The stats are incredible! Shared content continues to grow very quickly on the internet. The social sharing numbers are exploding! In fact, sharing on social media is projected to increase by an astonishing 600% in the next 5 years!
When it comes to daily content:
- 27 million pieces are shared
- 140 million tweets are generated
Your core digital marketing goal for 2015 is to connect with as many of your ideal customers as possible.
Your ideal customers are defined as:
- People who are hungry for your expertise, products or service, and;
- People who have the money to pay you right now,
- People who can’t find you yet on social media.
What’s one of the quickest and easiest way to connect with more of the right kind of customers in this huge and very busy fitness profession? Simple! You need to be creating and socially sharing large quality visual content across your social media main social media accounts. Why?
Well, for one thing, research continues to show that visuals are phenomenally more effective and instantaneous compared to text for communicating information to people. Consider that:
- Our brains decode visual information 60K times faster than text
- 70% of your sensory receptors are actually inside your eye
- 80% of viewers recall an internet video they have seen in the last 30 days!
So how do great fitness and wellness professional like you and I, with limited multimedia skills, actually create highly effective visual content? Well it’s a lot faster and easier than you think. There are some amazing and easy to use free tools out there that will allow you to unleash the incredible power of visuals!
Why is visual content so effective for reaching more of your ideal customers? Great visuals are the key to follower engagement. How? By quickly forming much deeper emotional connects and through almost instant information transfer:
Here are the top 7 reasons why visual content will be critical to your social media marketing success in 2015 and beyond. I’m also going to share a healthy dose of powerful tips,
tricks and easy to use free tools to help you start reaping the serious bottom line benefits of visual content marketing for your business. Let’s get started!
- Videos Generate Leads and Converts Those Leads to Paying Customers- Video improves:
- Google Ranking– websites with video are 53X more likely to end up on the first page
- Traffic– 75% of video viewers then go to the company’s website
- Visitor duration– videos increase the time prospects spend on your site from 8 seconds (text only) to 2 minutes
People share videos frequently. If you produce videos, they are 12X more likely to be shared than text and links combined! You generate opportunities for others to get to know your brand.
Video is great for converting leads to buyers. When you include a video that really describes the benefits of your company (an explainer video), researcher note that:
Fact: 85% of shoppers are more likely to buy based on good quality video content
And it’s so simple for you to integrate this huge video marketing trend into your social media and high impact business blogging strategies!
When it comes to video, fitness trainers and wellness coaches actually have it really easy compared to many of the other professions out there! It’s just a matter of recording and sharing what we do best in the gym, in corporate settings over the phone and in our consulting offices. Here are some quick practical tips to get you moving forward with video marketing:
- Make short demonstration and explainer videos where you explain the benefits of specific exercise, training principle, coaching or wellness practices.
- Keep your videos short – 90 seconds is optimal for keeping viewer attention on YouTube
- Apply the key principles of deep-engagement business blog writing (such as the 1-2-3 rule) to quickly craft effective story lines for your video content
- Monitor your engagement metrics on YouTube, your blog where you post your videos and on your other social media channels. This will allow you to see what your followers and fans are really spending time watching, so you can create fresh content around those targeted topics of interest and keywords.
- “Piggy-back” on popular media trends by creating quick video vlogs where you share your expertise, opinions and unique insights on hot popular media and news stories.
- Post Fresh Video Content Frequently: Just like with highly effective business blogging, frequently posting (15-30 times per month) fresh, engaging video content is arguably one of the most powerful organic SEO strategies currently availed!
- Remember this is a learning process it’s ok to make mistakes and learn as you go. If you’re real world clients love your work then chance are, so will your ideal customer through your visual marketing efforts.
When you create videos to connect with your ideal customers, make sure to:
- Use a good quality digital camera (doesn’t have to be the very best) or video recorder, headset and/or mic
- Use a stand to keep your video image clear and stable
- Get a great 5-7 second video intro and extro done that clearly displays your logo and contact information at the start and end of each video (this is surprisingly affordable on Fiverr.com or Elance.com). You need to keep your intro short because it’s critical that you capture your viewers’ attention in the first few second of your video, so they engage instead of bouncing.
