Currently, the biggest gap between how most brands communicate and what their audiences want is called ‘visual’. Consumers increasingly favor Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest over text-heavy platforms, while marketing and communications teams are still tempted to rely mostly on written content – perhaps illustrated by stock photos.
The shift from written to visual content is caused by the intersection of several trends. People increasingly consume content on mobile devices, which favors images and videos over words. Due to increased bandwidth, video is easier to upload and consume than ever. Finally, there is a lot of content out there. Unlike the early days of blogging, people now can choose between thousands of pieces of content to consume every day – and snappy visual content is easier to consume than long-form written pieces.
We tend to forget that up to 65 per cent of people are visual thinkers. Visual thinkers don’t process information as words, but as a series of pictures. If we communicate in text alone, we risk losing as much as 65 per cent of our audience.
For marketing and communications professionals, building the visual case is not always easy. It means translating brand messages from words to images, while maintaining a strong corporate identity and creating a consistent story.
In our new series of publications, we aim to support in building the case for visual content. Part 1 discusses the state of visual content in 2016, including all the stats and figures you need to convince an organization to communicate more visually. The piece also discusses how to demonstrate the ROI of visual content and optimize the impact of visual content – topics that will be explored more in-depth in later chapters.
Enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe to get notified when the following chapters are published.
