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The creation of mobile devices has made multitasking close to ubiquitous in the modern world. Between social media, live streaming, and digital news, it’s hard to imagine a time of day when we aren’t tempted to look at a screen while we’re doing something else at the same time.

Because of this phenomenon, it should come to no surprise that the average human attention span has fallen to just eight seconds — shorter than that of a goldfish.

What’s more, 59% of people share articles on Twitter without even reading them, and more than half of all pageviews are under a minute in length. It’s clear that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, and content creators need to adapt their strategy to that reality.

In this post, we’ll discuss strategies and resources marketers can use to create content that will generate clicks, shares, and most importantly, more readers.

The Current State of Content Marketing

Back in September, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs released their annual B2B content marketing survey results, revealing that 70% of respondents plan to produce more content in 2017 than in 2016. However, while content production continues to rise year over year, content engagement saw a 17% drop in 2016, according to TrackMaven.

This dip could be a reflection of decreased content quality, as proper planning and research tend to fall by the wayside when marketers ramp up their output. But it could also be attributed to that attention span shrinkage we mentioned earlier. After all, today’s readers are more likely to skim blogs, long-form written content, and podcasts rather than thoroughly consume them, according to data from HubSpot Research.

What’s a marketer to do? Let’s dive into our strategies for defying the goldfish attention span, without sacrificing the quality of your content.

How to Create Content That Gets Consumed

You already know that content creation is an integral part of the inbound marketing methodology. It attracts visitors to your blog, cultivates brand awareness, and helps you generate leads for your organization. But what about page views? Here are our strategies for making sure you’re not just creating into the void, but are actually producing content that gets consumed and shared.

Write quality content

We know, this one seems like a no brainer. But with 30% of marketers reporting that they don’t have clarity around what content marketing success looks like, it’s an important issue to stress.

It’s estimated that bad writing costs businesses close to $400 billion per year in inefficiency and productivity loss. And it could also be costing your organization if you’re generating content that isn’t driving any results. So before you start putting fingers to keyboard, implement a few processes to make sure you’re writing quality content that’s also useful to your audience.

Here are a few ideas:

• Validate your blog post ideas before writing them by doing industry and persona research and selecting keywords to target.
• Conduct a competitor analysis to see what content drives engagement across a variety of channels.
• Create a style guide and rely on an editorial checklist so each piece of content is held to the same high standard.

One of the easiest ways to create content that your audience will read? Ask your audience what they want to read about. Conduct social media polls and surveys to find out what topics and content types your subscribers are interested in, and brainstorm ideas based on their feedback.

For example, The Muse publishes content for job seekers about career growth, and they ran a poll asking their Twitter followers what would improve their workday.

We’re curious: What would make your workday a whole lot better? #career #poll

— The Muse (@dailymuse)
October 4, 2016

Sure enough, shortly after the poll closed on Twitter, they published this article based on the results:

Clever, right? Experiment with social media polls and ask for engagement from your followers. Encourage your audience to engage with the poll to generate content ideas and more participation on social media, and see what ideas you come up with based on the results.

Invest in thought leadership

When setting your blog editorial calendar for the months ahead, ask yourself: Are there any topics that someone in the organization, such as a founder or executive, is uniquely qualified to write about?

That’s thought leadership — and it’s not as difficult to incorporate into your strategy as you might think it is. In fact, there are a lot of small steps you can take to incorporate more thought leadership into your current editorial.

Here are a few ideas:

• Write a guest post on another organization’s blog. Check out this post for tips on how to become a guest writer on 11 popular sites.
• Publish long-form content that contains original research.
• Speak at conferences in your industry. (Intimidated by public speaking? HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar suggests starting with improv.)
• Interview an influential industry professional outside of your organization.

At HubSpot, we frequently partner with influential organizations — like Trello — to create content that reflects our combined expertise. By collaborating with the folks behind Trello to put together a comprehensive guide for using the project management tool in your marketing campaigns, we demonstrated our ability to provide credible, helpful tips — straight from the source:

Brainstorm other organizations in your industry and determine a mutually beneficial way you could collaborate. Whether that’s guest posting, cross-promotion, or working together as in the example above, keep bringing new ideas to the table that your audience can’t help but read.

Create visual content

Your audience wants to see more visual content, and it performs better, too: readers spend more time looking at images than words on a web page, and images promote greater memory recall than text alone.

There are a variety of different types of visual content that you can create to draw attention and promote greater readership, and our blog has a number of step-by-step guides to creating eye-catching infographics, videos, and more.

Vox does a great job of providing written and visual content for its readers. On any given day, it might publish a data visualization, a long-form article, and a video featuring different angles on the same topic — in this case, the Women’s March on Washington — to match different people’s content preferences and to keep things fresh for its audience.

