We’ve all heard about how crucial content marketing has become to any business’ digital presence. But is some content better than others? When advertising on the web, marketing influencers say it’s best to keep one simple adage in mind: a picture is worth a thousand words.

The human brain processes visual stimuli in just 13 milliseconds. Conversely, it took you roughly 250 times longer than that just to read the first word of this sentence. When you’re looking to make an immediate impression, talk isn’t so cheap — which means that it pays to let a picture send the message.

In today’s media environment, consumers scroll past post after post on their news feeds without ever engaging with static content. And even when they visit your website after seeing more dynamic content on social networks or digital advertising displays, the average viewer only reads 20% of the text on the page.

With a well-placed image, however, social posts drive significantly more traffic, and a website scores a much higher engagement rate if it’s populated with photos. Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social networks, and content with visuals receives, on average, 94% more views than content without them.

Recognizing Value

It’s no surprise then that the marketing world is recognizing visual content as the top means to drive consumer engagement. According to Social Media Coach, 40% of B2C marketers cited images and video as the most important forms of content featured in their campaigns. Convincingly, 46% of senior marketing executives surveyed by the CMO Council say photography is critical to their current marketing and storytelling strategies. What’s more, 65% believe that visual assets play a major role in how their brand story is communicated. Marketing influencers understand the impact that visual communications can make.

All that said, it seems that the marketing industry at large is unsure of how best to capitalize on visual content’s immense potential. According to the CMO Council survey, only 27% of marketers have a set process in place to aggregate, organize, and manage visual assets in their marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, 39% of respondents thought that they needed a higher budget to maintain the visual aspect of their campaigns.

In any other realm of marketing, this total lack of infrastructure would be ludicrous. Would a corporate blog accept just any old essay without vetting it through a system of editors and company executives? Images are more effective tools for engagement and must be afforded the same attention to ensure success. Marketing influencers understand that.

Best Practices for Success

Clearly, you need to implement some type of framework or strategy to make the most of a visual marketing campaign. But how?

One of the most effective techniques is to utilize user generated content. In specifics, that means original photos, videos, or artworks by real people for their own use. This shows hefty contrast from the sanitized stock images typically found in ad campaigns. Consumers more readily trust this type of content, and they find it 35% more memorable than other types of media.

On Instagram alone, there are over 300 million active user accounts and 40 billion photos on the network, with an average of 80 million photos shared every day. Imagine being able to pull from this vast repository of images for any marketing campaign at any time. Add up all the images and videos you could find on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, and elsewhere. You’ll start to get an idea of how crucial a resource social media can be for visual marketers.

In order to gain access to these images, you’ll need a tool that can license them easily, legally and efficiently.

Scopio is just that tool. It curates stores of media by category type for easy selection. Likewise, Scopio facilitates easy communication with content creators, and makes licensing a simple process. Scopio’s platform also enables you to measure the success of the new content.

With millions of pictures online, there’s no limit to the heights you can reach with visual content. The trick is cutting through the noise to find what you need — and that trick is Scopio. Embrace the advice of marketing influencers.

Scopio is the industry’s premier search and licensing platform for images and videos on social media. We help companies find and use the photos and videos that matter to their audience, from capturing content to evaluating the analytics on campaigns. Wondering how you can leverage UGC to help you tout your brand? Request a demo with the button below or email [email protected] Featured photo by Nicole Sereda/Scopio submission.

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