When it comes to content marketing, businesses often so much on the quality of the writing itself that the more visual elements like images and video are neglected or ignored completely. Visual elements are a huge part of content marketing. Consider the following stats:

• Facebook posts that include a photo or video are 2.3 times more likely to be engaged with (“liked,” commented on, or shared) as opposed to posts that are text only.
• Tweets with images or gifs are retweeted 150% more often than tweets without images or gifs.
• People retain just 10% of the information they read compared to 95% of the information that’s delivered in video format.

Whatever channels you’re using, whether it’s a company blog, a weekly emailed newsletter, or an SMS loyalty program, you need to find a way to incorporate visual elements. Here are a few tips.

Every blog post needs at least one image

Make it a goal to never create a single blog post that doesn’t contain at least one image. Images should be carefully selected, not copyrighted, not stock photography, and not pixelated or arbitrarily sized. Taking your own high quality, high resolution photos is a great way to accomplish this. When you share your blog post on social media channels, make sure one of the images from the blog post accompanies the post.

Occasionally live stream

Facebook users spend 3X more time watching live videos than traditional videos. A great thing about live stream is that you don’t have to spend a fortune on high end audio-visual equipment or hire a video production team. You can live stream a tutorial or a product unveiling in no-time and without spending much money.

Make sure videos include captions

It’s estimated that 85% of videos watched on Facebook are watched without any sound so include captions or anyone trying to watch without sound will end up watching something else instead.

Use Facebook’s native video uploading tool

When you upload a video directly to Facebook using their native uploading tool, it reaches ten times as many people as embedded Youtube links. So make sure your video content is uploaded to Youtube and Facebook separately, not uploaded to Youtube and then shared to your Facebook page.

Use GIFs

The younger generations appreciate a humorous GIF. They’re easy to create from still images or video clips using a GIF creator tool.

Include video on your landing page

Whether you’re including a link to a webpage on your site in an email or text message or if you’re using Google Adwords to pay for links to your website to appear at the top of the search results page, the page people land on when clicking that link should contain some kind of video format. You can see conversion rates increase by as much as 80% this way.

Don’t worry too much about high production quality

The average consumer isn’t overly concerned with the quality of the production. Quality of the content is what really matters. In most cases, videos or photographs shot from your smartphone is all you will really need.

Visual content and SMS

SMS (or text messaging) is necessarily limited to text only. However, you can include links to visual content like a Youtube video or a webpage with visual content. Also, RCS (Rich Communications Service) is on the horizon which is essentially a new protocol that will replace SMS and will support images and short videos being sent via text.