Brands Go Visual: Marketing in the Age of the Image

BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

Pinterest is the third most popular social site in the world. Instagram has 40 million users worldwide and generates more than 575 likes per second.

Infographics are shared 832 percent more often than articles.

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What’s driving our appetite for visual content and what does it mean for brands?

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

As brands put together their marketing budgets for 2013, now is the time to ensure visual content is an integrated part of the overall marketing strategy. While every brand will leverage this content differently, there are a few common ways visuals can build relevance and transform passive audiences into brand advocates and, in some cases, an extended sales force.

When given the pathways to create their own visual thumbprint, consumers rally to the cause. The only thing we like more than a good visual is creating that visual ourselves.

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

WHAT DOES THIS VISUAL REVOLUTION MEAN FOR BRANDS? For one, there’s more content than ever before, but our attention spans are shorter.

We’ve transformed from readers to a world of scanners, quickly glancing at pages or social feeds, picking out words or topics relevant to us and ignoring the rest.

With all this information at our fingertips, some of it complex and data-driven, we’re looking for ways to understand the story and the data in clear, concise, intuitive ways. There’s no single form of content more intuitive than a single image.

That encourages us not only to consume, but inspires us to engage.

Appeal to the Online Scanner We are a world of scanners – and we are desperate for the visual cues and shortcuts to help navigate online content. Getting the attention of the scanner is the ultimate challenge for marketers. What used to be accomplished through a blog or an article now requires nothing longer than a few words and, of course, an image.

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As a result, more and more websites, social media channels and especially apps have overhauled their desktop and mobile designs to emulate the Tumblr and Pinterest user interfaces to help consumers easily scroll through visual content or visualizations of more extensive content. In an attempt to redefine its relevance, Myspace recently overhauled their page design, creating a beautiful hybrid of Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook.

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As another recent example, the launch of Facebook Timeline allows consumers to see a story unfold through imagery, allowing a brand with a 100-year history like Coke to be consumed by a scanner in less than a minute.

News aggregates such as Flipboard or Google Currents are delivering content in a clean touch and swipefriendly format. More and more mobile apps such as Facebook, Google+ and Foursquare have adapted to a similar user interface.

Path, for example, allows you to easily scroll through a timeline of visuals. Documenting users’ and their friends’ daily movements through location based services that integrate a user’s photos, location maps and daily checkins. Utility-based apps such as the visual address book Brewster have adopted this approach by pulling in profile images from your linked

social feeds. All of the UI here has been dictated by the functionality and the best-case user experience, and brands should follow suit, whether they’re leveraging an existing platform or building their own.

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

Rally Your Brand Advocates

Consumers then see these products on “people like me” rather than just models, adding new relevance and emotional connection with just a single image.

Brands should consider ways to integrate these platforms to make it even easier for their happiest customers to take on the task of marketing products for them.

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Visual content is not only there to be consumed – it inspires and rallies your most engaged users to participate with content and curate it themselves.

Platforms like Instagram have made this particularly convenient. By driving consumers to take their own photos of your product or their experience using your service, brands can enable users to serve as an extended sales force or brand advocates.

For example, clothing brands such as Betabrand and FreePeople integrate into the visual social feed onto their site’s product pages. Users submit photos of themselves or friends wearing the brand’s latest styles of clothing, and attach these photos to the relevant product pages through a designated hashtag.

Consumers then see these products on “people like me” rather than just models – adding new relevance and emotional connection with just a single image. In addition, users who see their own images reflected on the site itself will be more likely to share that content with friends and purchase additional items from the brand.5 Beyond creation, the curation of content gives consumers more control over how they experience the content. For instance, using Pinterest, a consumer can not only “pin” the images that resonate with their interests, but they can also segment that content, putting it into more intuitive themes that can then be shared with others. This allows users to demonstrate their deeper connection through self-expression of interests or simple questions. The narrative or story is embedded within the visual interpretation that invites others to like, share or participate in sharing how they view and experience that narrative.

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

97.8 MINUTES

THE AVERAGE VISIT TO PINTEREST DUE TO THE EASE OF EXPRESSING A SINGLE IDEA THROUGH AN IMAGE.

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DOLLARS

THE AVERAGE ONLINE ORDER FOR BRANDS SUCH AS AMERICAN EAGLE, STAPLES, AND TARGET, ALL OF WHICH USE VISUAL INFLUENCE

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Encourage Greater Participation From blogs to posts to tweets, content continues to consolidate itself into shorter and more compelling snapshots to tell a more complex story. As a result, brands are embracing the infographic, with the dual benefit of communicating complicated information or data and serving as a vehicle to distribute other content. An infographic could be another medium created in addition to a blog post or a video, giving users another option as to how they want to engage with the same data.

In some cases, brands are expanding to a visual content strategy to reach new audiences or to inspire creativity. Scholastic has brilliantly leveraged Pinterest to give these audiences a new way to engage with their products through creative pinboard topics, including Bling for Bookworms, Classroom Ideas or Libraries We Love.

Pinterest and platforms like it are evolving the idea of discussion boards – rather than talking at length, users are able to express a single idea through an image.

As a result of this ease of use, the average visit to Pinterest lasts 97.8 minutes.6 According to Shopify, Pinterest users not only buy the products they pin, but spend more on average than their Facebook counterparts.1 With the average online order being $80, brands such as American Eagle, Staples and Target are leveraging the channel’s visual influence and friend recommendations. That is, using both images and videos to highlight various pinboards that offer the relevance to both the user and brand.

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BRANDS GO VISUAL: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

BUILD A BETTER BRAND EXPERIENCE The emergence of visual forms of content have enabled consumers to have more control over their own brand experience and how they share that experience with others to drive sales. In other words, visual content allows users to show, not tell, a receptive audience why they favor a certain product..

35%

OF USERS ARE MORE INTERESTED IN A FRIEND’S PICTURE THAN A STATUS POST

The best visual content strategy will not only grab the attention of the scanner, rally the user, and encourage greater participation with your product – it will accomplish all three. By first taking the time to understand how and where your target consumers and stakeholders are using and engaging with content, you’ll be able to better build emotional capital and leverage the power of a single image.

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SOURCES 1. Mark Hayes, “How Pinterest Drives Ecommerce Sales,” Shopify (May 16,2012) 2. “15 Stats about the Billion Dollar Instagram App,” Lime Canvas (June 13, 2012) 3. Lauren Dugan,“Infographics Shared on Twitter Get 832% More Retweets than Images and Articles,”

Mediabistro (August 15, 2012)

4. “Offline Storytelling for Online Scanners,” Big Spaceship (July 20, 2012) 5. Lauren Indvik,“Fashion Retailer Integrates Instagram onto Product Pages,” Mashable (July 24, 2012) 6. “35 Statistics That Fuel the Battle Between Pinterest and Google+,” Hubspot (April 24, 2012) 7. “Study Shows Images are the Most Engaging Updates on Social Networks,” Simply Zesty (July 28, 2012)

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Carl Sorvino

Executive Creative Director 201.964.2376| csorvino@mww.com

MWW

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