New report highlights importance of leveraging visual content in customer engagement

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The study of senior marketing executives examines why only 27% indicated that they have the ability to aggregate and manage visual media assets across marketing and non-marketing teams even though 65% believe it is critical to their success.

The study reveals that marketers believe visual assets, including photography, illustrations, infographics and videos, are core to customer engagement and will increase in usage in the coming year. Video will most dramatically increase in importance in the near future, according to 79% of senior marketers. Infographics (60%), photographs (50%), and illustrations (41%) will increase in usage.

Areas explored in the paper include:

• The role of visual media in marketing and brand storytelling strategies
• Anticipated shifts in the importance of visual media
• Budget allocations and anticipated shifts in spend for visual media development
• Key challenges and obstacles to maximising ROI
• Impact and value of visual media aggregation and consolidation

Lack of leverage

Conducted in partnership with Libris, a PhotoShelter business unit, the study reveals that internal silos, disconnected content development strategies and a vast list of other marketing priorities have prevented visual assets from being fully leveraged across the organisation.

"Marketers have been remiss in approaching the visual asset dialogue as part of the strategic customer experience and engagement dialogue," said Liz Miller, Senior VP of Marketing for the CMO Council.

"Perhaps because visual assets have long been the domain of creative or agency resources, the conversation around maximising value across the organisation has fallen off of the priority list. But as customers continue to react in meaningful ways to visual media, marketing cannot afford to stand idly by and not include visuals in the content ROI agenda."

Not a priority

Consumer research shows that 40% of customers will respond better to visual information than plain text (Zabisco). Marketers in turn, have shifted content production to include vast quantities of graphics, videos, photography and illustrations. Infographic production, by one estimate, increases by 1% every day (Zabisco). Yet according to the 177 marketing executives surveyed by the CMO Council in the second quarter of 2015, current investments in centralisation of these assets do not reflect this level of priority.

"Companies will continue making massive investments in the production and procurement of visual media assets because of the obvious and powerful impact on audience engagement and customer experience," explained Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter. "Yet as the study shows, hiding these assets away in team silos is destroying the greater organisation's potential return on content investments. As more content is captured and created, companies will need to rebalance their focus with a greater emphasis on strategies behind digital asset management, including centralisation, storage and accessibility."

Demographics

The audit, conducted through the CMO Council's Content ROI Center, tapped into the insights of 177 senior marketers, with 52% from B2B organisations, 18% from B2C companies and 30% from hybrid organisations selling to B2B2C. A quarter of respondents hail from organisations with more than $1bn in annual revenue, and 41% hold chief marketing officer, head of marketing or senior vice president of marketing titles.

The study can be downloaded here www.cmocouncil.org/r/from-creativity-to-content.