Hello, savvy marketers and entrepreneurs! Have you started using visuals in your marketing strategy yet?

Visual content grabs your consumer’s attention. There’s actually a psychological reason for this human behaviour.

• We process visual content 60,000 times faster than we would do text content. 
• 90% of information that our brain digests is visual content.
• Studies have also revealed that 65% of people are visual learners. Well, maybe you are not but the majority of your customers can have a big appetite for visual content.

No wonder, the past year has seen a rapid growth of visual content marketing. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Facebook have rolled out changes that incorporated more visual content on these platforms. 

To help you keep pace with the dynamic visual content marketing scene, here’s a curated list of the major visual marketing trends and statistics.

Marketing, SEO & Traffic

• 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%).  (Source)
• B2C marketers place greater importance on visual content than B2B marketers.  (Source)
• 51% of B2B marketers prioritized creating visual content assets in 2016.  (Source)
• 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%).  (Source)
• Cisco projects that global internet traffic from videos will make up 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.   (Source)
• 34% of B2C marketers say pre-produced video will be critical to content marketing success.   (Source)
• Video attracts two to three times as many monthly visitors. (Source)
• Having a video on a landing page makes it 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of the SERP.
• Adding an explainer video on your landing page triggers 20% average conversion and a big bang of sales and engagement.
• Blog posts incorporating video attract 3x as many inbound links as blog posts without video.

Engagement

• Visual assets (photos, videos, illustrations and infographics) play a pivotal role in the communication of a brand story. 65% of senior marketing executives back this claim. (Source)
• The average CVR for websites using video is 8%, compared to 2.9% for those that don’t use video.
• Combining video with full-page ads boosts engagement by 22 percent.
• The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women.
• Researches show that coloured visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.

Video

• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. (Source)
• Many have stopped watching TV. 6 out of 10 people say they prefer watching online video platforms vs live TV. (Source)

• Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
• 4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.   (Source)
• 59% of executives agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video.
• 76.5% of marketers and small business owners who have used video marketing say it had a direct impact on their business.   (Source)
• 62% of B2B marketers rated videos as an effective content marketing tactic.   (Source)
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in a text.
• The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video.
• More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
• The optimal video length for Twitter falls around 45 seconds but for Youtube, it goes upto 2 minutes. (Source)

 Email

• Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%.  (Source)

 Live Video

• In 2016, 14% of marketers used live video as part of their social media marketing.  (Source)
• Facebook users spend 3X more time watching live videos than traditional videos.   (Source)

 Mobile Video

• 51% of all video plays are on mobile devices — this growth represents a 15% increase from 2015 and a 203% increase from 2014.   (Source)
• Videos under five minutes in length account for 55% of total video consumption time on smartphones.  (Source)
• 92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

 360 Degree Video

• 29% more people viewed a 360-degree video than the same video in traditional format.   (Source)

Infographic Stats

• Eye-tracking studies show internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page.  (Source)
• Infographics get 3x more likes and shares on social media than other any other type of content.   (Source)
• Infographics were the B2B content marketing tactic with the biggest increase in use, from 2015 to 2016, up from 50% to 58%.   (Source)
• People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.   (Source)

 Images

• When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Source)
• Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.   (Source)
• Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.   (Source)
• In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images.  (Source)
• 46% of marketers say that their current marketing and storytelling strategies are critically dependent on photography. (Source)

 Periscope

• The equivalent of 110 years of live video is watched on Periscope every day.   (Source)
• Periscope users have created more than 200 million broadcasts.

 Facebook

• 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound.   (Source)
• Facebook users watch 8 billion videos per day.  (Source)

• Only 1.2% of videos go viral on Facebook.

• Viral videos command 38.7% of total views and 58.3% of total shares.

• Longer videos do better: videos 90 seconds and longer receive 52.1% more shares and 48.2% more views than the average of all videos.

• Organic Facebook engagement is highest on posts with videos (13.9%) and photos (13.7%).   (Source)
• Native videos on Facebook get twice the views and 7 times more engagement than non-native videos. (Source)
• Facebook native video uploads also get 530% more comments. (Source)

 Snapchat

• Snapchat users watch 10 billion videos per day.  (Source)
• Snapchat users share 9,000 photos per second.  (Source)

 Pinterest

• Shopify users referred by Pinterest spend an average of $80 compared to the Facebook referral average of $40.   (Source)
• Pinterest stats depict that 88% of consumers have purchased a product they pinned and 49% have purchased 4 or more products that they’ve pinned.

YouTube

• YouTube reaches more 18+-year-olds during prime-time viewing hours than any cable TV network.   (Source)
• In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube. (Source)
• Half of YouTube subscribers between the ages of 18 and 34 would drop whatever they were doing to watch a new video from their favorite channel.   (Source)
• About 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (Source)
• Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. (Source)

Twitter

• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter
• 90% of Twitter video views happen on a mobile device.

Black text on white screens is a thing of the past now. With the average human attention span dropping down to 8 seconds, visual content has become your best friend to attract, engage, educate and convert your target customers.

Looking to start your visual marketing journey? Let’s crackitt for you!

By: Deepasha Kakkar

Crackitt is a visual marketing boutique, specialising in the production of animated explainer videos, infographics and GIFs. We help your business harness the power of visual content to generate leads and close sales quickly.