Although we as copywriters love to make the case for long-form content, we also can’t deny the overarching benefits of creating value-led, shorter, skimmable content.
Every digital customer is looking for instant gratification when it comes to branded content. Faster is always better and with the flow of information accelerating in pace, fewer people take the time to finish reading in-depth, long-form content.
According to a recent Microsoft study, today’s customers have an attention span of just eight seconds, a decrease from 12 seconds back in 2000, with new research claiming that human attention spans decreasing by 88% every year. These drastically shrinking attention spans are disrupting the traditional marketing funnel; however, smart content marketers are adapting their content marketing strategies to meet the new needs of the increasingly busy, tech-savvy customer.
With studies revealing that 55% of page views are customers who spend only 15 seconds on your site before bouncing, your content needs to highlight key skimmable takeaways quickly and provide real value upfront, otherwise, your content may not convey the points you’re wanting to make, or even attract customers in the first place.
It’s completely understandable that with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day, our customers are left feeling inundated, overwhelmed and over-communicated by different brands. So, it’s important to help cut the clutter for them with useful, skimmable short prose that makes them stop in their tracks, alter their views and (hopefully) push us further down that yellow brick road to conversion. But what does skimmable content look like? While there are endless ways you can format your content to make it more digestible, we've highlighted 6 effective methods to make your content easily skimmable, along with examples of brands that are leading the way in adapting their content for time-constrained readers.
Write a catchy title that summarises but piques curiosity
Due to their inherent structures, skimmable content tends to have gripping and much catchier titles which help to target a much larger, more engaged audience.
In the age of bite-sized information where a tweet is only 280-characters, a Facebook post is in short-snackable sentences and captioned Instagram videos are becoming one of the most popular ways to consume information, your title really is the make-it-or-break-it-sentence.
Even back in 1963, one of the world’s most famous advertising gurus, David Ogilvy, explained, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” And not much has changed since.
As a content marketer, you need to create a sense of intrigue and pique your readers' interest with a “curiosity gap” headline. George Loewenstein, leading economist and researcher in The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation, shows that when our curiosity is piqued, the mind falls into a psychological state where our attention is concentrated on filling the gap in our knowledge. When we uncover the information that we’ve been searching for, our brains treat this as a reward, and the quicker the better.
A great way of piquing interest while also expressly showing the main takeaways your reader is going to get from consuming your content is by using numbers in your headline. Studies have shown that no matter if you’re a mathematician or not, every brain is inherently tuned in to pay attention to numbers. This is because when we scroll through our phones or read a book, we are subconsciously categorising information to retain later. So, if there are digits in a title, the reader will know that the mental heavy lifting has already been quantified and categorised upfront, making it more enticing to click and read on.
As impatient customers, we like to know what we’re in for, so if content marketers have quantified the key information and main takeaways before we even click through, we will know that we will be rewarded with 10 new nuggets of knowledge, for example.
Fast Company, an American business magazine that focuses on the daily exploration of technology, leadership and design, are king when it comes to creating “curiosity gap” headlines. By hitting the sweet spot between creativity and big data insights, you can produce a gripping headline that advertises without giving it all away upfront Judith Humphry, long-term writer for Fast Company explains. Headlines are the first, and perhaps only, impression your brand may leave on a prospective reader, so make sure you invest in the time to make them truly magnetic, as this could make all the difference between a browser and an invested reader.
Break Paragraphs Up Into Shorter, Digestible Sentences With Subheadings
When creating any piece of content, your primary goal is to motivate your audience to take action, whether that means signing up for an email newsletter, visiting your website or purchasing a product. However, nothing turns readers off quicker than massive walls of text.
Keeping your content simple is no longer just about comprehension, but rather about easy consumption, as you are in fierce competition for your readers’ time. Whitepapers, Ebooks and blog articles, should be skimmable and mobile-friendly for on-the-go readers. Shape your piece with short punchy, paragraphs and break up your easily digestible components with subheadings to keep your readers focused.
Just like photographers and graphic designers, writers also use negative space to create a focal point or emphasis and draw attention to text that’s important for the reader.
Writing an article with multiple subheadings ensures that you get your points across fast. It forces you to think about which parts of your content are most important to your incoming readers. Remember, time is money. This process not only makes you a more concise, organised writer, but it also means that every sentence adds value to your reader.
Online trade magazine, Digiday, provides readers with timely news about advertising, publishing and media. Understanding the importance of skimmable content, Digiday created an ingenious way to tailor their content in terms of customer preferences, so that they could write skimmable content without having to sacrifice their lengthier, long-form content that highlights their brand as a thought leader in their field. To achieve this, DigiDay introduced a TL;DR (“Too Long; Didn’t Read”) button for their articles. When the “TL;DR” mode is turned on, their long-form articles transform into shorter, pithy paragraphs showcasing the article’s main points and takeaways for maximum skimmability.
