Multimedia Marketing: Everything You Need to Know [2024]

When it comes to marketing, multimedia has long been in, and boring has been out.

For example:

• 81% of marketing experts post pre-produced videos.
• 47% of marketers leverage images in their marketing strategy.
• 68% of people aged 12 and over listen to online audio monthly.

Marketing that can engage the senses has the potential to have a great impact.

So what exactly is multimedia marketing? And how can you use it for your business?

This article will walk you through all of that, so that you can have the most effective marketing possible for your business.

What Is Multimedia Marketing?

Multimedia marketing refers to using different kinds of media, such as videos, images, audio, and text, to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It is not a commonly used term and is not to be confused with similar terms such as multimedia messaging, multichannel marketing, or omnichannel marketing.

Multimedia marketing could also refer specifically to companies that offer multimedia services (especially video).

Multimedia Marketing vs. Multichannel Marketing vs. Multimedia Messaging

Multimedia marketing should be differentiated from multimedia marketing or multimedia messaging.

Multichannel marketing would refer to taking advantage of multiple marketing channels—for example, email, SMS, and social media—rather than focusing on a small number of channels. Omnichannel marketing would be similar to multichannel marketing but would try to encompass all (or nearly all) marketing channels.

Multimedia messaging would refer specifically to including media files in text messaging, otherwise known as MMS. MMS is not a term that’s specific to marketing and also refers to exchanging media messages within personal interactions.

Different Types of Multimedia Marketing

Multimedia marketing involves using any and all media at your disposal, including but not limited to:

• Text: Obviously, it’s difficult to engage in marketing without using text!
• Images: Images can be a powerful tool for conveying emotions, illustrating concepts, and capturing attention.
• Videos: Videos have immense potential to tell compelling stories and engage users—videos can be anything from short promotional clips to in-depth product demonstrations. Their form factors can be classic embeds, stories, carousels, or floating videos.
• Animations: Similar to videos, animated graphics and GIFs add an element of fun and interactivity to marketing campaigns.
• Presentations: Presentations combine text, images, videos, and animations for impactful storytelling in marketing and are ideal for webinars and sales pitches—note that the best AI presentation makers can help streamline the creation process.
• Audio: Podcasts, sound bites, and music are examples of how audio content can be used in multimedia marketing.
• Infographics: As a specific type of image that presents data in an attractive way, infographics are another type of media you can use.

You’ll need to evaluate which types of media work best for your different marketing channels in order to determine what to invest in creating for your marketing.

Is Multimedia Marketing Effective?

In our experience, multimedia marketing can be tricky because it does sometimes expend a lot of resources to create and the benefit is not always easily measurable.

However, there is broad consensus that multimedia marketing, in particular using images and videos, is generally more effective than plain text only.

Yet there are some who suggest that when it comes to emails in particular, plain-text emails may sometimes perform better than emails that include images.

The bottom line is that with email and SMS, you should test for yourself with your own audience and see what performs better. For SMS, including media can sometimes cost you more money, so that’s something to keep in mind as well.

In general, however, for most marketing channels you can operate under the assumption that including multimedia elements can only help with engagement, as opposed to text-only content.

Best Practices for Multimedia Marketing

When engaging in multimedia marketing, here are a few considerations to keep in mind based on our experience and research…

1. Use Your Time and Resources Wisely

Unless you have a lot of resources on hand, you can’t create eye-popping multimedia content for every marketing initiative. You’ll need to evaluate which are the ones that could benefit the most from the highest quality multimedia content.

The main question to ask is, “Which content will get the most ROI?”

2. Use AI Tools, but Don’t Use Them Blindly

AI tools can make your multimedia content creation much more efficient—but the downside is that the outputs aren’t always the best.

So use AI tools, but don’t use them blindly. You’ll need to inject humanity into the content it produces.

3. Repurpose Your Multimedia Content

Save resources by repurposing your content. If you’ve created a powerful infographic, incorporate it into an existing blog post, and share it on social media, and send an email about it, for example. Don’t start from scratch with everything—leverage what you already have.

4. Outsource When Necessary

Sometimes you just don’t have the resources to do everything you want to do in-house.

Don’t be afraid to outsource when necessary. Outsourcing image creation in particular doesn’t have to be too costly (although video creation typically costs a pretty penny).

Some Ideas for Incorporating Multimedia Marketing

Beyond just the obvious concepts of including multimedia content in your regular marketing initiatives, here are a few other ideas for incorporating multimedia marketing into your strategy, to help get the juices flowing.

Use AI to Transform Blog Content into Audio Content

AI tools such as Murf (see list of tools below) can help transform your blog content into a voiceover that you can incorporate into your blog as a multimedia option, or that you can turn into a podcast.

If you go the podcast route, you can plug in some catchy music and perhaps even create an appealing graphic. Enhance accessibility and SEO by employing AI for audio transcription, providing a text version of your audio content. Then you can send an email and post on social media promoting the podcast and/or article.

Create Personalized Videos for Strategic Leads and Customers

A personalized video speaking to someone’s unique situation could go a long way toward winning their business and their loyalty.

You can do some kind of free audit or introduction, making sure to include their individual name. Since this isn’t the most scalable solution, you’ll want to make sure you have strategic leads or customers that you’re creating these videos for so that you’re not wasting time.

Go Live

Why not try spontaneous live videos on social media every once in a while? These don’t have to be polished and produced and can help you connect with your audience on a personal level through live interactions.

More Conventional Ideas

Other multimedia marketing ideas are more conventional:

• Turn your expertise and/or highest performing content into webinars, white papers, or ebooks
• Create GIFs
• Incentivize your customers to submit their own content promoting your services
• Create graphics that are optimized for social media to make it easily shareable
• Create YouTube shorts (less than 1 minute long)
• Create videos based off of your existing content

A Few Tools to Help with Multimedia Marketing

Here are some tools we’ve personally used to help with multimedia marketing…

Canva

Although not perfect, Canva is an awesome layman multimedia tool that allows you to create images and videos and to collaborate with team members in the process.

It allows graphic designers and non-graphic designers alike to create attractive visuals for multimedia marketing purposes. You can customize the size of your projects, pull from a database of visual elements that you can incorporate into your creations, and add music into video content.

Figma

Figma is a bit more involved than Canva but similarly allows you to create stunning visuals in collaboration with your team members. You can use it to create and organize designs and flow charts.

Figma is more organized and flexible than Canva, and is great for collaborative efforts, but as mentioned, is a bit more involved.

Design Pickle

If you don’t have the in-house resources to create all the visuals you’re wanting to create, Design Pickle allows you to submit image requests to professional graphic designers. The turnaround time is pretty quick and the results aren’t bad!

The cost isn’t cheap but it’s also very reasonable—certainly much less expensive than hiring a graphic designer (starting at $499/month).

Murf

On the audio side of things, Murf is an AI tool that allows you to convert scripts into narration, so that you can create videos with voiceovers (without actually having to do any voiceovers). Although AI still isn’t quite to the point yet in which the voices sound totally natural, some of the voices do sound pretty good!

Murf also has an integration with Canva that allows you to quickly create a voiceover for your Canva video projects.

Soundstripe

Soundstripe allows you to easily find royalty-free music that you can use in your videos or audio content (such as audio blog content or a podcast).

You can find just the right music you need to match the mood you’re trying to convey.

How Will You Engage in Multimedia Marketing?

There are so many possibilities with multimedia marketing that there’s always more we can do. Which multimedia initiatives will you pursue? Choose 1 or 2 and try it out in the upcoming months!

Interested in incorporating more SMS into your marketing? Try the Mobile Text Alerts platform for free today.