Picture This! How And Why Video And Images Will Get You Found And Shared

Video and images appeal to the huge chunk of your marketing audience that are visual learners. If you’re only feeding them words, they’re not listening.

Photos, video, infographics, motion graphics – sometimes, it can seem like we’re swimming in visual online content, can’t it?

It’s all very snackable and amusing and entertaining, but is it actually doing anything to socialise your business’s value proposition in a way that the ‘other guy’ can’t match?

The fact is, the other guy is already doing it. Some 87% of online marketers are currently using video content in their digital marketing strategies, it is estimated – here are a few reasons why, and some suggestions as to how you can avoid getting left behind!

Video marketing: the critical stats

Video has become the most powerful marketing medium of our age. Take a look at the numbers:

• YouTube is now the second most widely used search engine after Google. If you don’t ‘do’ video, you’re not where a lot of buyers are likely to be looking!
• Video is not going away. It will claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019.
• According to Forbes.com, 90% of customers report that product videos help them make purchasing decisions, and 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.
• Video is irresistible ‘click-and-share’ material, in a way that words just aren’t. In fact, research estimates that 60% of viewers will engage in a video post before a text post, and video is shared 1200% more than both links and text combined.

Whichever way you slice it, video now looms large in any effective digital marketing strategy.

‘Generation V’ and the power of the image

But it’s not just about video – it’s about the underlying persuasive power of all images.

A large tranche of your audience (particularly Generation Y and the Millennials, but to some extent Generation X) all went through education systems that became, over time, much more heavily visual in content.

(In fact, we should be calling all of them ‘Generation V’, for ‘visual’!)

Consequently, as far back as 2011 an estimated 65% of the population could be classed as ‘visual learners’ who ‘need to see what they are learning’, according to this research.

For ‘learning’, read ‘buying’. Generation V’ is your target, and if you’re not hitting them with images – still or moving – you’re not talking their language.

Visual and video marketing: getting it ‘out there’

Of course, you can produce the most engaging video or most compelling image known to man – if you can’t get it to the places where the right eyeballs will see it, it will fail.

As a full service digital agency, we offer a full out-sourced social media management option to our busy clients – Our dedicated team now offer daily support to over 100 social profiles for a mix of industries and topics including one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Influencer Voices of 2017.

Using a platform to enable you to post (or schedule) images and video to multiple social media accounts at once is a good way of getting the visuals seen without spending more time online than a pre-exam teenager, but it’s not without its limitations.

Hootsuite, for example – to name just one – at the time of writing doesn’t support Pinterest, Telegram, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat or WhatsApp.

And if you’re using still images like photography, (or even stock video), you have to spend additional hours trawling through iStock to find (and pay for!) an appropriate file.

What’s to be done?

The Social Dashboard: inspired by beer

We decided one of the most useful things we could do to help businesses who want to tap into the power of video and images in their marketing is to offer a social media publishing platform that simultaneously contains an image library and simple editing tools as part of the deal, and also refreshes the social networks other such platforms can’t reach.

Yep, in short, we did a Heineken – and you can taste it (it’s on us for the the first week) here: http://social.123internetgroup.com

So we are all swimming in images. But you know what? The water’s lovely. Grab a cold one and come on in.