Content Creation

8 Tips to Create Valuable Rich Media Assets

CopyPress

May 26, 2016 (Updated: February 28, 2020)

As an experienced content marketer, you’re versed in developing copy that captures your audience’s attention and encourages both sales and growth. To give your audience a more personalized and engaging experience, take your content to new heights by incorporating rich media. Follow these eight tips to create valuable rich media assets that complement your digital marketing efforts.

Recognize the Flexibility of Rich Media

Image via Flickr by AJC ajcann.wordpress.com

If you’ve written or read many blog posts, white papers, or e-books, you know that these types of media often follow the same linear format. Although some text-based media formats get creative and share information in new and interesting ways, writers can only do so much with text.

With rich media, however, the potential to tell stories becomes limitless. Use videos, podcasts, animated GIFs, and other types of rich media to take your story in different directions. Depending on what resonates with your audience, you can invite users to continue to explore your narrative in a way that further engages them.

Structure Information Clearly

While flexibility is a strong point for rich media, too much flexibility can cause confusion for readers. Help your audience make the most of your content by structuring information clearly and providing guides along the way. Menus allow visitors to navigate through content, and prompts on the screen offer hints about which elements are interactive. Calls to action help visitors understand how to process your rich media assets and show them what to do next.

Focus on Visual Examples to Illustrate Your Point

Making your point using text only isn’t always easy, especially if your audience’s short attention span doesn’t always respond well with the written word. When you want to drive home a point in an e-book or highlight a key example in a white paper, insert an interactive or a video to make your point memorable. If you do visuals well, these examples will encourage your audience to click through to your website to learn more or share content with their followers.

Make Infographics Shareable

With their straightforward visual appeal and creative way of revealing information, infographics take complicated ideas and make them easier to grasp for even the casual viewer. Infographics are also ideal for sharing on social media, since they offer quick bites of information. Use a distinctive design, graphics, and information to encourage widespread sharing and to generate new leads.

Know How to Generate Leads With Interactives

Static infographics can easily attraction attention from new clients, but when done well, interactive infographics have excellent potential for lead generation. This type of rich media is relatively complex, since it reveals different data depending on how your audience interacts, but this added element of personalization can go a long way toward building brand awareness and generating valuable leads.

Within the conclusion of any interactive, be sure to prompt your audience to follow through. Include a strong call to action to introduce new leads to your business’s sales funnel.

Grasp the Conversion Potential of White Papers

When you write an effective white paper or produce an informed case study, you have the potential to win over knowledgeable and highly interested clients. After all, white papers are ideal for demonstrating your thorough knowledge of your field and positioning yourself as an expert in your industry.

When you incorporate rich media such as videos or infographics, you’ll give readers a new way of comprehending high-level information and increase the chances that they’ll remember the most important details of your case study. Successful white papers also give potential clients the opportunity to understand the results you can generate, trust your brand, and convert interest into business.

Educate Your Audience With E-Books

As a reliable medium for establishing your business as a knowledgeable presence in your field, e-books allow you to delve into an important topic with much more depth than you’d be able to tackle in a lengthy blog post. E-books are also an ideal format for answering complex audience or industry questions, especially when they include rich media assets in addition to text.

Make your e-books more effective by tailoring the copy to your target audience and adding rich media like audio or video to educate readers about your niche. Use your knowledge of your audience’s most pressing questions to your advantage and address the topics that you know will strike a chord with your audience.

While selling your e-book is an option, consider using it as a lead generator instead. Offer it for download to interested clients who give their contact information, get them into your sales funnel, and follow up on the leads to gain more value from the interactions.

Drive Engagement With Video

As one of the most popular types of rich media, video appears in more than 90 percent of marketers’ campaigns. Out of that large percentage of marketers, more than 80 percent of people found that video had a positive impact on their business.

The primary reason that video has grown so much over the past few years is that this type of media has the potential to drive significant engagement. Statistics show that videos increase search traffic by as much as 157 percent and that online users are about 50 percent more likely to look for more information about a product or service after watching a video. Since a single minute of video equals nearly 2 million words, marketers can convey an impressive amount of information through this type of media.

If you’re looking to drive engagement with rich media, create a short video that aligns with your brand goals. To make it as effective and share-worthy as possible, develop a video that inspires positive emotions and start sharing it through your brand’s social platforms. The generally high engagement rates and memorability factor of video make video a smart method for establishing brand awareness and generating leads for your business.

As the online landscape becomes increasingly interactive, text-based copy alone won’t always grab your audience’s attention. Stay ahead of your competition and create effective rich media assets for your content.

Anna Sonnenberg

Anna Sonnenberg is a digital marketer who specializes in paid social strategy, social media management, content strategy, and email marketing. For over five years, she has run Sonnenberg Media, a digital micro agency that works with small businesses in the natural food and beverage industry, health and sustainability market, and travel space.

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