Content marketing and photos

The buzz in the ad world these days is all about content marketing. Why ? With content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generating about 3 times as many leads, 78% of CMO’s believe it is the future of marketing. (Source:DemandMetric).People spend more online ( ~ 6 hours a day) and large part is interacting with brand created content.There is a crying need for relevant content they can consume.

Consumer are not shying away from content generated by brands. In fact, they demand it: 50% of consumers’ time online is spent engaging with custom content. (Source:HubSpot) . Why ? because a brand, once adopted, is much more than a product or service, it becomes a lifestyle, if not a continuous experience. They can become the catalyst of social media conversations. Take GoPro for example. Long after purchasing the product, consumers continue to communicate their adoption on social media , fueling a wider market adoption.

Brands like Red Bull or Nike have already well understood this and continuously feed the lifestyle machine with new and relevant content. GoPro counts on its users while Red Bull repurpose their sponsoring dollars into extremely valuable content. Both use visual heavy content, being it videos or stills.

This is nothing new. Tobacco companies already knew what you sell is not a product but a lifestyle, the most famous being Marlboro and its legendary cowboy. Beverage company Coca Cola is another. And while they were creating a story around their products, they were also creating content to be consumed by both current users while enticing new ones.

But not all content is created equal. It is well known, for example, that articles with images receive 94% more views. (Source: Jeff Bullas) and that on social media, the most shared, view and liked items are photos. A brand opportunity to reach out and generate leads via photography is expanding exponentially. Sites like Pinterest, Snapchat or Instagram are 100% photography-based and WhatsApp with its 500 million a day shared images only confirm that conversations, connections and exchanges are happening more and more around visual stills only. Brands, in order to stay relevant, have to be part of this conversation.

Some, if not most, have taken the approach of creating their own channels in order to drive traffic to them. A post on Instagram, a Facebook page, a Pinboard and the job is done. But, while they can easily find followers, that doesn’t mean they convert any of them into consumers. Instagram, as well as Pinterest, understand this very well. That is why their ad format allow brands to be part of a user’s flow. The first reports are indicating high engagement rates.

But the real success is creating content that consumers want to share between themselves. Exactly what top visual content marketing brands like Red Bull, Gopro, or Nike are doing. In fact Red Bull has a whole division solely dedicated at creating photography first to be given away for free at news site in order for those to populate social media. They are not only part of everyone’s conversation, sometimes they are the conversation. ( Baumgartner’s jump from the stratosphere).

Sure, it can be expensive. But when 72% of marketer think that branded content is more effective than magazine ads and 68% find is superior to direct mail and PR, there is obvious room to shift the balance of budget. Furthermore, soliciting content from your own consumer via social media and repurposing it onto advertising offers a cheap and highly engaging option. The brand becomes not only  a friend that listens and  but someone the consumer can help out ( in other words, bonding) .

Website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Source: Aberdeen), most of it due to photography. The same photography that can be shared across social media reaching a wider universe of consumers by power of referral. Why a brand, today, would not create visual content marketing is incomprehensible ? It is the fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to reach, convince and convert and it shows no signs of weakening. In fact, with advances in file format ( 3D imagery, Light Field, rich content), automated curation and object recognition, tracking and analytics, it is only starting to reveal its real powers.

 

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