- Incorporate short, impactful video testimonials from your most satisfied customers.
It’s great to visually incorporate before and after images and/or strong research and stats that offer proof of the value of what you’re sharing.
- Give your best tips and advice away free in your videos – Treat your viewers link your best high paying customers and that’s more likely what they’ll become!
- Use a white board or flip chart allows you to add yet another layer of effective visual communication to your videos. In fact, if you know how to draw, simple hand drawn charts, graphs and characters are actually one the biggest trends right now in social media!
- When it Comes to Social – Great Images Get You Noticed Period! – Images alone drive results. When you place a photo in a post, you see:
- 94% more views with a photo in your post or Tweet.
- 35% increase in retweets with a photo URL
- 37% improvement in engagement (likes, shares, & comments)
- A post that contains video and images increases views by a whopping 48%!
- Be More Places- Its really great to use your visuals across different social media channels. For instance, you can take an explainer video from your website and post it on YouTube, Google+, and Facebook. You can also take an image and place it in a Twitter feed and on your Facebook page.
This “multichannel” approach is critical success factor in digital branding, social community building and social selling. Why? Because customers typically use more than one channel when making a purchasing decision. You can increase your conversion rate 24% by using visuals on different social media sites.
- Get Emotional and Get Noticed- People do not make buying decisions exclusively on statistics: people purchase from companies they associate with strong, positive emotions. Marketing that tells a story with visual content that inspires emotions, such as excitement and delight is 200% as effective as more fact or information based marketing alone.
Make a positive impression by:
- Creating adorable mascots
- Using strong, vibrant colors to convey an impression
- Producing and socially sharing funny GIFs
- Get Real Audience Involvement Going- The goal of marketing is to gain loyal customers. What’s the best way to engage them? Just ask them to get involved with your brand. Here’s how:
- Use visuals for setting up contests and awarding prizes
- Requesting they send in questions and answering them in a short video is powerful
- Including Call to Action buttons
- Pique Interest with Infographics- We discussed numerous statistics, so far on the importance of visuals in your marketing. Can you imagine how much more you would remember if all of that data were put in simple yet crisp charts and graphs? Data is more understandable and quickly digested when you put it in visual form.
With the exception of high quality, engaging blog articles, survey research shows that people want to see more infographics, than any other type of content.
New, not to mention FREE tools such Canva- Piktochart– and Infogr.am make it so easy and so fast for you as a fitness trainer or wellness coach to put your relevant data and photos in eye-catching form.
Have you ever thought about getting one of those super expensive animated explainer videos? Well, you can actually make your own powerful free animated explainer and white board videos and animated slideshows with the Powtoon platform! This can really save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars!
- Visual Content Improves Traditional Marketing- Adding visuals really improves the effectiveness of traditional marketing. One study found that press releases with photos had 14% more views than plain text press releases. Not only that but:
Videos drastically improve email marketing campaigns too. Researchers found videos in emails increase click-through rates a stunning 100%!
Tip: Add a 90 second explainer video to the top of your blog or business website. This will allow you to quickly and effectively share your unique value proposition with prospective new customers.
You can also reuse old PowerPoint presentations and blogs on SlideShare. Here’s another tip for you: When a person views your presentation on SlideShare, you can download his or her information and treat it as a lead! It also includes links to your website at the end of your presentation.
Visuals Are The Trend for 2015 and Beyond!
Now you have some great tips, tricks and tools under your belt to catch the visual wave that’s just starting to transform the digital marketing landscape!
Remember: Your goal is not just getting new customers, but transforming those customers into social media brand ambassadors and raging fans.
It’s time to really start growing social media community. Frequently posting great visual content is simply one of the best and most cost effective ways to attract new prospects, keep them interested and continuously learning form and connected with you and the incredible value you have to offer them and their organizations.
The bottom line: The megatrend is social selling is toward visual content marketing. As it stands now, 66% of social media posts have visual content. Make sure your posts have it too!
John Williams says
Great information! As always!