For many years, content marketing has been all about engaging text content that converts. Marketers have been obsessed with writing long articles in the hope of being noticed by Google’s algorithm. They have published long form blogs and white papers because they believe such content is what users are likely to share. However, a new trend has started forming. Nowadays, people tend to have shorter attention spans. With the rise of mobile devices, people have become more impatient and visual content seem to be the solution. Instead of reading text content for 7 minutes, people would rather stay for less than 3 minutes on a page that provides only the information they want.
This is why visual content such as videos and photos has shown tremendous popularity within recent years. Visual content has proven itself to be the most popular form of content people share through social media. To give you some further ideas, here are seven new visual content marketing trends you should watch out for in 2017.
1. Increase In Visual Content Usage
Although we have witnessed the growth with the number of views on visual content, it seems this trend has just begun. There is a strong indication that visual content usage will further increase in 2017. [pullquote]From 2015 to 2016, there was an increase of 130% of the number of marketers who published content with visuals.[/pullquote]
2. Overuse Of Stock Photos
Among all types of visual content, stock photos are the most widely-used. In 2016, social networking sites were filled with a variety of stock photos. In 2017, this trend may start to fade as more and more users get bored on photos being shared repetitively. As a result, people will begin to use their smartphones to generate photos on their own and share these through social media.
3. Infographics To Become The Most Engaging Content
Infographics such as data visualization, GIF, and 3D images may replace stock photos when it comes to user engagement. More and more users are likely to begin to share content such as GIF’s while more and more marketers are using data visualization and charts.
4. Marketers Will Spend Less Time Making Visuals
There is a growing trend that marketers are starting to spend less and less time making visuals. Instead, they outsource designers to do the job for them. In Portland, this trend is now taking place, so web design in Portland may give us a clue. Perhaps, marketers just want to make sure they publish the best visuals.
5. Consistency Will Become A Challenge
Visual content is not as easy as text content to publish. Because of this, some marketers may face new challenges to consistently publish visual content.
6. Visual Content Will Become Cheaper
It looks as though the supply of visual content is growing, and this trend will drive visual content to become less pricey.
7. Visual Content Will Become A Necessity
These days, there are a lot of bloggers publishing their content with visuals. Most of them just do it because they think it’s necessary and not it’s a strategy.
Conclusion
Visual content provides more benefits for users. It reduces the time consumed by users in staying on a web page. These days, more and more people are getting into social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Instagram because of visual content that attracts them to share.
In fact, even Twitter has made some changes to incorporate visual content into their short text feed. This means that visual content is a force to reckon with in 2017.
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