Remember To Use Short Sentences, But Vary Their Length
It’s a good idea to keep your sentences short but varied throughout your piece. Short sentences are powerful. However, using too many short sentences in a row can make your content seem disjointed and one dimensional. By varying your sentence length, you keep the writing interesting and stimulating for the reader and also improves skimmability as it’s easier to digest.
And no one knows this better than Journalist-turned-novelist, Ernest Hemingway. Revered for his clean and restrained writing style, Hemingway wrote one of the world’s most famous six-word short story of all time on a napkin to win a bet over lunch with a group of writers. “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.” This gut-wrenching sentence proves that you can write a gripping story with a complete narrative in just six words.
Make use of Bullet Points and Listicles Whenever Possible
If a section of your article can be broken down into a few basic points, why not opt for a bullet point list? Arguably one of the most versatile tools in a writer’s arsenal, bullet points can:
· Break up your writing making it easier to digest
· Draw attention to your key takeaways and ideas
· Be an effective CTA that inspires the reader to take action and/or purchase
By breaking down your text into a series of short steps and compelling bullet points, you effectively simplify and quantify information (without the use of numbers) which works well for listing statistics, strategies or recipes in an easy-to-skim manner. Believe it or not, well-crafted bullet points can sell.
Hubspot, an American developer and marketer of software products and inbound marketing, understands the need for bullet points in their library of informative blog posts. Highlighting key takeaways in bullet-point formats throughout most of their blogs, bullet points sometimes even become their main focal point of reference, for example, in their 31 Blog Writing Prompts to Break Your Writer’s Block. Using a simple 31 checkpoint list, the reader comes away with a quick-fix for their writer’s block without spending loads of time reading the article itself.
Apply bold, italicised text, hyperlinks or “pull quotes” to draw attention
If you don’t want to use bullet points, bold or italicised text is a great way to highlight key takeaways in paragraphs or draw the reader’s eye to important information in the article. Hyperlinked text also shows that you’ve done your research, and have the goods to back it up.
The advantage of using “Pull quotes” is that it can break up your text to highlight must-read sections for your skim-readers. A tweet share button for your pull quotes is also a great way for readers to share your content on their social platforms that will ultimately help to increase the overall shareability of your piece and the potential of the content going viral.
New York-based Content marketing platform, Contently, employs all of these copywriting tools to help boost the skimmability of their content. In their storytelling section, they wrote a piece called, “Branding Moments’: What Can a Gorilla Playing the Drums Teach Us About Great Storytelling?”, and throughout their 800-word article, they use bold text, italicised words and hyperlinks as signposts designed to attract the readers' attention and guide them towards the article’s finishing line.
Don’t be afraid to enrich your skimmable content with media, images, listicles, and tables.
Generally speaking, humans are very visual creatures, meaning that our brains are hard-wired to be attracted to anything beautiful or particularly eye-catching.
Studies show that our brain’s right hemisphere, (50% of our brain), is dedicated to visual processing. Robert E. Horn, American political scientist and visiting scholar at Stanford University, explains the importance of uniting both text and imagery, "When words and visual elements are closely entwined, we create something new and we augment our communal intelligence ... visual language has the potential for increasing ‘human bandwidth'—the capacity to take in, comprehend, and more efficiently synthesize large amounts of new information."
So, it comes as no surprise that using “eye candy” to illustrate your point has and always will be an essential requirement to grab your customer’s attention and increase their recall. Research indicates that articles with visual content receive 94% more readership and exposure than articles that rely solely on text alone. So, next time you’re writing a compelling piece, why not combine both, easily-scannable text and eye-catching imagery for a marriage made in content heaven?
And while we’ve covered the power of storytelling before, adding a visual storytelling element can drive your point home even more. Visual content affects readers on a cognitive level and helps to stimulate imagination, therefore, enabling them to process the information faster and generally retain their attention for longer.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR), doesn’t shy away from using big, bold and extremely compelling graphics to convey another storytelling element of their blog articles and reviews. The online written content they produce is usually broken into short, concise paragraphs, and always coupled with spectacular visual content whether that’s thought-provoking blog images, informative copy-led infographics, colourful statistical graphs or short videos clips. Their website even has a whole section dedicated to their “visual library” which showcases HBR’s best graphics, charts, and slide decks.
As customer’s attention spans continue to decrease, we as content marketers need to step up and adapt our content marketing strategies to adhere to this new normal of creating skimmable content.
So, next time you write an article, keep your paragraphs short and pithy, make sure each sentence delivers value and don’t be afraid to be bold, italicise and couple your story with breath-taking imagery. This will not only encourage your readers to digest your branded content but share it with others.