan or promotion to your audience. Upload it and share it. Go, go, go. People are watching.
Producing visual content is a must for anyone creating content marketing campaigns. You’re no longer just a writer anymore; You’re an image creator, a GIF maker, a video producer or an infographics pro. It’s time to step up your game with visual works for your content.
The Numbers
78% – Percentage of S. Internet users (2014) who watch online video content on any device
19% – Increase in email open rates when using the word “video” in an email subject line
65% – Increase in click-throughs when using the word “video” in an email subject line
60% – percentage of marketers polled by the CMO Council think infographics usage will increase in 2016
In November 2015, Facebook reported eight billion daily video views a day on its platform, up from four billion daily views in April 2015
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