Displaying advertising and content through visual marketing is trending in 2020. For online users, information that has been prepared graphically can be captured more quickly and thus attracts more attention. For its survey on the use of visual content, Venngage ‘s team asked 200 online marketing managers  how and where they prefer to use the element. But what is visual content marketing?

Use visual marketing sensibly

No matter which product you want to advertise, you cannot avoid visual advertising. Wait a minute, some entrepreneurs will now say, in marketing we work most of the time with images and have always done so. That’s true when designing advertising posters, spots or product photography, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as visual content marketing. The concept of visuals is closely related to corporate communication. He means influencing buying behavior through the use of images that make the object the focal point. Sounds more difficult than it is. For example, branded videos are a popular visual content marketing tool today. There are two types of branded videos.

Vabiant 1: Content, i.e. a funny or creative clip that ideally goes viral, is given an intro or outro and a branding frame. In addition to the actual content, the customer also sees the logo of the company and recognizes it later.

Variant 2: The company produces its own videos in which it associates a character or storyline with the product. For example, small web series campaigns can be produced around your own product. This type of marketing, together with concise imagery , animated gifs, automatic videos on websites and much more. is called visual content marketing.

Developments in the use of visual elements

The makers of Venngage asked marketers how they’ll use visual content in 2020, and the stats hold some real surprises. First, the 200 advertisers were asked how the use of visuals in their business evolved between 2015 and 2017. It showed that the use of visual content increased by 130% between 2015 and 2016 alone. While in 2015 40.5% of marketers stated that visual content was present in 91% to 100% of their posts, in 2016 it was 53%. Over 90% of marketers said they used visuals in more than half of their articles in 2017.

Stock photos are the most popular this year. Around 35% of marketers said they use it regularly. Also, among respondents, about 30% used infographics and other graphics specifically created to illustrate facts, 15% used videos and presentations, 14% used statistics, and more than 5% used memes and GIFs. The use of GIFs was particularly fueled in 2016 by the fact that many services such as Twitter and Facebook integrated the use of the Giphy service directly into their apps. Since then, users no longer have to laboriously search for the images online or create them themselves, but can search the large database for a suitable reaction with a click and keywords. News providers, blog and marketers who are active on social media also adopt this method. GIFs may replace the classic image meme in the future.

Create and distribute visual content

The survey also found that infographics and statistical illustrations generated the most interactions. Unfortunately, the figures do not show whether marketers also include the increasingly popular statistics videos in this category. Over 71% of marketers reported spending less than 5 hours per week creating visuals, with only 11% putting more than 15 hours of work into visual content. 33% used online editors, 30% used their in-house graphics department, 24% employed external graphic designers and 14% did the work themselves using Adobe software and Flickr.

Respondents regularly encountered problems when working with visual content. Almost 37% stated that they found it particularly difficult to create regularly, but also the quality of the graphics (29.1%), reaching a larger target group (24.1%) and finding reliable and interesting data sources (10, 1%) influenced the work. Almost all marketers agreed on one point: it is no longer possible without visual content. Only 2.6% stated that visuals were moderately or not at all important, 5% found them important, 31.7% very important and a full 60.8% stated that modern online marketing would not work without visuals.

Outlook into the future of visual marketing

The budget question was also asked. Surprisingly, as recently as 2016, 31% of respondents said they spent less than 10% of their total budget on image content. For 2017, 35.5% plan to invest more than a third.

The survey shows how important visual content marketing will be on the market in the future. According to KPCB, video content will account for more than 74% of all internet traffic in 2017 alone. It can therefore be assumed that professional advertising videos in particular will continue to increase in popularity. Companies that want to keep their finger on the pulse should therefore continue to increase the budget for image content as a precaution. Only one thing remains the same in 2017: Interesting, exciting and funny content wins.

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