70% of marketers say their results are better with visual content, but how do creative professionals navigate the growing demand for photos and videos?
To tackle this question, we partnered with Contently, a content marketing solution that helps brands deliver better customer experiences, to release the 2018 Report: Engaging Your Audience with Visual Content.
The report is based on a March 2018 online survey of hundreds of marketers and creative professionals.
Download the report to learn how marketers are creating, organizing and sharing visual stories today.
You’ll walk away with a few big takeaways:
1. Speed is more important than ever.
Speed is a critical factor when publishing visual content, and a large majority of creatives and marketers believe the ability to locate and share visual assets quickly is more important today compared to previous years.
We asked: Compared to previous years, is the ability to locate and share visual assets quickly more or less important to your job? Here are the results:
With almost two thirds of participants saying the need to locate assets quickly is more important than previous years, there’s no question that the ability to tell stories fast — and often in real time — can make all the difference.
We can also see this up close with organizations like the Women’s March Chicago, whose visual storytelling workflow helped them go viral, and the Colorado Rockies, who depend on fast photo sharing to better engage their fans online during games.
2. Marketers have a greater need for video than photography.
We asked: Compared to last year, has your need for videography increased, decreased or stayed the same? Here’s how participants responded:
The need for video has dramatically increased, and more so than photography (63% said their need for photography has increased compared to previous years). But although 69% of participants say their need for video is increasing, 81% also say video (either custom or live) is the hardest content to create.
The takeaway? The need for video is growing, but producing video content presents the biggest challenge.
3. Most share visual content at least once a day.
We asked: How often does your organization use visual content to engage with your audience online (whether through social media, email, blog posts, etc)? 65% of participants share visual content multiple times a day or daily. Take a look.
Of those who share visual content daily or multiple times a day, over a third also believe the ability to find visual assets quickly is “important” or “very important.”
The Takeaway
With visual content at the center of brand storytelling, this report may open your eyes to the fact that the production, organization and sharing of visual assets is more central to your job that you realize.
Creatives and marketers have to establish a clear visual storytelling workflow, communicate their approach to the entire team, and set up a system for testing and measuring performance. In other words, when it comes to engaging your audience with visual content, you need a strategic plan in place to help you get there.
We hope you use these findings to check in on the state of visual content today and see how you stack up compared to your peers.
