As the amount of online content continues to explode, consumers' attention spans are diminishing. Adding multimedia content can help separate your message from the hordes of other messages bombarding your prospects. It can also help you target specific audiences and increase long-term visibility to your brand. Creating a rich mix of photos, videos and social media also enables digital marketers to engage and initiate ongoing dialogue with prospects and customers.
What’s more, the algorithms of search engines and some social media networks give extra weight to multimedia when determining the priority of information to display. Leveraging all types of multimedia helps brands tell their stories in an engaging, visual and dynamic way that more easily captures the increasing short attention span of readers.
Here are a few tips on how to integrate multimedia into your brand’s content marketing strategy.
Content sharing is becoming increasingly visual, as evidenced by the exploding popularity of social networks, such as Pinterest, Instragram and Vine. According to Track Social, posts on Facebook that include images get 120 percent more engagement than text updates.
Distributing an image along with your press release results in a wider reach than if the release is sent alone. According to PR Newswire, press releases that include multimedia assets—photos, video or downloaded files—generate up to 9.7 times more views than text-only releases.
It’s all about placement when you’re adding images to content. Increase the chance of your news getting picked up by search engines by placing the image at the top of the page and as close to the headline as possible.
Why? Because it is. YouTube is now the world’s second-largest search engine, and the number of companies with YouTube channels has increased 39 percent in the last year. So be there or be square.
One of the trends in video marketing is the use of humor to share your brand’s message. Good examples are using comics or memes. Memes, which help tell a story in a condensed way, are not only funny but can be used to share quotes or a customer case study by including a quote, photo or brand logo.
Facebook can give your content legs to cross over into new audiences. For example, when a fan of your brand likes videos you post directly to Facebook, your page will appear in that person’s Newsfeed, opening up your content to all of their friends.
Sure, it’s challenging to encapsulate an engaging PR pitch in 6 seconds, but ambitious marketing folks are jumping on board and using Twitter’s Vine app to create elevator pitches that quickly engage viewers with product demos, presentation clips, how-to video segments and “sneak peaks” of longer videos.
Don’t try and use the same message on all social channels since audiences differ. The goal should be to establish a presence on each social networking site and maintain it by offering interesting and valuable content to keep people coming back.
Using video to tell your story helps you convey a tremendous amount of information in an engaging and interesting way. But you'll want to keep them short—preferably under 2 minutes. People watch videos (even B2B videos!) to be entertained, so keep them tight to help retain your audience.
People want content that is quick and easy to consume anytime and anywhere, so the content you create needs to be able to be viewed everywhere on any device (laptops, iPads, smartphones, etc.). Be sure and load your content on your devices before releasing it to your audiences.
Create a compelling story
Choose the right type of content (images, videos, etc.) to communicate it
Partner with others to help tell your story
Pick the right channels
Promote your content strategically
Follow that roadmap, and you’ll reap the rewards: an engaged audience tuned into your message and open to continuing the conversation with your brand moving forward.
Photo Credit: Deposit Photos
Barb Schmitz is professional writer with more than 20 years of experience writing for B2B and B2C publications and web sites. She served as an editor on Computer-Aided Engineering magazine for more than 10 years before starting her own PR/freelance writing business in 2000. Her expertise includes interviewing, researching and writing whitepapers, blogs, eBooks, case studies, and feature articles.
