It was sometime in the 1980s, and I was home for the summer watching the Phil Donahue show. His guest had this crazy machine that he put a photograph in, dialed a phone number on and it sent the photo to someone in Australia. And that person sent it back with comments on it. A fax machine. It blew my mind!
If I mentioned a fax machine to my child today, he would have no clue what I was talking about and would ask me why I didn’t just take a picture of it with my phone and text it to someone. Or just post it on social media.
My, has technology changed. And as marketers navigating through this ever-changing landscape, we have to change with it.
In 1920, fewer than 15% of ads had any sort of photography. Due to the technology of the time, marketers had to rely on words or illustrations to tell their story. But, with advances in photography equipment, by 1930, almost 80% of ads used photography. Why? Not because they could, but because someone somewhere along the way figured out that using photographic visuals was more effective in capturing their audience’s attention than words!
And the same holds true today with audiences.
You Must Evolve Along With Technology
Technology has changed. Since the Phil Donahue show went off the air, we have gone from newspapers, TV and magazines as our primary media for communicating our brands, to computers. We now have countless social media sites, with more popping up daily. And, just like back in the days of illustrated ads turning to photographs, as marketers, it is evolve or risk losing your audience.
According to Bufferblog, visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social medial than any other type of content. And articles with an image every 75-100 words got twice as many social shares than articles with fewer images.
Slap a picture on your social media and you are all set, right? No! Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than social media content without relevant images.
Evolve to Help Grow Your Business
Lots of stats here. But we need to take note of these stats…as modern day marketers, we know what this all equates to…more shares equals a bigger audience. And with links leading this bigger audience back to your website, products or services, that means more business for you.
We started with websites, our online brochures. These evolved into dynamic websites with changing blog content engaging our audience in interaction and comments. These posts became shorter and we made the shift to Facebook and Twitter – saying what we needed in 140 characters or less. As so it became inevitable that we would reach a point in which we would then rely on images to tell our story, and the popularity of YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and now SnapChat exploded.
What does this shift mean for your business? You must evolve. You must create your own visual content and promote sharing. Otherwise, you will be sitting in your office with your thermal fax machine with no audience for your business.
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