Data Visualization

Long-Form Article

Video

The lesson? Don’t automatically default to writing a blog post simply because it’s a medium you’re comfortable with. Experiment with creating visual content to tell data-driven stories your audience will click, and hopefully share, too.

Meet the reader halfway

Follow the Golden Rule: Treat your reader as you’d like to be treated. Most of us are busy people, and busy people on the internet like to skim-read content. Luckily, you can make it easier for readers to consume your content all the way through with different formatting, layout, and coding choices.

Here are a few ideas:

• Use headers and bolded text to break up sections and paragraphs so readers can maintain focus.
• Use bullet points and numbered lists to draw the eye to a new format and pay closer attention. (See what we did there?)
• Include summary and takeaway sections in your written content to help readers remember what they’ve been reading about and maintain their interest.

Even better, help the reader understand how quickly they’ll be able to read a piece before they get started. Check out how Medium does this in an example from ThinkGrowth.org, HubSpot’s Medium publication:

(For more examples of publications that produce easily consumable content, try reading this blog post for inspiration.)

Publish on a variety of channels

Another challenge to getting people to thoroughly consume your content is they just may not have found it yet, and that’s where off-site content can come in handy. Audiences vary across different platforms, and it’s easier for your content to get discovered, and then read, if it’s published in more places than just your blog.

Medium is one example of where you can publish different content to attract a broader audience. You could create original content for a Medium publication, or repurpose old content by turning text into an infographic or video. As HubSpot Vice President of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson notes:

On the open web, people are searching, but on Medium, people come to spend time reading. This leads to much higher engagement on Medium and it’s this engagement, not search behavior, that fuels further discovery.”

Social media platforms also offer a variety of features for publishing original content. For example, you can publish live video on Facebook, ephemeral messages on Snapchat, photos on Instagram, and blog posts on LinkedIn. To ensure you’re publishing on these channels at the most optimal time, check out this guide from ClearVoice on when to publish content on social media for different industries.

Getting Started

We know this is a lot of information, but competition is getting stiff, so experimenting with how you create content now will pay off in the future. If you need help getting started, here’s our list of free tools to make awesome content.

What’s your favorite type of content to read? Share with us in the comments below.

I don’t know about you, but as a rule, I communicate better via written word.

It gives me time to think. It lets me use the vocabulary that my SAT tutor hammered into my brain so many years ago. And most of all, it gives me a screen to hide behind when I have to confront an uncomfortable topic — making the situation much less awkward. But there are times when even I, the perpetual wordsmith, have to make an actual phone call.

Speaking to another human being over the phone can be nerve wracking. Maybe it’s because so few of us actually use our mobile devices for that anymore — after all, Pew Research found that text messaging is the most widely-used feature on them. 

But even if it looks like phone calls are fading on the surface, there are times when they’re still essential — especially, it seems, where a sensitive subject is concerned. That means it’s time to stop hiding behind the screen, take a deep breath, and dial. We’ve outlined six of the most important occasions when a phone call is better than an email. Have a look, and start talking.

6 Times a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email

1) When You Want to Apologize

Most of us grow up understanding that, when we do something wrong, we should say, “Sorry” — 96% of parents think it’s important for kids to apologize when they deliberately upset someone, and 88% believe the same is true, even when it’s unintentional. But what constitutes a heartfelt apology?

It’s so hard to admit when we’re wrong. And to actually say it out loud — “I’m sorry” — is even more challenging when we have the option of quickly typing it out in an email or text message. That’s why it can carry so much more weight when someone actually calls us to apologize. Assuming he or she means it, we can hear the person’s remorse.

But if you’re afraid of screwing up an apology when you try to do it off-script, you can still write it down before you make the call. That can help to give you an idea of what it is that you really want to say, and can mitigate the risk of stumbling your way through saying sorry. Just make sure it sounds natural — an apology won’t seem very authentic if it sounds like you’re reading from a script.

2) When You Anticipate a Lot of Questions

My colleague, Leslie Ye, recently had a phone call with someone to discuss a project for the HubSpot Sales Blog. She specifically chose to have a spoken conversation — rather than explain the parameters over email — for a few reasons. Among them, she told me, was that she anticipated the writer would have several questions.

As it turns out, she was right. “Calls that have a lot of questions are typically harder to handle over email, because that’s not a real-time conversation,” Ye explained. “With a phone call you, can go back and forth on one question until it’s clarified, then move on to the next one.”

In other words, it was more efficient for Ye and her counterpart to address all questions in a single phone call, rather than over a string of emails. When you do the latter, you risk losing track of what’s been asked and answered. But there’s a catch — if you don’t take notes during your call, it’s just as easy to forget what you’ve discussed, given our declining attention span and retention of details.

