Spurred by increased digitisation around the world, alongside global social media saturation, consumption of digital content is growing exponentially.
From retail to real estate, businesses are expected to showcase their product in the best light possible, and regularly engage their customer base with high-quality visuals. In 2022, every business is now in the content business.
What this means for any business, is that you are now running a multimedia company, whether you like it or not.
It’s no news that the digital economy in the Middle East has been radically transformed over the past few years. From artificial intelligence and blockchain to machine learning technology, the Middle East is quickly emerging as a global leader in terms of rapid digitisation.
However, whilst it’s easy to get lost in the noise of the tech world – the world of NFTs, ICOs, and designer clothing for your metaverse avatar – it’s important to recognise that, above all, our highly digitised world offers businesses the unique and unprecedented opportunity to interact directly with our customers.
At the end of the day, it’s what purchasing decisions are made on, it engages customers new and existing, and builds credibility and loyalty in a very busy global marketplace.
Better content sells more products. It rents more houses, sells more cars, attracts new customers, and converts more leads.
The use of imagery and videos dramatically increases brand awareness and boosts conversion rates far quicker than text. Deliveroo states that high-quality photos lead to a 7 percent uplift in menu item orders.
Booking.com states that 92 percent of its users are more likely to book properties with high-quality images.
Quality photography and videography, across any business vertical, is no longer optional, or a ‘nice to have’ – it’s essential.
With this ever-growing demand for digital content, there is one obvious pain point – it’s hard to produce and manage, especially accounting for challenges presented by scale and location.
Due to the consumer appetite for quality visual content, and recognising the ROI it provides, businesses large and small have a major bottleneck, which is only increasing in scale and scope: to produce more content, better content, and to get it to your customer faster than the competition, or at least as quickly as your customer wants it.
How this looks for your business or industry will of course depend on multiple factors. An e-commerce company, with thousands of SKUs, will have an almost overnight requirement for product imagery at scale.
More emotive purchasing decisions, such as real estate or automotive can hinge on the availability of clear, beautiful imagery that showcases properties and vehicles to entice potential customers into the showhome or showroom.
The first positive touchpoint a customer may have with your restaurant will be engaged by attractively presented menu items, drawing them to click.
As the world begins to round the corner of the Covid-19 crisis, and global economies begin to reopen and recover, consumer behaviour is predicted to change for good.
Over the past two years, global digital adoption rates have exponentially increased, at an unprecedented scale.
McKinsey report that we have covered a “decade in days” in the adoption of digital since the start of the pandemic. In a report on consumer behaviour, they state that businesses must urgently consider embracing new trends in order to “stay relevant across multiple [digital] touchpoints”, “re-evaluate physical-store footprint” and “allocate resources [towards] increased digital engagement.” The pandemic is said to have caused digital consumption to “rise by over 30 percent.”
The signs all point in one direction – digital content is here to stay, and businesses must accept their positions as multi-media creators, and the importance of this within their marketing strategies and budgets before it’s too late.
Whilst the demand for digital content has never been higher, digital content production, on the other hand, remains in the dark ages. In order to regularly produce content, businesses are scrambling for solutions.
Some may chance it with the freelancer grey market, spending time and money trying to find, vet and manage individual photographers and videographers across different regions. And of course, results may vary.
Some attempt to bring production in-house, finding themselves managing large teams of full-time employees, either unable to cope with demand spikes or with excess capacity and oversupply.
It’s not unheard of for realtors to be given their own cameras, with no training and little oversight, to shoot their own listings. There have even been reports of major hotel groups arming waiters with cameras.
Whilst ‘any’ content is arguably better than ‘no’ content, these days, digital content is too important to be an afterthought.
A cohesive content plan, with high-quality photography and videography captured at scale and across locations, has to be the bedrock of any marketing plan, from single product SMEs to multinational enterprises. Your bottom line will thank you for it.
Aidan Christofferson and Jacopo Trinca, co-Founders of www.flashy.ae
Follow us on
