It doesn’t take a genius to know that people like browsing visually stimulating content, in the same way that most children are only interested in picture books. More often than not, people browse and scan through a piece of content before deciding if it’s worth the read. And we, marketers, only have that small window of opportunity to convince the readers to stay a bit longer and read what we have to say.
In quick figures, these are the volume of content you’re competing with on a daily basis:
- 27M pieces of content are shared each day.
- 9/10 organizations do content marketing.
- 20,000+ blog posts are published per day, through the WordPress platform alone.
The question is: how does your voice stand out from that noise?
The answer is not rocket science, you guys:
INVEST IN GOOD QUALITY IMAGES.
Now, this is not to say that an influencer who puts together thousands of words (or a dozen!) in an image-less piece of content is any less effective than the visual storyteller. Our premise here is, attracting your target market through good quality visuals—inspiring images and interactive formats—is an opportunity you want to leverage on. Even more if you’re new in the playing field, or you’re a small to medium business without millions of dollars to spend for commercials and paid ads.
In the Spiralytics blog alone, our best performing posts are ones that have accompanying illustrations and slideshare decks. Here are two of them:
Although I have to note that these topics are very relatable and funny, and the articles well-written and interesting, the visuals made the articles more valuable and attractive. Our content team has invested time and effort to create original and high quality illustrations for the above posts. And true enough, these two articles were great examples of how visual content marketing works.
So, here are 10 interesting facts and figures to convince you that you have to start investing in not just good quality content but also good quality visuals, starting with the top 5 networks where images are most frequently shared:
- Facebook users share 2.5 Million pieces of content every minute, and has over 1.3 Billion active users. As a sidenote, 47% of the American users say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases.
- Pinterest users pin 3,472 images every minute, has 70 million users, 80% of which are women.
- Instagram users post 216,000 new photos every minute, has over 300 million users, 51% of which are men.
- Youtube users upload 70 hours of new videos every minute, and has over 1 billion active users.
- WordPress users 347 blog posts every minute, and has 74.6 million websites dependent on its platform.
With that kind of content volume EVERY MINUTE, you have to know how to make your content stand out! And this is why you have to leverage on visuals:
- Articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
- 44% of users are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures.
- 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.
- Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as plain text posts.
- Users clicking on photos of real life people are twice as likely to convert to a sale.
To see more mind-blowing data, check out this article’s sources:
- Domo: Data Never Sleeps 2.0
- ManageWP: 14 Surprising Statistics About WordPress Usage
- Newscred: 50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing
- Jeff Bullas: The Facts and Figures on the Power of Visual Content Marketing
- Visme: 29 Infographic Statistics You Need to Know in 2020
And of course, to apply my own recommendations, we’ve put together these statistics in an infograph, in case, you know, you didn’t bother to read all of the text above! 🙂 Start investing in your visual content, you guys. It’s time.
