Black text on white screens is a thing of the past now. If you are about to plan a content marketing campaign, then incorporating visual content marketing in your strategy is a must, especially in today’s digital age. Visual content stimulates the audience and entices interest and therefore should take priority in your marketing campaigns.
To better understand the concept, let us first look at what content marketing is. “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action,” according to the Content Marketing Institute. Hence, in layman terms visual content marketing can be defined as content that communicates or compliments the valuable information in a visual way.
Image source: Vertical Response
Brands are increasingly using visual content as tool for storytelling to distinguish themselves from their competitors and connect better with their audience base.
“When you consider that 65% of people are visual learners, 90% of information that comes to the brain is visual, and presentations with visual aides are 43% more persuasive, it makes sense to use content types which people have an innate psychological resonance with,” said Lucien Joyce, lead copywriter at Mammoth Infographics and writer at Kissmetrics Blog.
Image source: Kissmetrics
There are six types of visual content that are prevalent in the online marketing discourse-
- Images
- Infographics
- Videos
- Presentations
- Memes
- Screenshots
The past year has seen a rapid growth of this marketing strategy. Various social interface platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Facebook introduced changes that incorporated more visual content on these platforms. These changes in the past year hence illustrate the importance of visual content and its ascending popularity among marketers.
To help you keep pace with the dynamic visual content marketing scene, TYS curates a list of the major trends and statistics of this year on this front.
- 46% of marketers say that their current marketing and storytelling strategies are critically dependent on photography.
Image source: Hubspot
- Visual assets (photos, videos, illustrations and infographics) play a pivotal role in the communication of a brand story. 65% of senior marketing executives back this claim.
- Researches show that infographics are Liked and shared 3 times more than any other type of content on social media.
Image source: Hubspot
- 51.9% of marketing professionals across the globe state video as the type of visual content that results in the best ROI. (Return on Investment)
- A staggering 844% of mobile video plays have increased since 2012- 74% in 2014 and a whopping 44% midway through 2015.
Image source: Hubspot
- Buffer reported that for its user base, tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images.
Image source: Hubspot
- Instagram users have grown to more than 400 million as of September 2015.
- Pinterest stats depict that 88% of consumers have purchased a product they pinned and 49% have purchased 4 or more products that they’ve pinned.
Image source: Hubspot
- From 2014 to 2015 budgets allotted to visual content marketing grew from 3 to 5% and is projected to increase by the same into 2016.
Image source: LinkedIn
Many international brands have successfully used visual content in their marketing strategies. The prime example is Target’s Pinterest page which harmoniously amalgamates engaging graphics, images and text. It stands out from its competitors as it has various boards on its page and employs a different strategy for each board, for differentiation and easy navigation.
Image source: Coschedule
Another example of a brand ‘doing it right’ is Grammarly. The brand nails their visual content efforts by a perfect blend of witty and eye-grabbing memes, which they call as ‘Grammarly Cards’ that are user- friendly and establish an instant connect with the audience.
Image source: Coschedule
Put your creative caps on and get working, folks!
