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“Content Marketing” is one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing. It requires businesses to create content that their customers actually want. Content that helps them. And it is such a hot term right now because it is one of the biggest gaps between the content marketers create and the information our customers are looking for.

That is why more than 90% of marketers are using content marketing, but only 42% rate their content marketing efforts as effective, according to a recent study.

If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?

The Answer is Visual Content

Articles with images get 94% more views than those without. And posts with videos attract 3x more inbound links than plain text posts.  A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.

And this holds up when you look at how the social world is evolving. The meteoric rise of sites like Vine, Instagram and Pinterest, as well as the efforts by Facebook and Twitter to add more visual elements to their platforms are simply following the trend that visual content is the best way to reach short-attention-span audiences in a world filled with so many content choices.

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Images are the key to breaking through the clutter of social media. Here are three main opportunities for marketers to take advantage of this trend.

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There are three main opportunities for marketers to take advantage of this trend.

1. Include highly relevant images on all of the pages on your website. This will ensure that your site is highly sharable on the visual web and can drive more traffic, leads, and sales to your site. All pages, especially product pages and blog posts, should include highly relevant photos. Try pinning your pages on Pinterest to see what images show up for each page.
2. Optimize your social content to break through the clutter with images. Most leading businesses are making use of images in their content on all social networks. Your Facebook, Twitter, blog, and even LinkedIn strategies should include images.
3. Join some of the fastest growing image social networks. Pinterest and Instagram are two of the quickest growing social networks, and brands have seen tremendous success in brand building as well as generating traffic, leads, and sales from these networks. Take a look at these sites and build a strategy for how your business can get results.