For that reason, there are times when it’s a good idea to combine a phone call with an email. Following up in writing is a helpful way to ensure that both parties are on the same page after a conversation, and gives you a point of reference after the fact.

3) When You Have to Explain Something Complicated

There’s a reason why telephone support still exists. We use it here to help HubSpot customers, and for good reason — 73% of customer service managers say that support inquiries are becoming more complex.

Written instructions are always helpful as a point of reference — see above. But if you’re trying to follow a series of complicated steps, or you’re simply new to what you’re doing, it’s tremendously helpful to have someone walk you through it via spoken word.

As a channel consultant, my colleague Adrianne Ober deals with this phenomenon daily. “Email is great for getting to the point and keeping on task,” she says, but “a conversation is going to naturally provide deeper context.”

But while it’s great to be friendly, it’s also crucial to stay focused — it can be easy for the conversation to go off-track, Ober says, especially when you strike a good rapport with the person you’re speaking with. So remind yourself of the purpose behind the conversation, and stick to it until the issue is resolved.

4) When You’ve Taken Way Too Long to Respond

It’s tough to say how many unread emails exist in the average person’s inbox. When I polled by team, just over 37% of my colleagues responded that they have anywhere between 11 to over 50.

That explains why it’s so easy for emails to be overlooked or forgotten. Admit it — how many times have you opened an email and marked it as “unread” with intention of answering it later? That habit makes it easy for messages to quickly become buried under constant incoming email.

There are two potential solutions to this issue:

1. Organize your inbox with resources like HubSpot Sales, or any number of the email management tools we’ve listed here.
2. If you’ve overlooked something crucial, call the sender.

Remember our advice to call when you need to apologize? Here’s a great example of when that’s particularly helpful. With inbox overload becoming a workplace epidemic, chances are, the person you’re calling will understand a little bit of neglect. Plus, making the effort to actually call the person and address the issue — rather than responding with an overdue email that’s just going to flood his or her inbox, too — speaks volumes. It sends the message that the person is a priority, rather than something at the bottom of endless to-do list.

5) When You Need to Discuss Something Personal

Simply put — life happens, and sometimes, it’s not so awesome. And on occasion, the less-than-awesome things require us to temporarily step away from certain responsibilities, like work.

As we’ve emphasized, using the spoken word in lieu of email can help to make your counterpart feel like a priority, and to understand the significance of what you’re discussing. So when you need to bring up something personal, like a family emergency or medical issue, skip the email and have a real conversation about it instead.

That also helps to instill a sense of empathy. Not too long ago, researchers at the University of Michigan found that there was a 40% decrease in empathy among certain populations, which correlated with an increased use of technology. It’s a symptom of hiding behind a screen — and, therefore, not being able to associate emotion with what’s being said.

That’s why we generally advise using the phone — or an in-person conversation, if possible — when you need to discuss anything important, as we note below.

6) When It’s Really Important

What constitutes “urgent,” these days, has become somewhat fluid. We’re a deadline-oriented culture — in fact, it’s been found that adding a deadline to a task makes us 24% more likely to do even get it done. But sometimes, we can’t pull off those deadlines alone. We need to interview an expert for a quote, or have an official party sign off on something.

But remember — a lot of us have unread emails in the double digits. So when an important request comes in, even when labeled as “urgent,” it’s easy for it to get pushed down by a high rate of incoming emails. What’s urgent to me, might not be a priority for the person I’m trying to reach.

Sure, “most Americans would rather type it than say it,” writes Chicago Tribune’s Corilyn Shropshire. But reaching out by phone not only prevents an email from going unread — and adding to the recipient’s email avalanche — but also, it helps to instill that sense of empathy we mentioned before, and emphasize urgency.

Here’s another instance when following up in writing can help. If you can’t reach the person at his or her desk, for example, email might be received quicker, since 88% of us check it on our smartphones. Try sending a written summary of what you said in your voicemail, but save the meaty details for a phone call, so that they don’t get lost in the email shuffle, as per Ye’s above example. But be respectful of that person’s time, and ask when it would be more convenient to speak by phone — that whole “empathy” thing goes both ways.

Make the Call

To be clear, we’re not trying to knock email. We love email — there are times when it’s an invaluable resource for marketers, and when it’s a perfectly appropriate method of communication.

But we also like to keep a human element to things, which is why — and feel free to call us “sentimental” — sometimes, we like to talk it out. These are six instances in which that’s the way to go, and when it can help you accomplish things more effectively.

When do you opt for phone calls over emails? Let us know in the comments.