Editorial calendar filled out through the next two National Superhero Days, which is April 28 just in case, you know, ahem.
You’ve coordinated your social media posts, and you’ve already bought your tickets to Content Marketing Conference 2017.
Your content planning goals are crushed like you are Thor’s hammer, yet something is missing.
For some reason you feel like your content could go from 2-D to 3-D with a nudge in the right direction.
Turns out that nudge is content design, and it’s taking content marketers places.
Words, Words, and More Words
Sure, we get it. Content is words, lots of glorious words other than the word “word.”
If you have superior scrivener skills and your content is well balanced, witty, informative, and not fake, you should get all the readers to your site, right?
As anyone can likely guess, your content isn’t as bombastic as you would like it to be, which is why you are here looking for ways to improve the planning stages in particular.
So if content is all about the words, then we should read all the time and practice our grammar if we want to improve. Not working? You might want to consider what you are looking at.
Let’s be as real as Superman’s cape about content, and point out that it is a visual medium.
Therefore, your content must be visually stimulating and pleasing. It must attract and hold the attention of your vision, which can be super difficult to do with so many squirrels running around. So this is where your Superman skills kick in.
Below the Fold
In order to pull this death defying feat off without causing chaos you’ll need to learn a few words that will make you sound less like a design newbie.
When you are looking at an article, infographic, image, or video consider “below the fold.” This is a newspaper term that refers to printing a column beneath the fold of a sheet of newspaper. It makes it difficult for the reader to access the full story and is cumbersome.
When it comes to internet users, they see the below the fold in a different direction. Obviously your computer screen is not a sheet of paper. Instead below the fold requires your readers to scroll down to read the rest of the story.
This manual action of scrolling can lead users to zoom right out of there and go to a shorter story. Therefore, you want to try to keep your content above the fold to retain those that have decided to visit.
Fly Into the Future
Just as Superman was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, you too can be a content superhero. It all starts in focusing on the future.
Forget trying to keep up with what everyone is doing today. OK, yes, you should probably keep one eye on what is happening right now in the content marketing world.
However, your other eye should at least be trained on the future. Complicated interactions and inventive designs, you say? That’s for certain thanks to technology like augmented reality and parallax effect for scrollable websites.
Continuing Your Content Planning Transformation
These two content design ideas are only one part of the content planning process. Before your content has reached its fullest potential, you’ll need to go a step above the rest.
One place where you can do this, without risk of villainous attacks, is at the Content Marketing Conference 2017.
Meet your content comrades in Boston for some planning sessions that will blow your marketing mind.