Strategies to create reader-friendly content
The success of content marketing depends upon its consumption by your visitors and customers. With more access, the content has more chances of getting shared on social media.
Content Marketing Institute experts Fergal McGovern has shared an useful article highlighting content readability and tips to enhance it.
McGovern says, “Content clarity is the user experience of how difficult or easy it is to read text. Why is that important? We know from neuroscience that processing words places a far greater cognitive load on the brain than images. Plus, attention spans are shorter, meaning visitors have lower tolerance for confusion.
Research shows that the average U.S. citizen reads at a seventh- to eighth-grade level – and it’s not simply a problem of low academic achievement. Some studies show even highly educated people disengage rather than spend the mental energy to unpack dense, complicated prose. Josh Bernoff, author and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, surveyed 550 businesspeople in 2016. As many as 81% said poorly written content wasted too much of their time.
That’s one reason Reader’s Digest and Time magazine are successful. Reader’s Digest has a readability index of about 65 and Time scores about 52. Give people the choice between reading something at that level versus run-on sentences of 40 or 50 words with several competing ideas, it’s clear which they’ll prefer”.
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