As a professional writer, I have a lot of respect for the written word. There’s just something about writing things down that make them more real, more ~official~ than if they’re just said out loud.
That being said, though, many written messages simply don’t land half as well without a bit of visual support. In the current content marketing landscape, and particularly in social, the use of visuals is becoming increasingly popular and important. After all, while a big block of text might contain some key nuggets of wisdom, today’s readers will likely just gloss over that content without some sort of visual cue to capture their attention.
In this week’s Content Marketing Weekly, we’re taking a look at some tips and tricks for visual marketing, as well as some other elements to help inform your strategy. So without further ado, let’s take a look:
7 Tips for Using Visual Content Marketing
In this piece for SocialMediaToday, contributor Melanie Tamble talks all things visual marketing, including the fact that people can recall visual information 6 times better than written or oral information. Besides being more memorable, it also takes the brain much less time to process and understand a visual – just 1/10th of a second for an image, compared to about 60 seconds to read 200 words.
Visuals pack quite the punch in marketing, and they can help you quickly connect with your target audience and almost instantaneously spread a message. As far as your visual marketing strategy goes, Tamble recommends using images that are easy for your audience to digest and understand, and bringing a mix of image types and formats into play. It’s also important to consider copyright laws and SEO optimization for visual elements as well.
Read more and check out Tamble’s other tips here.
The Powerful Benefits of Video Content Marketing
Speaking of visuals, we’d be remiss if we didn’t touch on the advantages of video. By now, it’s no secret that video is gaining traction – as Adotas contributor Rebecca Paddon cited, 80 percent of traffic across the internet will be comprised of video content by the end of this year.
As Paddon noted in the article, there are several other key benefits that marketers can reap from video marketing, in addition to being a part of the huge wave of video content. Videos can help capture consumers’ attention while bolstering SEO, and can also enable brands to establish a deeper, emotional connection with their audience.
Check out the article to read more about how video can benefit your brand’s content marketing.
Study: 75% of Consumers Want More Rewarded Content Like Videos, Surveys
There’s basically an endless list of use cases when it comes to video. In a prime example, Marketing Dive’s Erica Sweeney discusses how marketers can better connect their video content efforts with their loyalty programs, reporting on a survey from HelloWorld.
The study, which encompassed opinions from more than 1,500 American consumers, found that three-fourths of customers want to be rewarded for engaging with a brand, including by watching a video or taking a survey. And while traditional approaches to loyalty programs – like earning points for taking certain actions – are still helpful, more than half of consumers noted that it takes too long, and is too difficult to earn rewards.
In this way, it could be time for your brand to shake up your loyalty program, and leverage your visuals and video marketing to help.
Check out these and other insights from the study here to learn more.
How to Turn a Single Blog Post Into a Month’s Worth of Content
Another trend that’s taking the content marketing world by storm is the practice of repurposing content. In fact, I recently wrote a little something on this for our own Brafton blog.
Copy Bluffs’ co-founder Dakota Shane also discussed a few tips and tricks for repurposing content in this piece for Inc. Magazine. As Shane pointed out, the vast majority of today’s consumers – 88 percent – look to research a brand online before making a purchase, and this is the ideal opportunity to grasp their attention with high quality, well-thought-out content.
However, creating this caliber of content is time-consuming, and the age of pumping out a new blog every day just for the sake of having content is far behind us now.
Enter, the practice of repurposing. As Shane noted, a single blog can provide you material for tweets, email marketing, infographics and even video. Best of all, repurposing allows you to take all the hard work that was put into your written content, and stretch that effort (and spend) as far as it’ll possibly go.
Check out Shane’s other tips here in the article.
And check back next week for the latest and greatest in all things content marketing news!
