Written content, including articles, blog posts, press releases and white papers, make up the foundation of any effective content marketing campaign.
However, a successful strategy may also include visual content, such as images, infographics, memes, videos and even animation. While your written content gives you the best means of going into detail on certain topics and providing useful information to readers while boosting your search engine rankings, visual content is often what draws people to your brand in the first place.
Related: Easily Avoidable Mistakes Derail Too Many Content Marketing Campaigns
Consider some of these statistics to help you realize just how important visual content is in the modern digital marketing realm:
- Internet users are easily distracted. The average person is distracted in just eight seconds, with some people being distracted in as little as 2.8 seconds. Most visual content delivers information to those within that window of distraction. Additionally, people form their first impression within 50 milliseconds of visiting a page.
- Approximately 81 percent of people only skim content they view online. In fact, the average reader only fully reads between 20 and 28 percent of words on a given page.
- Posts with images produce 650 percent higher engagement on average than posts that only contain text.
- Visual content may help people make purchase decisions. In fact, users are up to 85 percent more likely to purchase a product after they watch a video about it.
- Social media networks relying mostly on visual content are growing rapidly. Tumblr’s active user base has expanded by 120 percent recently, and the numbers for Pinterest and Instagram are 111 percent and 64 percent, respectively.
- Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites and 150 percent more retweets, while Facebook posts by brands that include images make up 87 percent of all engagement.
These statistics indicate that visual content is incredibly effective at helping people process and understand information much more quickly than written content. Visual content, therefore, can be the incentive that draws people in to pay more attention to what you have to say in your content writing.
Some more tips for powerful content marketing
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of content marketing is creating interesting and impactful content through your blog posts, articles, white papers and other marketing efforts. However, even after you’ve developed this content, your job is far from over. The question becomes: how can you effective manage and sustain this content well into the future?
The following are some simple guidelines that can help ensure you get the most out of the content you’ve spent so much time and energy creating:
- Keep old content relevant: One excellent way to keep traffic on your blog content is to go back and link old posts. As you read through these older posts, however, make sure that all of the information is up to date. Any statistics or facts should be double-checked just to make sure they are still accurate. If you link out to other websites in your blog content, make sure that link still works and that it still contains the relevant information.
- Recycle old piece of content: Go back through your content and recycle sections of it to create new pieces for your audience. A single section from an e-book or white paper you developed, for example, could be a great foundation for a new blog post. You might also consider turning blog content on similar topics into a webinar series. This can all extend the “shelf life” of your content.
- Remove content that’s no longer relevant: If, for example, you have a blog post detailing industry trends to watch for that you published in 2011, there’s really not much reason to keep that post up. Someone who comes across the content in a Google search could be confused and think it’s actually relevant for today, when in all likelihood, your industry and/or business has drastically changed since then.
- Create new content to replace removed content: If you do decide to remove content from your archives, try rewriting it so that it meets your current standards of quality and is fully up to date for your audience.
Content management can be just as important as content creation, especially once you have developed a large amount of written content over the past several months or years. Keep these tips in mind as you sustain your content marketing strategy.