As a company, it is important that you have a clear and strong content strategy. A strategy needed for the development, publication, and evaluation of the content you produce and share. To improve your communication value and to increase loyalty, you need to adjust the content to your target group.
Things to consider first
Make sure you have an overview of:
- Who makes the content
- Who publishes the content
- Which medium you will publish
- The context of your content and
- What results you desire
With good content, it becomes clear to your audience who you are and what you stand for.
Take control of your content
There are different channels to publish your content, such as your corporate website, social media platforms, or a static blog. Almost every company has a website on which the latest news can be found, but honestly… which website do you visit regularly to check if there is news? You can also distribute information via social media, but will it be read? Controlling the content on all those channels can be difficult without a content strategy that suits your reader.
According to contentbridges, a good content strategy offers the following:
- Gives organisations insight into what content the target audience really needs
- Provides a realistic, sustainable and measurable ‘content production plan’ that also delivers long-term results
- Reduces costs by investing less in unnecessary publications and strengthening the effectiveness of useful content
- Ensures proper coordination between communication and channels - this means website content, newsletters, printed matter, social media messages and intranet content reinforce each other and contribute to the same goal
- Prevents web projects from derailing and slowing down because often the time and energy is underestimated, which it costs to produce good, result-oriented content.
Filter time
In 2015, research by SUE Amsterdam showed that people have a very short attention span of 8 seconds. Even more recent research shows that it is not even 8 seconds of attention, but 8 seconds of filter time. In short, our brains determine what we read in 8 seconds and commercial content is filtered out very quickly. How to decide what content your audience really needs when there is so little time to being read by your audience?
Catch their attention
Taking into account this short timeframe, you can imagine it is difficult to distinguish yourself as a brand and to stand out among other companies with a solid content strategy.
An effective way to make your content stand out is to make it interactive. Present your story in a creative way to the target group. The difference between interactive content and familiar content marketing (like social media posts or static blogs), lies in the degree of true interaction with your reader. Interactive content can be incorporated within an online publication, for example an online magazine, product brochure or digital annual report.
It gives you a stage where you can display (for example) financial information in a visual and understandable way, or attract the attention of the customer with stunning visuals. You give a new dimension to the user experience by making your publication a real voyage, in which all kinds of content can be uncovered by clicking and swiping.
The publication can be filled with impressive photography, different types of animations and illustrations. It makes you offer your readers the possibility to scroll through the content themselves, instead of a ‘standard’ presentation of what you want to tell.
Smidswater states:
‘’The interactive components in an online publication increase the involvement with the brand. An online publication provides two-way traffic; users interact with your content in a different way. This means that they have to do an action to make content visible, and this can lead to a brand experience’’.
With this, you immediately tackle the problem of the 8-second attention span. As long as your content is relevant and you present it in an attractive way, you can involve your reader much longer in what you have to tell.
Marketing tool for online publications — Maglr
Maglr offers two powerful online editors to create interactive stories that are readable on any device. More importantly, no coding skills are required.
Choose from a template library or use the Maglr Pro editor (Pro can be seen as an InDesign kind of tool, focused on online interactive content). Needless to say, the digital content can be made responsive, which means that it is readable on every screen, applicable to different types of web content. Create your story yourself and publish your digital story online. Ideal for marketers and designers who ‘need to convert their content into a clear visual story’.
Maglr Template editor & Maglr Pro editor
Why visual and interactive content for your customers?
You can benefit from presenting such content to your audience in a variety of ways.
- Reach a larger audience through a responsive digital content that can be viewed via the web browser on a PC, tablet or smartphone
- Set up, publish and maintain your publications in-house
- Distinguish in design and truly impress your audience
- Digital distribution means no printing and shipping costs
- With interactive content, you can involve your reader and be in real contact
For which type of organisations is Maglr a solution?
Maglr is suitable for organisations that want to communicate in a professional and effective way with their target group and/or employees. This can vary from very large organizations to smaller organizations. In contrast to a printed version of a magazine, an online publication can be read on all devices, and reading behaviour can be tracked.
Reading time
Our figures show that the average reading time of publications that are made in Maglr is 4–6 minutes. For an online medium, this is quite long, compared to other types of digital communication. By actively involving and captivating your readers, you keep them on your website for longer. Especially with such small filter time, an online publication is an excellent strategy to make sure your reader engages with your story.
An important note, in addition to the reading time. The amount of time does not necessarily tell on how successful an online publication is read. It always depends on the purpose of the publication. Whether a company wants the reader to literally read everything or only read the headlines and get the intended message. The most important factor is that the overall message is being read, and not literally the whole text, pictures, and videos.
The statistics of a publication, clearly show the pages that have been viewed by the reader. If you have a publication of 12 pages and you get an average of 9.6 pages that are read, then most of your readers, understood the main line of the story.
If you go a step further, you can see in detail how the visitor clicked through the publication and on which pages the most time is spent. This information can be used again by an organisation to improve with follow-up publications.
Other tools
There are other tools that can be used besides Maglr. Apart from Maglr software, there is also a studio that makes designs in Maglr. Photoshop and Illustrator to edit photos or make illustrations.
The designers of Maglr Studio use the tool Sketch is a design toolkit especially focused to create web content. In Sketch the wildest ideas can be designed, which can be built in Maglr.
They also use Photoshop in order to edit images. It is possible to crop an image from a picture and edit it separately in a page of Maglr.
On the other hand, Illustrator is a design toolkit focused on making graphics of illustrations.
Eventually, everything is merged in Maglr to build a complete publication.
