• by Maryanne Conlin , April 17, 2013

Despite the irony that this post lacks graphic content, I’m hooked on the rightness of including visuals as a big part of any content marketing strategy. My fellow MediaPost contributor summed it up: The future of the social Web is all about pictures!

Yet, as many brands gear up their content marketing departments, writers take the driver’s seat, with graphics a secondary consideration. In the parlance any mom would recognize from her offspring - “That’s so wrong!” 

To connect with the 21^st century mom, with cell phone in one hand and toddler in the other brands need to grab her attention and grab it quickly. As anyone who has tried to surreptitiously check email with children within 50 yards will tell you, that phone/tablet/computer is likely to be yanked away mid-sentence. A full 40% of the population are visual learners, picture prefer-ers, moms, by necessity are forced to be too! 

But don’t believe me, Try these simple steps to improve your content marketing strategy

1. Spend the time to pick the pics. Make graphics an integral part of your planning process, not a secondary consideration of what visual goes best with the written word. As a blogger, I’m guilty of this myself, writing the post then picking the picture. Turn this around and find the graphic first.

2. Don’t get wordy on social media channels. Facebook posts should primarily be large photos and pithy copy. Think headlines not paragraphs. On Twitter, heavily sprinkle Vine videos and images throughout your stream. Link back to Pinterest for powerful posts on all channels and don’t forget Instagram as a powerful tool to reach mobile moms.

3. Prefer pictures. Part of a good content marketing strategy is listening and responding to consumer conversation. Now more than ever that story is told through pictures. Scanning responses and crunching numbers on your listening software or social media monitoring program (Radian6, Social Bakers, etc.) is easier. Digging deeper and analyzing what and how moms respond visually can, well…be worth a thousand words.