The enormous value of visual content is becoming impossible to ignore, especially for hotel marketers. The fastest growing social networks include Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest – all networks based on visuals – while platforms like Facebook have been making enormous efforts to include more visual features (Facebook Stories, new image-like statuses, etc).

Visual content marketing should now be a cornerstone of every hotel’s marketing strategy and a regular presence across your owned media channels such as your blog and social media. Don’t believe us? Here’s some definitive statistics to prove it.

Studies show that when information is delivered verbally and people are asked to recall what they were told three days later, they retain around 10% of that information. However, if a relevant image or video is provided along with that information, participants were able to recall about 65% of the information.

Vision is perhaps our most important sense, especially when it comes to marketing, so it’s essential that hotel marketers and those developing hotel marketing solutions are appealing to this sense with everything they have. If you look at social media, the figures speak for themselves:

• • Social media posts with videos attract three more links than posts with only text.
  • Posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than an update with text only.
  • The highest organic engagement on Facebook goes to posts with videos at 13.9%, with posts with photos following close behind at 13.7%.
  • 8bn videos are watched on Facebook every single day.

Many marketers are already picking up on the importance of visual content marketing. More than a third (37%) of marketers say that visual marketing is the most important form of content for their business – beaten only by blogging, which inched ahead at 38%.

The prevalence of visual content marketing has also see the rise of a very specific content format: the infographic. These combinations of images and bite-sized snippets of text tied together in an appealing graphic receive three times as many likes and shares as any other type of content on social media.

Studies analysing eye-tracking have found that people using the internet pay more attention to information-carrying images like infographics. People who are following instructions or directions with a combination of text and illustrations also perform 323% better than those following text-only directions – making infographics ideal for ‘how-to’ or tutorial-style posts.

Visual content marketing also continues to grow and evolve in exciting new ways. The rise of live video has changed how we consume video on social networks – studies show that Facebook users spend three times longer watching live videos than a traditional upload. 14% of marketers used live video as a marketing device last year, with the figure expected to skyrocket in 2017 as more platforms add live streaming tools to their service. 

For more information about refining your own visual content marketing strategy, or hotel marketing solutions that will help grow your business, get in touch with the Digital Hotelier team today.