Focus on Quality

Firstly, you need to make sure that what you’re creating actually has substance, whether that’s a news story, interesting figures or your opinion on a relevant topic. Your content has to be concise enough for people to want to read it, but also filled with enough useful information to be worth reading.

If you are creating a lot of content (or are part of a content creating team), it’s worth creating a style guide and editorial checklist for you to follow which can guarantee the consistent production of high quality content. In addition to this, thoroughly research your competitors and see what they’re writing about, the style they’re writing in and what else they might be doing to grab their readers’ attention.

A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words

No matter how much blood, sweat and tears you put into creating useful and informative content, if you present it as a wall of text, very few people will read it all the way through - many will bounce away immediately. Making your content visually appealing is a must if you want readers to engage with it quickly.

The easiest way you can do this is simply by including some images in your content - these might come in the form of photos, animations, even graphs or charts. In our recent webinar, Skip Fidura, Digital Director at dotmailer, said that “if a picture is worth a 1000 words, a video is worth a million”. Creating video to support your content may seem like a lot of additional work, but it has the potential to keep the reader engaged for just that extra bit longer to convince them to make the most out of your content.

Include Your Audience in the Content

One way you can try to encourage engagement is to conduct some quick polls or surveys on your social media accounts and create some headline-worthy, attention-grabbing statistics which you can build your content around and use to pull the reader in and encourage shares. If the audience is personally involved in your content, they are much more likely to want to know the results of your findings.

If you find that your audience is responding to content with well-designed graphs and statistics but have always found yourself writing articles or blog posts, you may want to consider creating infographics like this example from BuzzFeed.

General tips

Here are some quick tips for you to follow to help make the structure of your content more visually interesting:

• Use headers, bolded text, bullet points and numbered lists to break up sections and draw the reader’s eye to a new format.
• Include a summary/takeaway section - remind the reader of the reasons why they invested the time in reading your content.
• Ensure it not just works on mobile, but is easy to read. You’ll gain more readers and improve the page’s search rating.

Summary

Every marketer is short on time, but spending as much as possible optimising and enhancing your content will increase its effectiveness exponentially. Not only will making your content more visually appealing help keep those with short attention spans interested, but it will also enhance the SEO richness of the page, making it more likely that people will find your content in the first place - it’s a win-win!

Attention spans may be getting shorter, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get people to engage with your content. By creating mobile-friendly, visually appealing and concise content that has something interesting to say, you’ll be drive clicks and shares, but most importantly encourage readers to engage with your brand.