With ever-growing competition, new trends, and the fact that the average attention span of humans is now about 8 seconds, you’re not left with a lot of time to capture the attention of your audience.
If you add the fact that users read about 20% of the actual text on a web page, it becomes even harder to come up with truly engaging content that your audience will love and read fully.
Businesses must keep in mind that as technology evolves, their audience changes as well. Their appetite for content and how they want it changes quickly so if you want to compete, you need to deliver exactly what they want.
Good content is important because it determines the success of your website/business. In this post, we tackle the types of content your audience likely wants to see along with some tips on how to incorporate various content styles into your content marketing strategy.
Video Content
It’s not a secret that video content is booming lately. This trend is not going anywhere. On the contrary, people will continue to watch and stream videos even more today. Users don’t even need the sound to watch videos. About 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without turning the sound on.
Watching videos requires less time than reading a 1000-word article so naturally, the demand is growing.
But that doesn’t mean you should create just about any type of video. Users prefer shorter videos of up to a minute (preferably less than that) that capture their attention and are easy to digest.
Billions of videos are watched daily on social media like Facebook or Snapchat. This is a huge opportunity to jump on the bandwagon and reach your audience that seeks short, simple, yet informative video content that teaches them something or shows them how to do something, for example, recipe videos.
A great thing about video content is that you can share it on so many platforms. You can upload it to your Facebook page, Instagram, Snapchat, and reach your target audience wherever they are.
Video is likely one of the most effective marketing tools of today which is why you can’t afford to not create video content.
News
People rarely buy actual newspapers every day to catch up on the latest events in politics, economics, etc. They read news online and visit their favorite publications and news outlets daily.
News articles with visuals, shorter paragraphs, and bullet points are prefered by users as it makes the content more digestible and easier to understand. This works especially well if the article is comprehensive.
Images and videos accompanying the news article can help users who are in a hurry or simply don’t want to read the entire article to still grasp what the story is about without spending too much time on the page.
We must consider the fact that people consume content where they go: on the way to work, on the way home, at breaks, in the evening, between tasks, even in the bathroom. The demand for news doesn’t go away but the format in which the news is presented changes. Keeping track of these changes helps you deliver the type of content your audience really wants.
Useful Blog Posts
The audience might be skimming long articles but they still need them so this type of content won’t go away anytime soon either. Blogs are still a valuable part of every content marketing strategy so you should focus on producing high-quality, informative content that answers your audience’s burning questions or addresses a problem.
However, posting only blogs won’t get you far. It is important to add some infographics or videos to the article to enhance readability and thus increase time spent on a page.
To know more about blogging and how to be successful at it, observe your competitors’ blogs or start following experts on the topic such as Leslie Gilmour.
Infographics
Instead of plain, boring stock images, infographics can help you break down overwhelming stats and info into clear, readable format.
With infographics, otherwise boring data or research statistics can be presented in a way that is engaging and shareable.
On top of that, people are more likely to remember information that is visually presented rather than reading plain text. Infographics are very easy to digest as they are well-organized, with clear fonts and engaging headlines, and good design. Such content is more likely to be shared as well.
Social Media Posts
This is not surprising since more than 3 billion people actively use social media. Facebook alone has about 1.8 billion daily users so businesses must not neglect their social media accounts.
Users want to see more content from your business or website and for many, this is the only place where they get their information and stay up to date. This doesn’t mean that you should only focus on creating social media content but that you should diversify and add this type of content to the mix to meet the demand.
Know Your Audience
Finally, creating content that captures the mind of your audience is not just about the trends. Following recommendations regarding the content type, style, frequency, and length is a good way to start but you must keep in mind your specific niche and target audience.
You should track how your audience evolves and what type of content they seek to see on your website or social media accounts because there are other factors that might influence their preferences, such as age.
It’s not likely that 20-year-olds will consume the same type of content as 50-year-olds. Also, they don’t consume content at the same time.
One way to see what type of content your audience wants to see is to survey them. Social media is also a powerful tool in discovering this so use the analytics tools available to improve your content marketing strategy.
All these types of content are in demand, however, not exclusively. A successful content strategy includes diverse types of content to meet the demands of users.
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