Why You Need a Visual Communications Strategy

In today’s fast-paced world, staying on top of the latest innovations is key. Everyone has a website, but what can you do to make sure yours stands out from the crowd?

Creating unique and optimized online video content increases your chances of being seen and heard. After all, people retain only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they see, but 80% of what they hear and see. A video attracts attention quickly, and is a medium for providing information through the use of combined images and words.

It comes as no surprise that the use of videos for marketing and advertising has increased within recent years. However, more importantly to acknowledge is that online video viewership has been climbing steadily with no signs of slowing.

The statistics don’t lie: according to eMarketer.com, 60% of surveyed views would rather watch a video than read text. 65% of U.S. executives surveyed said they would view a website after seeing a video about that website. 75% of executives surveyed say that they view business-related videos at least once a week.

Here are some other reasons why businesses should have unique strategic visual communications campaigns:

• A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research. (Forrester, January 2009)

• With proper optimization, video increases the chance of a front-page Google result by 53x. (Forrester, January 2010)

• Video results appear in about 70% of the top 100 listings, the type of content most often displayed in universal or blended search results. (Marketingweek, 2011)

• There were nearly 25 million mobile video viewers at the end of 2010, an increase of 40% over the previous year.77% of mobile video viewers report watching more mobile video than they did one year ago. (eMarketer, 2010)

• According to Cisco, video will increase from 30% of Internet traffic to 90% of Internet traffic by 2013. (Cisco, 2010)

Tags: Public Relations, marketing, Technology, Web 2.0, C-Suite, strategy, Thought Leadership, video, campaign, content, internet, optimized video, SEO, traffic, visual communications