It’s always a good idea to reevaluate your content marketing strategy at the beginning of a new year. With 2019 now upon us in force, if you haven’t already done so, today’s the day to take a good look at your current content marketing strategy and identify areas of possible improvement for 2019. One area you most certainly should examine is your visual content strategy. To give you some framework for the process, consider the following facts about visual content marketing and then some tips for implementing it into your marketing campaign for 2019:
What is Visual Content?
Before moving forward, let’s define visual content marketing. Sure, most of you know what it means, but those arriving late to class, it never hurts to review and go over the basics. Visual content is pretty much exactly what it sounds like; it is the use of visual images, infographics, social media, and videos within your content marketing campaign. Visual content allows you to communicate more easily with your readers. After all, as the old adage says, “a picture is worth 1,000 words.”
Interesting Visual Content Marketing Statistics
- Some 32% of marketers feel visual images are their most important form of content.
- Around 80% of marketers regularly use visual assets in social media marketing. In fact, video alone, which accounts for 63%, has now surpassed blogging, which accounts for 60%, when it comes to social media marketing.
- Some 51% of B2B marketers currently prioritize visual assets and their creation as part of their overall content marketing strategy.
- If a reader hears/reads information alone, they will remember around 10% of it three days later. If they see an image paired with the information, though, their retention rate moves to 65%.
(Above statistics according to a 2018 Industry Report from Social Media Examiner.)
- Mobile video usage has increased in the last two years by nearly 100 million daily views.
- Video streaming has increased immensely over the past several years. Twitch, a live-streaming platform, has noted an increase of more than 13 million average daily streaming hours between the years 2012 and 2017.
- Some 62% of B2B marketers feel video is an effective content marketing tactic.
(Above statistics according to Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends)
Two Thoughts on Your Visual Content Strategy for 2019
Don’t Allow Browsers to Dictate Your Visual Content: Make Sure Your Images Scale to Mobile
By now, we have looked at the importance of visual content via statics and defined what it means. Now, let’s explore some ways to incorporate it into your marketing strategy as advised by Buddy Scalera, who is a content strategist who recently gave a talk at Content Marketing World and shared this information with Content Marketing Institute during an interview:
“Brands often start creating visual content without actually having a plan for how they’re going to scale it across all their different platforms. They usually start with their own platform or their social media platform, but they don’t think past that…You need a strategy that will ensure that that one piece of content scales gracefully across all your platforms.”
During his presentation for Content Marketing, Buddy went into detail about how Google indexes sites based on mobile-first capabilities. In other words, you must take control of how Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer renders your images. If they do not translate well, the browsers could communicate to Google that your site is not mobile first oriented.
One way to make sure this isn’t a problem is perhaps having multiple images, which are designed for different devices.
Don’t Allow Social Media to Choose Your Images
“Every once in a while, test your content—new and old—on the social platforms that you’re hoping people will use to share it. How does that content look on LinkendIn? How does it look on Facebook? Is it grabbing the image that you want it to grab?”
This quote by Buddy highlights a common problem with using automated social media tools. Unfortunately, they often choose the wrong image or crop it in a way that it loses some of its resonance. Instead of relying on such tools, though handy they may be, you should dictate which images are shared with a tool like Open Graph.
The above are two important elements to take into consideration for your new outlook on visual content marketing in 2019. Hopefully, you found the information immensely helpful and are rip raring to begin revitalizing your current visual strategy.
Brandie P‘s career as a freelance writer spans several years and encompasses an abundance of niche specialties. Before beginning her writing career, she was an office manager and worked in the medical field. Her experience in these two fields have come in handy when writing topics pertaining to these fields.
