Each year in mid-January, when all of last year’s research has been published, we like to read through some of the major reports on inbound marketing, content marketing, social media and online behavior.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, honestly, it’s amazing how fast things can change in twelve short months and 2014 was certainly no exception.
While reviewing this year’s research two major trends emerged and both highlight the effectiveness of visual content marketing. As you will learn, this year’s data reveals that marketers who are leveraging visual content are seeing significant increases in their blog traffic, social media engagement, visitor-to-lead conversion rates and inbound customer acquisition results.
Let's begin by examining a few statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on social media reach and engagement.
Over the last 12 months almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram have increased the prominence and importance of visual content. Keeping pace with this trend, several research studies conducted over the course of 2014 point to the rather amazing effectiveness of visual content for social media.
Here are a few stats, specifically related to social media, that you should consider while you are crafting your 2015 content marketing strategy:
1) Last year the amount of video from people and brands in Facebook's News feed increased 3.6X year-over-year.
2) Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets.
3) Socialbakers.com looked at the top 10% of posts made by more than 30,000 Facebook brand pages and found that posts with photos saw the most engagement—accounting for a whopping 87% of total interactions.
4) In 2014, 39% of B2B buyers identified that they share infographics on social media frequently.
5) Adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost retweets by 35%.
6) Images and photos are the most important tactic in optimizing social media posts.
7) Visual content is a key component in each of the top 5 most effective B2B marketing tactics.
8) 70% of marketers plan to increase their use of original visual assets in 2015.
9) The top 3 content formats that B2B buyers seek out to research a purchase decision include: Whitepapers (78%), Case Studies (73%), and Webinars (67%).
10) B2C marketers are more likely to use original videos (63% B2C vs. 56% B2B) and original visual assets (63% B2C vs. 56% B2B).
11) 95% of B2B buyers agreed that they preferred shorter content formats.
12) In a recent study 86% of buyers expressed some level of desire to access interactive/visual content on demand.
13) Social Media Examiner recently asked marketers which forms of content they most want to learn about in 2015. Creating original visual assets took first place, followed by producing original videos.
14) In 2014 the use of video content for B2B marketing increased by 8% to 58%, while the use of infographics topped the adoption list increasing in usage by 9% to 52%.
15) Interactive content formats such as Brainshark and SlideShare increased in popularity during 2014, up from roughly 21% in 2013 to 28% in 2014.
16) B2B marketers are employing on average 12-14 formats of content.
17) The popularity of whitepapers as a B2B content marketing format is actually declining in relation to more interactive, easily digestible formats such as video.
Given that white papers were previously the most widely used form of marketing content for inbound marketers I might be so bold to call this shift the birth of content marketing two point zero.
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