Accessibility. That’s the million-dollar word when it comes to customer-focused content marketing. The more barriers you break down—the easier you make it for your customer to consume your content—the greater the satisfaction rate will be. No, seriously—those with a solid, customer-focused content marketing strategy receive nearly 6 times the click-through rates as those without one.
Let’s walk through some tips for maintaining customer accessibility in content. Are you doing any of the following to make the content marketing customer journey more difficult?
Don’t Use Too Much Jargon
Pop quiz! Tell us everything that’s wrong with this sentence:
“You know TFW you get 50% off the most on-fleek iPhone cases? Wig, am I right? And what if your phone also got a glow-up with our bougie new pop sockets and charms? Now that’s fire.”
Oof, that was as painful for us to write as we’re sure it was for you to read. But if it reminds you to avoid heavy, industry-exclusive jargon in your written content, we consider that a win.
Whether the jargon is accessible or not also depends a lot on your target demographic. If that demographic is, in fact, Millennials or Gen Z, one or two of those phrases from the sentence above may not be so bad.
The same goes for older generations. Sure, maybe your fortysomething audience feels nostalgic for Bruce Springsteen or Sixteen Candles, but reference them too much and you’ll still sound contrived.
And this is all for appealing to B2C customers—imagine how much more rigid these parameters need to be for customer-focused B2B content, where a focused, logical, easy-to-consume writing style is best.
Avoid Long Paragraphs
Look, content marketers, we see you. You want to provide as detailed an account of your business as possible. You want to tell a story about your products and services. You want to persuade your audience and get them to take action.
We see you, but we’re going to be real for a moment: too much detail—i.e., winding narratives and lengthy paragraphs—can mean huge accessibility barriers. These customers may never have even heard of you, so what’s going to capture their attention first: a bullet-pointed list of why your product is superior, or a long-winded novel straight from an AP Lit textbook? Big walls of text make customers click away, and that’s that.
Additionally, many of us prefer to skim articles over actually reading them word-for-word. Users spend, on average, around 5.6 seconds looking at a website’s written content. 5.6 seconds! Signal to your readers that the info you’re about to share is quickly digestible by breaking up that content into smaller chunks. That way, even if they don’t view your article for long, they’ll leave with a good grasp of what message you meant to convey.
Need more guidance? Check out our previous post about ideal blog length for some actionable tips!
Understand Readability Scores
True to its name, a readability score is a number that tells you how difficult or easy it is to read your writing. It’s not necessarily about your vocabulary size or the depth of your argument; it’s about how much effort your reader must expend to get your message.
Where can you find your readability score for your written content? Sites like Grammarly are specially designed to detect not only spelling and grammar issues in text, but how readable that content is.
Grammarly suggests businesses aim for a readability score of 60 out of 100, but we’re going to be honest . . . that feels a little low to us. With the details of your target demographic in mind, write up some content and shoot for a readability score of at least 75-80, perhaps even higher. Trust us; you’ll be glad you did.
Be Quick to Answer Questions
Remember what we said earlier about 5.6 seconds? Not only are your customers skimming to get the general idea of your post, many are looking for specific answers.
This is a great way to tie SEO into your written content. If a customer types a question into Google, a superior SEO strategy will ensure that your site pops up right away. But in addition to using the right keywords, are you actually answering the questions at hand?
Consider featured snippets, one of the ways Google answers customer queries fast. It’s that snippet of data that appears in response to a search query on the top of search engine results. You know, the text with a larger font size, often written in boldface?
Google’s algorithm can be finicky, so it’s not always guaranteed that you’ll land yourself a featured snippet. But to boost your chances, try titling blog sections with questions and then directly answering them in the first sentence of the paragraph that follows. Keep your character count low (< 250), and aim to answer at least 2-3 questions in any given piece of content.
Customer-Focused Content Has Never Been So Accessible
Not until we came along, anyway. Let’s find proven, quantifiable ways to make your content more customer-friendly and get you the click-through rates you deserve. Schedule a conversation so we can help you break down barriers!