Visual Content Marketing Trends That Will Help Your Business Explode

Well executed visual content drives traffic. It’s a fact. People who are browsing sites and articles via social media or search engines are most likely to click on links and sites attached to attractive visuals. It’s human nature: we see an attractive photo or infographic, read a headline, and click to check it out. 

It’s no accident that 91-100% of all marketing materials online contain some kind of visual element. Making those visual elements work for you as a business is the tricky part. After all, visuals are how your business tells their story so your customers and followers via social media can form strong connections to your brand. Those content connections are what attract new and repeat customers, so being smart about how you integrate visual content with your text is essential to both marketing and brand building.

Furthermore, keeping a close watch on what visual content trends are driving the most engagement and traffic is almost as important as smart visuals integration. Keeping up with trends is absolutely vital to online marketing success. When you know what is already out there, you are much better positioned to differentiate your content from the competition.To streamline this process of monitoring and adjusting, here are some of the top visual content marketing trends that can help your business explode online.

Visual Content Usage Is One of The Fastest Growing Segments of Online Marketing

Since 2015, visual content usage for online marketing has grown by 130%. That is in just two years. This major jump in increased use of visuals is largely due to the fact that consumers expect their internet experience to more closely resemble social media, which relies heavily on visuals and snappy typefaces and headlines to garner those all-important clicks. If you aren’t using strong visual content, people are going to be clicking elsewhere.

Stock Photos: The Time To Retire is Here

Believe it or not, stock photos are still the most popular way to add visuals to content. In fact, 35% of all marketing content makes use of stock photos, whereas original graphics such as infographics are used only in only 30% of most marketing materials. These two are followed closely by video and slide presentations (15%), charts and data visuals (14%), and in last place are GIFs and memes with 5%. What this trend represents for your marketing is that stock photos are overused, leading to a general loss of unique content for users who have seen the same photos in similar content posts. It’s time for marketers to reduce their stock photo usage, and instead start boosting video and animated slideshow presentations. It also seems just a little bit absurd that it is 2017, the YouTube generation is rapidly approaching adulthood, and so few digital marketing plans integrate video in any significant way.

Infographics: Winning at Engagement

When it comes to visual elements of marketing, infographics are hands down the number one click-through driver around right now. Currently, infographics and data visualizations rule consumer engagement numbers: they bring an impressive 25.7% conversion rate to the table, which is a number online marketers cannot afford to ignore. This means that data for your marketing materials needs to be expressed visually in charts, graphs, videos, and presentations as much as possible to drive up those engagement numbers. Also, for variety and to demonstrate a little internet culture savvy, try integrating some memes or amusing GIFs that get circulated around social media. Having a positive meme or GIF associated with your brand is an excellent way to expand your brand exposure while expending very little effort.

Spend More Time and Money Making Your Own Visuals

According to a recent survey, a whopping 71% of all marketers spend less than five hours a week generating original visuals. Another 17% stated they spent between 5-15 hours per week, and a further 11% claim they spend 15+ hours weekly just on visuals. What does that mean to you? You cannot spend “too much time” working on original visual content. The more original and high quality content you produce, the better your return on investment is going to be. If you are spending countless hours on visuals that are not earning you clicks, focus less on quantity and more on quality instead. After all, if it’s not fun, funny, or interesting, it is not going to perform well.

Hiring a Skilled Professional Graphic Designer

Too many marketers depend on their own in-house or personal skill set to design visuals for their campaigns. 46% of all marketers are DIYers, with a further 30% using an in-house designer, with less than 25% hiring freelancers. Now, if your marketing team really has the skills to deliver beautiful, well composed, well edited photos and videos, then that’s great. However, as is the case for most marketing departments, if you don’t have the talent in-house to make it look snappy and professional, you need to hire professional help with a proven track record. The increased engagement you derive from your professionally designed visuals will more than cover the added expenditure.

It May Be Tough, But Be Consistent

If creating original visual content was easy, nobody would be able to charge so much money to do it for you. The real challenge, however, is maintaining a consistent series of engaging visuals. Over 36% of all marketers claim this is the most difficult aspect of integrating strong visualization in their marketing. Second to that is the challenge of producing high quality, well-designed visuals, followed closely by finding reliable and interesting data to convert to visualizations. These challenges are very real, and they can be a major impediment to progress for your business. You want to make sure you have the talent, creativity, and interesting data to combine together with a sound content strategy. No plan ever guarantees success, but having those three elements combined to overcome your challenges will certainly help your chances.

Visual Content is Fundamental To Success

It sounds like a no brainer, but in reality there are marketing groups do not treat high quality visual content as the vital element that it is. If you are not prioritizing better visuals in your marketing, you might want to catch up with the past 200 or so years of progress in advertising techniques.

Visual Content Needs To Be More of a Budget Priority.

Believe it or not, even though strong visual content is a major priority for many marketing agencies, just over half of most agencies allocate 20% or less for visual content. This is a negative trend that needs to be reversed quick, fast, and in a hurry. All of your leads, prospects, and new clients are generated by marketing. If you want to get ahead or stay competitive, you need to be investing more in high quality images and video for all marketing materials. The benefits will outweigh the added cost in no time.

Start Investing in Hiring and Acquiring Better Visual Content NOW!

More than a third of all companies intend to invest up to a full third of their marketing budget in hiring new talent and developing fresh visual content this year. If you want your company to succeed, that means getting started with hiring talent or contracting out for superior quality visual content right away. Waiting could mean that there is a labor shortage for creatives on the general market, making it much harder to go out of house for graphic design work, and much more expensive to hire talent who have numerous other employment opportunities. Don’t wait! Get your marketing people on this right away.

Once You Know Better, You Do Better

Understanding these trends and how they impact your marketing and your engagement online is only the beginning of the journey. You have to take action to make this knowledge work for you. You can’t drive engagement without smart marketing, and without engagement, you can’t drive growth. Take the time to educate yourself about the advantages of stronger visual content. Work with your existing marketing team to acquire fresh talent or find a designer whose work really brings out the best elements of your brand. Be proactive about taking control of improving your visual content. Even if you just start your own YouTube Channel for your business, you are making headway towards better integration of visual content marketing to help your business grow.

If keeping track of trends and developing newer, better visual content is proving to be too much of a challenge, you need to contact us for a consultation.. Our staff of designers and writers are all highly skilled at refining and improving both your brand image and your branded content. We specialize in helping companies from all industries in all markets reap the benefits of strong visual content for their marketing programs. Get in touch today, and let us help you grow your business and brand through stronger and better visual content marketing.

Gabe Arnold creates affordable, long-term marketing and technology solutions for businesses of all sizes. He has over 15 years of experience in writing, technology, and marketing campaign creation, and management.

Gabe has worked with over 1,000 startups as well as hundreds of established businesses over the past decade to help them achieve their goals. He is passionate about connecting businesses with the best possible solutions in marketing and automation. Gabe helps business owners like you reach their full potential. Contact Gabe here, or follow him on Twitter.