It’s hard to believe that another summer has come and gone. It seems like just yesterday we were making predictions about what 2015 would hold!
Before we start getting emotional on you, let’s turn our attention toward visual content marketing trends and how they’ve progressed over the last 8 months. As you look over these recent stats, you’ll see what types of content are most favored and the practices you should be implementing into your own marketing strategy.
Let’s get started.
General Visual Content Stats
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People are 80 percent more willing to read a piece of content when there is an image accompanying it. Images pull readers in, make them feel more connected to the content, and help them better understand what they’re reading. Also, marketer Jeff Bullas cites that articles with images get 94 percent more views than articles without them.
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Typically, when people hear information, they only remember 10 percent of it a few days later (husbands remember less). But, when a relevant image is shared with the information, people retain 65 percent of the information a few days later. (It’s still unclear what husbands remember.)
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More marketers are making visual content a priority. According to one survey, 46 percent of marketers said that photography is crucial to their marketing and storytelling strategies. Another survey found that marketers place more importance on visual assets compared to blogging and videos.
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The Content Marketing Institute reports that the majority of content creators plan on creating more engaging content this year. Fifty-five percent say they intend on prioritizing visual content as part of this plan. Additional goals are to optimize content, find more ways to repurpose existing content, and have a better understanding of what type of content is most effective.
Social Media Stats
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Images are very important on social networks. Visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other forms of content. Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without them. Also, research shows that adding an image every 75-100 words doubles the chances that the content will be shared.
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B2C marketers place more importance on visual content than B2B marketers. As a matter of fact, 40 percent of B2C marketers say that visual content is the most important form of content.
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Instagram has grown its community to over 400 million. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs report that photos showing faces get 38 percent more likes than photos not showing them.
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Instagram is a popular network for all ages, particularly teens and young adults. Fifty-two percent of teens use Instagram, according to the Pew Research Center. Despite the rumors that Facebook is for the “old” crowd, 71 percent of teens use it.
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The Pew Research Center also found that 41 percent of teens use Snapchat. Snapchat is growing in popularity, with over 100 million daily users, 65 percent of whom upload photos using the app.
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Pinterest continues to be dominated by women. Forty-four percent of online women use Pinterest compared to 16 percent of men. Pins have been a great boost to the platform, as over 80 percent of pins are re-pins compared to just 1.4 percent of tweets that are retweeted. Also, 88 percent of consumers have purchased a product they pinned.
Infographic Stats
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Infographics are simply awesome. They are liked and shared on social media 3 times more than any other type of content. Internet users spend more time looking at the images because they are relevant and combined with short, easy to digest information.
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Infographics were the B2B content marketing tactic with the largest increase from 2014 to 2015, up from 51 percent to 62 percent. More than half of marketers predict that infographics will continue to increase in 2016.
Video Stats
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Video statistics released by Invodo found that nearly 52 percent of marketing professionals across the globe feel that video is the type of content with the best ROI. This isn’t really surprising considering that shoppers who watch a video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-viewers, and using the word “video” in a subject line boosts open rates by 19 percent.
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Last year was an exciting year for video. Halfway through, mobile video went up 74 percent from 2014 and 844 percent since 2012, according to data gathered by Ooyala.
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Not only are marketers creating more videos, but also people are watching more of them. Between April 2015 and November 2015, the average daily video views on Facebook doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion each day. In July 2015, Periscope reported that viewers were watching the equivalent of 40 years’ worth of videos.
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Probably most surprising of them all, Syndacast predicts that 74 percent of all traffic in 2017 will be video. 2017 is just around the corner. What do you think?
Conclusion
It’s clear that visual content is a prime consideration for most organizations. Consumers are more likely to read, engage and share content that has relevant images, and they prefer using platforms that are highly visual.
With the internet having progressed as it has, it’s no surprise that people want to be wowed and intrigued. If your content doesn’t attract readers, hold their attention, or give them tools to remember the information, you could easily lose them to your competition.
As you begin to look toward 2017, think about how you will integrate more visual content into your content marketing strategy. Now is a great time to partner with an outside agency to outsource some of these needs and give your organization a head start.
