More Than a Thousand Words: Why Video & Images Must be Part of Your Content Strategy in 2020

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More Than a Thousand Words: Why Video & Images Must be Part of Your Content Strategy in 2020

If you have ever read a picture book as a child, you would be aware of how fascinating experience it was. The colourful illustrations, paired with the arrangement of the images, allowed for a captivating experience, which motivated you to read on. When you compare this to written content, there is quite a significant difference. As the primary medium of online communication has shifted from text to images, and now video, using regular blogs and articles devoid of visuals is the best way to stay behind the competition. To keep up, you need to implement visuals into your work as smartly as you can. 

People like looking at pictures

There isn’t anyone on the entire planet that doesn’t like to look at images. Pretty much every social media platform and website uses images to add a creative flair to the site, as well as adding some aesthetic value to its design. If you think about this in terms of speed, people are a lot more likely to see your message if it’s expressed in a visual format. Using pictures and videos in your content doesn’t only add some flair to your text, but can also serve a practical purpose, as stated above. 

Ideally, you should try to use pictures that are high resolution and have some colour to them. After that, these pictures need to scale well on all types of displays, such as phones, tablets and computers. You should also attach images to the start of an article, and also have pictures and videos scattered throughout it.

Pictures and videos are more descriptive

If you take a poll and compare information against time, you would notice that people prefer to absorb a greater amount of knowledge in a shorter time. This has to do with the gradual decline in attention spans and is a significant proponent behind visual content. The information contained in a typical blog or article, which is usually between 500-1500 words, can be condensed down to a video which is barely 10 minutes in length. This is far less than the time it takes someone to read an article at an understandable pace and is a big reason why you need to use visuals in your work.

Making visuals by yourself isn’t really a laborious process. In fact, the content you write for your blogs can easily be converted to image or video form. What’s important to note is that videos need to be shot as concisely as possible, and need to be edited well.

Pictures and videos look natural

If you try to write an article or a blog without an image or two, there is a high probability that it will end up looking off, and unnatural. As more and more authors and writers started to incorporate images and videos as part of their content plans, it caused the entire industry to shift to the new standard. In this scenario, it would be silly to simply write a blog without illustrations, lest you want it to look low-effort and boring. Another thing to note is that most social media and communication platforms use images as the centre of attention, and the text is merely complimentary.

Visuals such as videos, images and gifs are a functional part of your content that also happens to look attractive. Most importantly, if you are looking towards making an impression on the younger audiences, it is best to use visuals that are in trend.

Visuals grab attention better

Perhaps the most important reason, visuals have the power to breathe life into an otherwise bland content strategy. Adding videos and images to your blogs and articles is a fantastic way to not only increase the variety of content offered but to grab the attention of readers as well. While the length and type of video do vary a lot based on the kind of message you are trying to deliver, the rule of thumb is to keep it as succinct as you can. Longer videos may contain a lot more content than short ones, but shorter videos are a lot more likely to be watched completely.

If you wish to condense information into a shortened format, you can rely on videos to do the job. By incorporating text, photos and voice-overs into one video, you can easily deliver a complicated message in a three-minute video.

Images and video can be easily remembered

Visuals aren’t only just unique and attractive on the surface, as they are also easy to recall. When you were in high school or college, you might’ve noticed that diagrams and other images seemed to linger in your memory the most. This is in stark contrast to text and paragraphs, which needed to be read and reread, over and over to be memorized. The key to premium content writing is to use just the right amount of images and videos in your content plan, without making them look overused.

As a sizable majority of the population are visual learners, using images allows your text to be memorable, and relevant. Instead of using text to explain a difficult topic or concept, it is much better to use an image or two to simplify things for your readers. Another way of easing memorization is to create a richly detailed video with an easy, natural pattern.

Visuals are quite versatile

Maintaining a blog or a social media profile isn’t exactly an easy task. In order to maintain your content strategy and keep the content on your pages fresh, there needs to be a constant effort from your side to add new articles, blogs, and other content. Most marketers try to reuse old content by making additions to them over time, or by condensing the information contained in one article over a few. Although there isn’t anything wrong with recycling content, there is only so much that can be done before the source material itself goes stale.

However, visual content enables you to reuse existing content by changing the way it is presented. That blog you wrote last month can be turned into an infographic and posted on your social media page. That how to guide you wrote can be turned into a brief instructional video.

Pictures and Videos increase leads

If you use visuals as a part of your content strategy, you will directly improve the engagement you have with your audience. As a result, it would cause your leads to show a proportional increase. This correlation can be used Online Class Help productively by an aggressive content promotional campaign, which is sharing your branded content across the far reaches of the internet. In this situation, the main factor that decides your success would be the quality of content published, so make no compromises. 

By | 2021-08-07T16:56:12+00:00 December 3rd, 2019|Content Marketing, Content Writing|0 Comments

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