The new era of publishing is here: It’s interactive, immersive, and highly visual
Content on the web is more competitive than ever. It’s getting harder to rank in search, harder to get the attention of your audience, and even harder to keep their attention when you have it. Harder, too, to win awards.
What are the key qualities of successful, award-winning content on the web today? Increasingly, brands and media companies are investing in higher-quality content that’s multimedia, interactive, highly visual, and immersive (that is, distraction-free).
So if you’re looking to boost your digital content strategy and create content that people actually want to read, see, and share; here are the ten most important qualities found time and time again across the web’s best content.
- Visual and multimedia
With attention spans dwindling and content reaching saturation point, it’s more important than ever before for brands and publishers to not just meet, but exceed their viewers’ expectations.
By using video, high-resolution images, and audio coupled with compelling text, the humble text-based story can be elevated in new and exciting ways. Plus, readers of interactive visual stories tend to spend longer on the page, bounce less often, and are more likely to click any calls-to-action.
- Digital-first
What’s the point of digital content if it’s merely a carbon copy of the printed page? Digital provides publishers with a myriad of unique and exciting features that simply wouldn’t be possible in other, more traditional formats.
Digital stories are typically responsive to different display sizes, immersive, and use a range of multimedia types such as images, video, audio, infographics, and illustration. They may also use scroll-based animation and other scroll-based storytelling techniques.
- Immersive and distraction-free, without the usual interruptions
Immersive content typically means full-screen, beautifully designed, and unlike standard CMS stories with their headers, side banners and other distractions.
Take the following example from Imperial College London. Before using Shorthand, Imperial College London published their feature stories on a bespoke CMS used by the university’s news site. The CMS was great for news but wasn’t necessarily suitable for longer feature stories.
The stories would look the same as our shorter stories, and were interrupted by skyscrapers, headers and banners that you would have on any of our other platforms. It wasn’t an immersive experience. However, after nine months with Shorthand, Imperial College London feature stories have seen 142% higher average unique page views and 50% higher average time on page.
- Interactivity
Premium digital content turns reading online from a mindless activity to one where the viewer feels like they’re actively engaging. Animated graphics as the reader scrolls down the page become the digital equivalent of flipping the page of a glossy magazine… if a magazine’s content could move along with the page itself.
For Stuff New Zealand’s digital team, the benefits of interactivity are leading directly into boosted time-on-page. The publisher sees page views of two to three minutes – a great result compared to the time-on-page of a typical story. Most of their visually-led stories see over 70,000 page views — and sometimes much more than that.
When employing these techniques, aim for the ‘Goldilocks’ effect. Without interactive elements, you can easily lose the attention of your audience, who will quickly click away. But with too many elements, they’ll be overwhelmed, and the purpose of your piece will be lost.
- Premium look and feel
Premium content can command a premium price tag. People are willing to pay for an experience that feels noticeably above average, which can help support new media business models and content monetisation strategies. Newspapers, magazines, academic journals, think tanks, data collators… many of these businesses monetise by asking people to pay for long-form content.
- Motivated by quality over quantity
Unfortunately, many content teams are faced with strict quotas and targets that can sometimes make them feel like they’re running on an endless hamster wheel.
A mindset shift to quality over quantity is where the real magic happens. With high-quality digital stories as the priority, content teams are encouraged to spend time developing and researching their pieces – rather than simply being judged on how quickly they can pump out content. The end result is stories that people appreciate, remember, and recall easily.
- Published at scale (without developers)
In days of old, premium, interactive digital content would involve a large team of developers trying to wrangle lines of code to fit the editorial team’s exciting vision. It was time consuming, frustrating, and usually too much effort to bother with.
But with platforms like Shorthand, there’s no need for developers or in-depth knowledge of code. Publishers are able to put their ideas to work quickly, efficiently, and without the need to retrain in an entirely new profession to make it happen.
- Produced for humans, not algorithms
Unsurprisingly, humans respond well to stories that are written and produced for humans – not to pander to an algorithm. Take analytics company RELX, for example, which posted a story powered by Shorthand on its science publication The Lancet. The company immediately saw a threefold increase in the number of reads and a 50% increase in dwell time.
Following on from that initial success, the company’s head of corporate communications, Paul Abrahams, wanted to figure out how the business could use Shorthand to publish stories for the group’s more than 33,000 staff around the world.
The first story, on flexible working at RELX, saw a more than tenfold increase in the number of reads as compared with previous internal comms stories. It worked because it was a very human story written and designed in a way that humans enjoy: visual, engaging, and interactive.
- Data-driven
One of the most powerful aspects of visual storytelling is the potential to make powerful use of data. Those with data to share should make this front and centre of their story.
On the more advanced end of the spectrum, there are some extremely powerful analysis and visualisation tools such as including R or Tableau. If you have developers or data scientists on hand, this is a worthwhile use of their time.
For those without developer resources, though, it’s still possible to create stunning interactive maps, charts, and graphs with platforms like Shorthand. This was the approach taken by Stuff in their story on Jacinda Ardern’s 2020 landslide election victory in New Zealand. With some nice graphic design, they created an impressive and reader-friendly summary of the scope of the win.
- Scrollable
It might seem silly, but sometimes, simply enjoying the sensation of scrolling is enough to keep readers engaged. The full-screen impact and simple scroll-based interaction of Shorthand stories are regularly recognised as key factors in award nominations and wins.
If you’re interested in joining the new era of digital publishing, you can get started with Shorthand’s free trial.