How to Successfully Integrate Multimedia Into Your Blog

• Updated on: 2023-02-28
• Read original article here

We often think of the word blog as a way to deliver words. And we associate vlogging with a way to deliver content via video. Today, delivering both – and more – to your audience is not just recommended, but essential. 

The overarching objective of a blog is to provide quality content to your audience. Writing is just one aspect of blogging: a quality blog will include multimedia like videos, photos, GIFs, audio, slideshows, infographics and more. 

Video is still king, and the most used content marketing format today. A survey by Wyzowl reported that people share videos at twice the rate of any other form of content. They also found that 88% of people were convinced to buy a product or service based on a brand’s video.

Multimedia helps create a more engaged audience and allows topics to be easily explained. In addition, it holds the attention of readers who prefer to skim.

According to HubSpot, 51% of marketers plan to invest more budget into short-form video. This includes creating content for video platforms like TikTok, as well as inserting video into other content and platforms. Tutorial and ‘how-to’ videos are a great way for people to learn a skill or a specific task, and they'll remember your brand as the one that taught them. 

Businesses like appliance parts distributors lend themselves readily to these types of videos. Which sounds more effective: Paragraph upon paragraph detailing how to replace the motor coupling on a washing machine? Or those paragraphs accompanied by a video of the steps actually being performed? 

Are other types of businesses out of luck when it comes to how-to videos? Not at all. Incorporating video into a blog post about how you perform a certain task, how you navigate a certain aspect of your business or how you assemble your number-one product really helps your audience visualize your brand in action and reinforces your message.

When words are accompanied by images, readers have a much better chance of retaining the information.

Slideshows are a great way to showcase a large number of images, while infographics do the same for potentially dense written material like statistics, lists or geographical data. Infographics are also liked and shared three to four times more often than other types of content on social media. 

When a blog post contains instructions, images are even more important. If your audience can literally see what you mean, it makes product use or assembly much easier, which translates to a more positive overall brand experience. 

Podcasts and other recurring audio events are a way to reach audiences you might otherwise not – and ingrain your brand into their everyday routine. Not everyone has time to sit down and read or watch a video, but they can queue up your podcast for when they're making dinner or going for a jog. 

Bonus: Podcast guests will likely use their own website and social media to publicize their episode, which will expand your visibility and credibility.  

In fact, all of these multimedia blog post ideas not only help your website 's SEO, but also help position your brand as a thought leader and trusted resource for valuable content.

Multimedia increases the time spent on your site, which can bolster your page’s search engine ranking. But search engine crawlers also look at tagging and metadata, so without relevant keywords here, you'll miss out on the full benefits of deploying multimedia. 

Metadata – information like file name, title and description – doesn't just help your team find the right video or graphic in your computer system. It can boost your multimedia blog post's SEO. 

Graphics, audio files and videos must be relevant to and enhance audiences' understanding of the topic at hand. This might require custom work, but it's worth the effort.

As with all technology, multimedia components for their own sake add no value to your blog. At worst, they can seem gimmicky and result in diminished trust in your brand. 

Your audience won't reap the benefits of multimedia if file sizes are not compressed and cause the content to load at a snail's pace, or if the content itself takes too long to engage viewers. 

In these cases, viewers will likely leave your blog for another resource where the information they want can be accessed more quickly. 

Keeping your audience on your page is great for SEO, and interactive or multimedia elements are an excellent way to accomplish that.

Assets should be playable within your post rather than via links that transfer users to another page: more links make it more likely that your audience doesn't make it back to the post where they started. 

Be conscious of maintaining a seamless user experience with any links you do include. Broken links or ones leading to irrelevant or outdated content can chip away at your brand's credibility and frustrate audiences to boot. 

Blogs are a great way to drive organic traffic to your website and brand. Interactive or multimedia elements within a post can help advance your audience through different stages of the buyer's journey by introducing different areas of your business, such as solutions and services you offer. 

A call-to-action (CTA) lets the audience know exactly what to do if they want to continue engaging with your business. 

For example, the end of a video showing how a toy store crafts their wooden blocks could say: "Visit our inventory page to see all of the handmade toys we have to offer at The Toy Place." 

What does the business want the audience to do next? Visit the inventory page. The path is clear. Reinforce the message by including a similar linked CTA at the end of the post.

Two things are true about today's culture: One, we all consume content differently. And two, our attention spans are shrinking – a blog post needs to capture its audience within 30 seconds. 

Attention can be captured and held by creating one blog post that contains many different types of multimedia. This allows the page to be easily shared and digested by a wide variety of users, and it can boost the performance of your blog and website by keeping those users engaged for longer time periods.

Multimedia helps your blogs not only be read but listened to, watched, interacted with and – most importantly – remembered as a positive experience with your brand. 

The credibility and performance of a blog depends not just on the quantity of multimedia assets but also quality. But even the highest quality videos won't have their desired impact if they aren't part of a well-developed digital marketing strategy. 

Click here to learn how Kuno Creative can help your business create value-added video marketing pieces that integrate seamlessly into an overall strategy that will elevate your brand well above its peers.