Written is the new visual

By Vignesh Prem, Chief Technical Officer at Hyper Destech

The results of Wolfram Alpha show that the average reading speed of people is 250-300 words per minute, which reduces due to uninteresting content, low readability or useless information. The world runs at a warp-speed and one inappropriate message through your content could tumble your image down. Well-written content is extremely important as people now make buying decisions based on the knowledge they gain from truckloads of content available online. For example, a consumer willing to buy a car would be least interested in hearing acquaintances out for suggestions/reviews. They’ll google their doubts out, read the information available and decide for themselves. This shows that people concentrate on the know-hows more in the contemporary scenario which gives the spotlight of importance to written or textual content. As a consequence to this, informative, entertaining and educative written-content is the centerpiece of all consumer activity and now takes an edge over the visual representation of ideas and tactics.

“Tell me how it’s done?”

Consumers from all walks are increasingly curious to know more and more about products, before buying them. While the IQ of a person is invariably an innate quality, the Curiosity quotient (CQ) can be developed over a course of time. With the advent of the internet, people have developed an increasing curiosity to know things. They enquire, research and analyze whatever is in the market before they proceed to buy it. If your product’s marketing campaign has enough textual information to settle their curiosities and convince them of your value propositions, you’ve hit the right chords.

Content fits them all (“I want to know more, I want to know right”)

Amongst your target market, are highly intellectual and information centered individuals who would have an analytic approach to the evaluation of your product. To exemplify, if you tell them who you are, what you do, where you’re from, it might not bind them to you. But if you inform them about how you do things at your company, what has been your journey and what your current customers think about your brand, they’ll count on you. On the other hand, there are customers who do not want a lot of information but an extremely simple value proposition. You could do it with visuals for them, however, textual content is integral to their understanding of your visual also.

‘Content is King’ (“Put the ads away, I am reading”)

Online Advertisements and pop-ups are diminishing and people get agitated on sighting them. All they care about is the main textual content on the site they’re visiting. Bill Gates’ essay titled ‘Content is King’ in the year 1996 has come out to efficient soothsaying. He had written, “As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that’s a few years off”. The year gap he mentioned has passed and content is the king all the way.

Reviews and Ratings (“Let’s check out the online rating”)

The pervasiveness of information has made people logical and earnest about their choices. They read reviews and ratings of products and services and make up their mind. Review writing has become an entire field within content writing and does the rounds on social media. Zomato reviews and Imdb ratings have crammed the internet. Hence, content continues to be the master in influencing buying decisions and in marketing.

Multilingual people (“Does the site have a translatable version/ translate this for me”)

With the commencement of globalization, increasing immigration and emigration and an influx of foreign direct investment, multilingual customers are spreading across the entire fabric of the market. A number of websites now upload their content in multiple languages for all the audiences to understand and connect with it. It is also a popping trend on social media to write a single piece of text or information in two languages, to make it sound more entertaining if the audience is familiar with both the languages.

The ability of words to play with a customer’s psychology (“I love words”)

Impulsive words: These are words that generate a feeling of alarm, urgency, contingency or immediate action amongst the people. Such words are especially used in headlines to magnetize the customers towards the content and compel them to read it. Some of the examples are, “Immediately end your savings account to avoid being broke in the future”, “Is you financial health moving towards a dead end”, “10 daily habits that could decrease your life expectancy”.

Emotional words: Words that connect with the audience and generate feelings of happiness, empathy, anger or sadness in the readers are a tactful marketing tool. Once you have struck the emotional intelligence of your customer, he gives in to your propositions. A good sentence exemplifying the use would be, “The government is taxing out your hard earned money and you shouldn’t just let it go”.

Memes, Polls and Quizzes (“I laughed harder than I should have”)

If there’s anything that has consumed social media platforms and recurs over and over are memes. They are an immaculate example of how an image can be given context through content. Textual content forms an important part of memes by giving context and meaning to a random picture. Moreover, the social media audience is captivated by the presence of polls and quizzes, it generates interest in them to record their answers or attempt an interesting quiz. Content remains at the heart of all of these.

Customers want more written content “I am lusty for content. Give me more”

An analysis by Hubspot found out that 53% of the marketers believe that Blog content creation is their top priority for inbound marketing. This indicates that blogs generate the highest success rate for them. To further support his argument, the research also states that 96% OF B2B buyers want more content form thoughts leaders within business. Clubbing the two statistics, textual content is perceived vital by both, the marketers and the consumers.

Saying all this, rather writing all this, one can graph a rough image of how important a good content it. A good content can convert a grey and lifeless topic into a colorful one. In an information centric world, the one having no time to stop and stare, it is of paramount importance to deliver maximum information in a crisp and not too extensive form. What does this leave us with?