In a comprehensive marketing strategy, plain text isn’t enough—you need other types of media to engage users and create compelling content that performs well. Learn what rich content is, why it matters, and how it makes your content more competitive in this guide.
What Is Rich Content?
Rich content, or rich media, is a digital asset that goes beyond plain text to enhance user engagement through multimedia elements like videos, audio, and interactive features. Common types of rich content include:
- Videos: Product demos, location tours, live podcasts, social media videos, interviews/Q&As
- Infographics: Comparison charts, data-driven graphs, process or how-to flowcharts
- Interactive Content: Quizzes, polls, calculators, interactive maps, interactive games
- Audio Content: Podcasts, interviews, blog audio transcripts
- User-Generated Content (UGC): Customer photos and videos, reviews and testimonials, social media posts
Why Is Rich Content Important?
Rich content is important because, when compared to simple text, it better captures attention, drives deeper engagement, creates more opportunities to rank in SERPs and generative search, and can easily be repurposed across channels. Explore the benefits of using rich media in your marketing strategy below.
Increased Engagement
Rich media, like videos and images, typically attracts more attention than simple text, which can help increase dwell time on your website or blog post. Interactive content receives 52.6% higher engagement on average—holding your audience’s attention for 6.5 minutes longer than static content. The human brain also processes visuals faster than text, and remembers the information—and your brand—400% better. Hurrdat’s rich content strategist Reagan Bergen explains:
“Rich content captures the attention of consumers in ways that traditional written copy cannot. Whether it’s data-driven infographics, how-to videos, or animated GIFs, rich content keeps people on the page longer and makes your brand look more professional.”
Enhanced SEO
With the rise of visual search and video search, rich content has become essential to outperforming competitors in SERPs. Businesses relying solely on a text-based content strategy won’t show up in image and video search, so you’ll lose potential customers to competitors that are publishing rich media.
Bergen’s tip:
“B2B brands in particular have a huge opportunity within image and video search results on Google. Use professional product photos, lifestyle shots, and video tutorials that show your products or services in context. And don’t just rely on YouTube to host those explainer videos. Embed your rich content directly onto your product or landing pages to boost SEO.”
As your engagement metrics like dwell time and website traffic increase, search engines may take it as a signal of high-quality content and rank it higher. Even the potential to earn inbound links improves, as high-quality rich content is more likely to be shared and linked.
Better AI Search Visibility
Rich content improves visibility in AI-powered search results and AI Overviews because it makes your content easier for search engines and large language models to interpret and surface, and it’s more helpful to users—which lines up with Google’s EEAT principals. Visuals like videos, infographics, and step-by-step graphics break down complex topics and align with the kind of helpful, informational responses AI is designed to generate.
When paired with schema markup, descriptive alt text, and clear header formatting, these elements increase your chances of being featured in AI summaries. In the 30 days following the addition of rich content, Hurrdat’s self storage client generated keyword rankings within AIOs for over 200 new keywords and increased impressions by over 200% for how-to blog posts like “How to Choose the Right RV and Boat Storage in [City]” and “How to Create a Self Storage Inventory List.”
Improved Brand Storytelling
Visuals have a greater emotional impact than plain text, so rich media helps your target audience develop a deeper emotional connection with your brand—making them more likely to buy your product or services regularly. Video and audio can also foster a more personal relationship, especially if they allow customers to see behind the scenes or hear from real people in your business. And because infographics, charts, and other multimedia are the best ways to simplify complex topics, rich content helps you demonstrate your brand’s expertise to potential clients and search engines more effectively than just text could.
Higher Conversion Rates
Higher engagement and stronger, more memorable messaging generally translates to better conversions—and you get both with rich media. On average, Hurrdat increased the conversion rate on paid landing pages by 16% for a financial services client when we added videos to the page.
With high-quality images, interactive demos, detailed guides, and other rich media, you help shoppers make more confident buying decisions. Showing your products or services clearly and answering customers’ questions upfront builds trust and smooths out the buyer’s journey to make people less likely to hesitate, bounce, or abandon their cart.
Repurposing Potential
Create quality rich content once and reuse it across all your marketing channels forever. That way, you save time and money and extend your reach instead of working harder by having to create from scratch every time. Rich content can easily be reused across blog posts, webpages, social channels, emails, local business listings, and paid ads. Infographics can be taken from a blog and posted on social media, videos can transfer from social media to your website, podcast transcripts can be turned into quality blog posts or emails, and so on. A marketing strategy where you repurpose content means your best ideas keep working for you long after you hit publish.
Ready to make your content perform better with rich media? Hurrdat Marketing offers content marketing and creative services that are strategic, well-designed, and results-driven. Contact us today to plan your next campaign!
