What is the importance of visual content management for your business?

Over the past few years, visual content management has been the go-to for advertisers. Many of the infographics, maps, graphs, presentations, GIFs, and videos have received shares, followers, and revenue from brands.

Yet advertisers appear to be wary of investing in visuals. When outsourced to agencies, they can often be costly, and depending on in-house experts is not always a feasible choice. Most marketers have switched to inventory images, but these have seen declining levels of efficiency.

The question remains, how and why can visuals be used by brands to deliver quality content? And the visuals offer the most bang for their buck to the brands?

Visuals offer powerful stories

Visuals have become an utterly critical aspect of modern marketing. They have the power to catch people's attention, communicate complicated messages, and more easily and memorably cross language barriers than words can. For content marketing, the strong storytelling capabilities of visuals have made them indispensable. Simply put, you need to combine them with compelling visuals if you want people to read your content. Visual content makes a good foundation for a well-researched content management system.

Visual content is appealing

Authentic visual content is much more powerful across industries than stock imagery or branded visuals. Today's customers are hungry for content, but they are also incredibly cynical and hard to please. They crave visuals rather than staged or stock that is relatable and accurate. In reality, a whopping 90% of customers claim authenticity is key when determining which brands they like and supporting from 86% in 2017, according to a Stackla survey.

That means that the use of authentic visuals is on the rise, such as user-generated content (UGC). By leveraging the content that their clients are already producing about them, brands create a more community-centric experience.

Visual material gets the message across more easily.

In its visual cortex, the human brain processes visuals, a less busy and quicker portion that is different from the busier area that processes words.

It is easier to recall visuals.

Just 10 per cent to 20 per cent of it is retained when people read text-based content. Attach an image to written content, and 65% of it will be remembered by individuals.

It's harder than content writing to create graphics, but not as hard as you think it is.

In order to create a beautiful infographic or instructional video, it requires a specialized skill set. But even if you're not a designer, fantastic visuals can still be made.