Visual Content Marketing Takes Off In US
78% of U.S. CMOs consider custom content the future of marketing.
Visual Content Marketing Taking Off
Written By:
Tim Bahr, CEO, NextWorks
www.nextworks.com
Ninety percent of U.S. organizations now use content in their marketing efforts and 78% of U.S. CMOs consider custom content the future of marketing. The interest in video content is also peaking. According to the Custom Content Council, ”Video is the fastest and most consistently growing medium for content marketing — 62% of respondents report using video in their content marketing.” Furthermore, 85% of consumers say they would watch videos about products they are interested in, according to e-marketer.com.
Marketers now recognize huge opportunities to provide valuable, relevant and visually informative content that can actually help people buy products and services.
But how do you get started? First, you need visually informative content. This means videos, images, infographics, graphics and presentations that together help move your audience toward desired actions. The content should not be overly promotional. It should tell a story. It should arm your audience with all the information needed to take the actions you desire.
If you do not have in-house capabilities to produce this type of content, there are numerous resources, including former TV news producers who are experts at using video to tell stories in an informative and easy to understand manner.
Once you have content produced, you will want to make it easily accessible and sharable. The first inclination is often to place new content on your company website. The downside is that content can get lost or buried within your website. It’s also not easily sharable, especially within the context of related content that is often necessary to convey your entire story. Rather than trying to get your audience to your content, you should be getting your content to your audience.
Ideally, new content should be presented with other supporting content in a creatively designed layout that takes a viewer on a journey through content engagement to a call-to-action. This is beginning to sound like a microsite, right? But a microsite means a lot of time and money, and microsites are not really sharable.
Many marketers are seeking new digital distribution platforms that can quickly and cost-effectively package and deliver content in sharable modules or units wherever and whenever an audience wants to receive it. The best of these platforms monitor all interactions with content and provide metrics to help guide production of new content that meets the changing needs of an audience.
One such platform, the Content Capsule™, is gaining strong traction with U.S. marketers and communicators. It’s an interactive, highly sharable, visual content marketing platform that lets marketers creatively tell complete stories with videos, images, presentations, links and transactions in one self-contained, branded and highly sharable unit. Your audience can be taken on a journey from assessment, through deeper levels of engagement, to conversion without ever leaving a your content.
Capsules allow marketers to quickly launch engaging content marketing campaigns. They can be embedded and shared across owned, earned, shared and paid media, and they function on all devices. They are being likened to portable microsites that can be embedded across all media channels.
Every piece of content within a capsule is monitored and measured in a real-time dashboard. Marketers can respond to audience interactions and update content while a capsule is in distribution. And, when content needs to be updated, you don’t need to redistribute that content. Once content is updated in a Content Capsule, everywhere that capsule is syndicated instantly displays the updates. This creates a unique opportunity to continually update and “program” new content throughout the lifecycle of a campaign.
To learn more please read this white paper by the Content Marketing Institute.