• by Eran Gilad , June 16, 2015

What’s top of mind with marketers? Creating, producing and publishing visual content, according to a recent State of the Industry report contracted by Chute. Based on its findings, the best-performing visual asset for desktops and mobile is professional photography. With website, email, advertising, and social media content development a significant focus this year, marketers face some big challenges. Some of the biggest hurdles include:

1. Maintaining timeliness
2. Difficulty obtaining approvals 
3. Governance

We all know how difficult it can be to organize, market and even monetizing content across social networks and other branded sites. But the biggest challenge for creating effective visual marketing content, cited in this report, is lack of time or staff resources. With nearly half of marketers spending more than 25% of their time each week designing, adjusting or handling visuals, it’s clear we have two problems: 1. Scalability and 2. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” as more social sites open up to advertisers and introduce new ad formats.

Marketing Automation to Address Scalability and Insights

Marketers can turn to individual or enterprise-scale professional digital asset management tools, like PhotoShelter’s Libris, to help achieve that timeliness factor, organization and even automate creatives to scale and suit new and existing social site requirements. Just as important, in my opinion, and as noted in the report, is the ability to obtain relevant insights. Nearly 60% of marketers said being able to automatically mine consumer insights would save them the most time. Here’s what they cited as the most important insights to capture using data automation tools:

1. Demographics
2. Psychographics
3. Audience segmentation
4. Purchase data
5. Web browsing
6. Social media profile
7. Geography

But I’d advise marketers to pay very close attention not only to how consumers interact with their visual content, but when, where, and with whom. Analyzing how people interact with photos — like, share, comment and converse — is critical to understanding sentiment. After all, conversations involve emotion — and they can’t be force fit into only one category of positive, negative or neutral. Analyzing emotion is a tough thing to do and technology is catching up to it, with recent advances in detecting mixed sentiment across text and photo analytics.

Keeping up with the Joneses

While Chute’s recent report summarizes obstacles marketers currently face with visual marketing, how will the continued commercialization of social sites impact them? Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram have turned to free ad-supported services for users. Instagram opened up advertising on its network back in 2013 but with its recent big announcement that it’s opening up its feed to all advertisers, Instagram is targeting businesses very strategically. I think a lot of brands will transition from more subtle forms of marketing to direct advertising. This is a huge opportunity for brands and businesses, and another important deliverable for visual marketers, which I feel will assume a greater role in the marketing mix. 

According to The Next Web, every second there are 2,100 new posts on Instagram, bringing an average of 180 million uploads each day. With more than 300 million monthly active users who spend an average of 257 minutes a month on the platform, think of the new audience brands and businesses can reach. It’s astounding and an incredible challenge to creative departments that need to transition from single channel development to mass or multi-channel production. It’s like “Little Shop of Horrors” — where I can picture frazzled marketers running a “feed me, Seymour” type of operation.

The good news is that there’s no shortage of visual marketing opportunities. With Instagram launching an ad program for businesses — I think marketers have a tremendous opportunity to post captivating images and use them in ads to attract new consumers and inspire fans. Keeping up with content creation and measuring user interactions, in a visual context, will be key to successfully marketing on Instagram.