The visual elements of your website can become the focus of attention with the right display and application. An attractive and properly-done visual content can be much more effective than textual representation of the same theme. A visually appealing content will help to generate more traffic for your website and attract higher number of links for the content also. Moreover, visual contents leave an indelible impact on the memory of the viewers and help with recollection of your website.
You can refer below for the seven latest trends in visual content and its marketing strategies. This data was collected from recent surveys among the online community.
Growth in Usage of Visual Content
The 2016 survey showed 53% of marketers used visual content in 90 to 100% of their published materials. This data was an increase of 130% from previous year’s figure of 40.5%. The inference from this data is viewers are sold on the meaningful and engaging visual contents.
Infographic Visuals Attract Most Viewers
The representation of data through charts and visualization got the most engagement by viewers online. Around 25.7% viewers liked this mode. Another 20% preferred presentations and videos, while stock photos generated only 7% engagement from viewers. The GIFs and memes attracted 5% of the viewers. So, you may use original infographics wherever possible; also try to incorporate more charts, presentations and videos into your content. Combine some light-hearted GIFs and memes to attract more viewers.
Do-It-Yourself Tools are Preferred by Marketers
The survey showed that 46% of the marketers used some kind of visual content creation tool or graphic design software. Of the rest, 30% employed a designer and 24.1% preferred to use freelance services. This inference points to the fact that creative people may use designing tools for creating visual content. Or you may employ designers full-time or freelancers for the work.
Stock Photo is Most Popular Medium
The stock photos got the most number of votes in terms of usability among the visual mediums with 35% of the participants. Original graphical content which included infographics were used by 30% of the people. Other forms of visual media like videos and presentations got 15%, charts and pictorial data got 14% and GIFs and memes got 5% in terms of usage by the survey group. This shows that stock photos are a safe option of creating visual content, but we should try to be less repetitive and pay attention to the stored photos.
Visual Content Creation is Not Paid Much Attention by Marketers
71% of the marketers spent less than 5 hours per week for the creation of visual content. Another 17% spent between 5 to 15 hours and 11% more than 15 hours for this job. The inference here is you need to spend more time to find the reasons in case there is less generation of interest over your visual contents.
Visual Content is Becoming an Absolute Necessity
Around 60% of the participants in the survey agree that visual content is an integral part of their marketing strategy in 2017. Another 31% agreed that this is a very important part, while the rest were somewhat skeptical. The inference is that visual mode of marketing your products or blog should be a definite part of your strategy in 2017.
Difficulty in Maintaining Consistency of the Visuals
The process of creating an engaging and meaningful visual content is difficult. The problem, 36% of the surveyed people said, is maintaining consistency in quality of the visual contents. The other problem areas identified in the survey were the inability to produce well-designed imageries by 29% of the participants and reaching a wider audience by 24%. The inference from this is we need creativity and talent, hard work and research for original contents and a strategy for creating contents.
Here is a complementary infographic to help you sum up the blog post:
