tips Archives » REALMS INC

Tips for Making Your Content Stick

Time disappears. Memorable messages never fade.

How?

As Chip and Dan Heath point out in their marketing classic Made to Stick, they are designed to stick.

To help you make your material memorable, the Heath brothers offer a checklist for developing sticky messaging.

Let’s go over five of those suggestions along with illustrations from businesses that have used them.

1.Keep things very straight forward.

Determine your main point before you write a single word. Your material must be governed by this central theme, providing organization, focus, and direction.

How to proceed

Make sure your material has a straightforward, obvious theme before anything else. Ideally, you should sum everything up in one line. Your headline and each phrase should clearly state your subject.

Let’s compare an article that lists the advantages of eating veggies to one that explains why carrots are fantastic for vision, as an example.

The first is overly broad and all-encompassing. Quelle vegetables? How can the reader remember the content if the author lists every veggie and every perk? According to research, there is a limit to how much information we can take in at once.

The topic is more general; the article on carrots is more specific. It is simpler to keep in mind that carrots are beneficial for vision. Readers may also see a carrot. It is palpable.

2.Grab attention to something unexpected.

According to research, individuals learn by looking for patterns. We look for routines and consistency.

How to proceed

Consider a novel viewpoint on a well-liked subject. And if you declare something unexpected, support it with evidence.

For instance, if you work in the health area, you could write an essay about how dark chocolate with almonds lowers the risk of heart disease. Here is a draft of a headline: Did You Know That Dark Chocolate and Almonds are Your Heart’s Desire?

3.Reject abstraction and adopt concreteness

The shortest path between locations A and B on a flat surface is a straight line. Your material must adhere to this regulation.

When you present your message in tangible terms, you give the reader a clear path to follow. If you present your message in an abstract manner, you give your audience a muddled, squiggly line. Once bewildered, they take off running.

How to proceed

Making each notion tangible should come first. Use metaphors and analogies to aid with this. Don’t speak in jargon.

Here’s an illustration:

Abstract: “I need to relax.”
Concrete: “I need to get the cobwebs out of my head.”

The first term is overused, unimaginative, and monotonous. What next? Its direct language draws you in. It is visualisable. It is considerably more enduring.

4.Connect via emotions

Your audience will pay attention if it’s a topic they care about. They will care and respond to what you provide if you appeal to their emotions.

How to proceed

Find the emotion that connects your message to your intended audience. Readers are more inclined to care if you add that emotion to your material.

5.Draw audiences in with an engaging tale

According to research, individuals don’t only hear stories; they also experience them. It has the ability to transfer.

How to proceed

Tell a relevant story to help your target reader understand your message.

Imagine that you are writing a piece for Dole that urges readers to eat more bananas. Your narrative starts with a lazy individual dozing off at their desk in the middle of the morning. The patient had enough energy to get through the morning and the rest of the day the following day, however, after eating a banana to start the day. The outcome? If you want to do more things in a day, eat bananas.

Tell a captivating tale that leads your audience to the answer they’re looking for. Then, conclude with a statement that motivates people to take action.

Stickiness can be chosen.

Stickers are sticky on purpose. Knowing what the product would be used for, the maker added adhesives to its surface so that customers could glue it to another surface.

The correct audience may be added to your material if you are aware of its intended audience.

Your writing is more enduring. Why? because it was designed to be.

Which of the five suggestions will you use?

Use These Simple Tips to Improve Your Writing

We’ve kept this piece brief, consisting just of useful writing advice, to give you time to explore more of this week’s Content Marketing World sessions.

Even talented writers value advice on how to write more persuasively. Additionally, readers value writing that is more effective. Their attention spans are short. They only have little windows of time to ingest stuff.

Do you compose and edit your work with the idea that readers will only read it briefly? Try these two writing suggestions for material that speaks more to your audience.

Tip 1: Use short, simpler words

Everyone enjoys sounding intelligent, but if your audience doesn’t grasp what you’re saying, they’ll stop listening. Don’t use overly complicated language in your content so as to persuade your viewers to quit reading it. Avoid forcing your attentive audience to navigate away from the website to look up a definition.

Short words are simple to comprehend. Long or difficult words make reading more difficult. Key points may be missed by readers, or they may stop reading altogether.

See how these before-and-after examples demonstrate the effectiveness of simplification.

BEFORE

tracking of workspace usage in real time.
Because of the data silos brought on by rigidity, it is challenging to
Due to a split in customer tastes, text is favoured over email.

AFTER

monitoring of workplace use in real time.
It is difficult to… due to rigid data silos.
Despite the differences, more customers choose text over email.

Save your best vocabulary terms for your ground-breaking book or your upcoming Scrabble match. In your content marketing, use straightforward language. Even readers who are familiar with difficult subjects value clarity in writing.

Tip 2: Make short, concise sentences.

Therefore, readers who enjoy short word length will also enjoy brief sentences.

A statement with less than eight words was understood by every reader in the poll. And 90% of people could comprehend a phrase of nine to fourteen words. Comprehension declined as the number of words rose. Only 10% of the information in a statement that included 43 words or more was comprehended. Even though the study was conducted over ten years ago for newspaper writing, content marketing might benefit from its findings. And it stands to reason that now, shorter could be preferable.

Do you frequently employ conjunctions and clauses in your sentences? Could those be divided into a few simpler, stronger sentences?

Let’s examine one of the introduction’s most difficult to write sentences. You want to grab the interest of your readers and encourage them to keep reading the information. The key is to speak clearly.

Let’s run through this illustration. I’ve altered a few details to protect the author’s privacy:

“Over the last several months, we have observed the trend of remote work, which calls for more individuals to utilise their home internet for business-related activities and raises cybersecurity threats.”

That statement is excessively lengthy at 31 words. How can we condense it while keeping its meaning?

First, think about the unimportant things.

The sentence is dated by the phrase “during the last months.” Is time a crucial element? Since it isn’t in this instance, it is cut.

The usage of home internet for professional reasons is becoming more common due to the trend of remote work, which also raises cybersecurity dangers.

The sentence now has 27 words.

Next, the present perfect first person is used to express “we have seen.” The sentence is not essential since attribution is not required, even if the verb tense might be changed to a simple past or present tense. Additionally, remote work is a well-known trend in 2020. There’s no need to state that:

“More individuals are using their home internet for professional reasons as a result of remote employment, a development that also raises cybersecurity threats.”

The sentence is now 20 words.

Additional edits: Remove the phrase “requiring additional employees” because remote workers are a given. There is no internet at home for your dog. the verb be changed to active voice.

“The growth of remote work necessitates the usage of the home internet for professional reasons,” introducing cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

The sentence now has 18 words.

Keep in mind that we already erased the “trend” viewpoint. We must repeat the process.

“Using home internet for business reasons is a requirement of remote employment, posing cybersecurity hazards.”

The sentence now has 14 words.

The usage of the word “labour” twice is more obvious with the shorter text. Let’s remove one citation:

There are cybersecurity dangers while using the home internet for business.

There are now 11 words in the sentence. Although the intention was to remove one word, the editing opportunity exposed the idea’s redundancy. “Remote work” is better described as “home internet for work reasons.”

Is there anything else in the statement that is unnecessary? Yes. Let’s modify once more:

“There are cybersecurity dangers while using the home internet for business.”

The sentence now consists of eight words.

The main idea is still present even if the phrase is just eight words long instead of 31. Additionally, it hits the percentage of terms that all participants in the American Press Institute study could understand.

What quick suggestions do you have for writing better?

Every day, we create, edit, and read it – material with rambling phrases or difficult words.

Let’s surpass that material. Let’s keep in mind that our readers have limited attention spans and enjoy reading things that are simple. Because of it, our language and phrases must be concise.