One of the most common questions we hear from PR professionals is, “How can I make my press releases more visual?”. Most PR pros understand that visual content is important, but for an industry that still relies heavily on pitch emails and text-based press releases, making the switch to visual PR can be daunting.

Well, PR pros, you’re in luck. This post is your ultimate guide to creating visual press releases.  We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, but we promise it will be worth it. Here’s a quick overview of what’s in store:

• Types of visual content – There are four main types of visual content you can use in your PR programs. We’ll cover them all, complete with plenty of real-world examples.
• Best practices for each content type – Most of these are just common sense, but don’t skip over this section. We’ve thrown in a few helpful hints that might not have occurred to you.
• Helpful DIY tools – For those of you who want to go the DIY route, we’ve put together a fantastic list of online tools to help you do so. Bonus: they’re all easy to use, free or inexpensive, and incredibly powerful.
• Outsourcing tips – If you intend to outsource content development, check out our list of vendors and guidelines to make sure you get the most for your money.

There are many reasons to include visual content in your press releases, but the biggest by far is that visual content gets shared more. A lot more. Facebook posts with images get 53% more likes and 104% more comments^[1] than the average post. Tweets with pictures are nearly twice as likely to be retweeted^[2]. And content with compelling images gets 94% more views^[3] than content without.

If that’s not enough to convince you that visual content matters, chew on this: A 2012 study by PR Newswire^[4] found that press releases with photos garnered nearly twice as many views as text alone. The more multimedia you add, the more that percentage skyrockets. Press releases with text, photo, video, and downloadable files received up to 9.7 times the views as plain text releases.