As the social web has allowed us all to become publishers and marketers the importance of content for search and social media marketing has exploded. This is driving another trend within that sector called visual content marketing.
This visual web growth has happened for a few reasons.
- The rapid acceptance of smart phones and tablets
- The widespread availability of high speed wireless networks
- The decreased cost of data that makes high definition uploads cost effective
- The emergence of focused visual media social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram
This is all good and fine, but for marketers managing this content is a challenge. You need platforms, infrastructure and processes to manage your visual content collection and creation. Then you need to moderate and publish at scale.
The benefits of visual content marketing
Visual content has many benefits for a marketer. These include
- Increased engagement
- Improvements to SEO
- Accelerated sharing on social networks
- Increased brand awareness
- Sales growth
The digital marketer to remain efficient needs to use tools that control the collection and publishing process that both protects and amplifies the brand.
Shuttlerock is one of the leaders in visual content marketing platforms that provides brands and businesses with a platform to collect, moderate and share your customers photos and videos.
The power of visual content marketing
I was talking to Paul Bingham, the Chief Operating Officer of Shuttlerock the other day and he provided some hard numbers on the benefits to businesses. Here are just some of the facts and figures that they have seen when customers have optimised crowd sourced visual content using the Shuttlerock platform.
- Increased customer’s email lists by over 44,000 new subscribers
- 23 million impressions on users friends Facebook timelines
- 57% growth in sales for a client after using the ShuttleRock platform for 12 months
- Another client had over 33,000 page visits to their ShuttleRock photo page in just one month after running a photo competition on the platform
So these are the sort of numbers that makes marketing managers and business owners smile.
The numbers behind the growth of the visual web
Flickr was one of the pioneers of the visual web way back in 2002. Since then it has became stale and is now seeking to reinvent itself.
Competitors have emerged driven by the social web and includes Instagram, Pinterest and Vine. If we look at the global impact of these we get some rather staggering numbers.
- Pinterest debuted in May 2011
- Pinterest saw a growth of 1047% in unique visitors from 2011 to 2012
- Instagram started in 2010
- Instagram has 130 million users
- Instagram photos have 1 billion likes a day
- More than 16 billion photos are hosted through the service.
See some more facts and figures below in the Infographic.
Infographic courtesy of the On.com Team.
What about you?
How is your visual content marketing? Are you using images and video to engage with your customers? What’s working for you?
Could you use a visual content marketing platform?
Look forward to hearing your insights and stories in the comments below.
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