Creating Engaging Digital Content: 6 Tips for Success

Are passersby watching and interacting with your content, or is it falling flat? While it’s true that digital content captures nearly four times the interest of static content, that doesn’t mean the simple act of creating digital content will inspire your audience’s interest. At Oppna Digital, we know that building vivid, interactive, engaging content for your digital wayfinding display is essential for your system’s success. To give you a better idea of how to bump up the quality and appeal of your content, we’ve detailed a few helpful tips below.

Tip #1: Define Your Content Goals

What are the end goals for your content? Do you want to capture emails? Promote a product? Upsell a customer? Provide valuable information? The objective of your content not only drives audience interaction but also directs your content strategy, the overall feel of your design, and the flow of your communications with your viewers.

Tip #2: Know Your Audience

Before you ever create content, you must know who you’re creating it for. Without that critical piece of the puzzle, you simply cannot create content that appeals to your audience. The more you know your customer, the faster your content will take off, and the faster your business will benefit from your digital wayfinding deployment. Facts you’ll need to know include:

●        What is the age range of your audience?

●        What gender are you targeting?

●        What kind of work do they do? What’s their average income?

●        What’s their relationship status? Do they have kids?

●        What level of education have they completed?

●        What’s important to them? What do they value?

●        What are their interests?

●        Why do they need your product/service/solution?

You need to know what drives your viewers to take action so you can design content that captures their attention and encourages engagement with your brand. Designing a display for a 75-year-old grandmother will (likely) be vastly different than creating text and visuals for a 25-year-old fashion blogger, so keep your audience demographics top of mind as you build out your content.

Tip #3: Remember the Eight-Second Theory

How much time do you have to make an impression on your viewers? Three minutes? Two? Thirty seconds? If you ask a group of seasoned marketers, the general consensus is a whopping seven seconds—or less.

Human attention spans are waning, so keep that in mind when designing your content display. If you have only seconds to strike a chord with your viewers and capture their interest, your most important messaging must be the first thing they see.

Consider how your viewers would prefer digesting that message—do they like video content or text? Perhaps a combination of both? If you’ve done your audience research, you’ll have a solid idea of the types of content your viewers gravitate toward, so you can design your display according to their preferences. If you show them content they actually want to see, you can bet they’ll pay attention.

Tip #4: Layout Optimization

When designing your content layout, arrange the display in a logical, easy-to-read, and easy-to-follow manner. Even if you’re an artistic type, getting crazy creative with the layout or incorporating too much movement will quickly distract viewers and disengage their interest.

As much as possible, keep your text stationary, since moving text content is difficult for your audience to read and follow. Images can (and probably should) move, but don’t go overboard with animation on any given display. The idea is to attract viewers’ eyes to the most important content on the screen while minimizing distractions that might pull their focus away from your message.

Tip #5: Animate Your Content

Incorporating animation in your digital wayfinding and signage content will help attract far more viewers than plain text alone. According to Statista, in 2018, over 85% of internet users in the United States consumed video content on a monthly basis. And, according to HubSpot, 54% of consumers would like to see more video content from the brands they patronize.

You can capitalize on the growing video trend and garner more interaction than ever by incorporating movement into your display. As part of your approach, you can also try using animated transitions between messages to signal to viewers that something new and interesting is on the way.

Tip #6: Incorporate Color Contrast

Readability is critical for engaging your audience—after all, if your visitors can’t see the words you display, how can they interact with your content? To create easy-to-read, visually stimulating text content, be sure to incorporate color contrast throughout your display.

The eye should be able to immediately differentiate text from background graphics, so when you’re designing your content layout, pay close attention to the colors you select. Light-dark contrast tends to stimulate viewers’ eyes the most, so try sticking with light-colored text against dark-colored backgrounds for the most striking effect.

Need User-Friendly Content Management? Find Your Solution With Oppna Digital

As an end-to-end digital wayfinding solutions provider, at Oppna Digital, we can design and develop custom, pixel-perfect content that aligns with your brand image and design. Even better, our custom content management system integrates with your existing systems and makes it easy for you and your staff to update and maintain content across all of your channels. We know your digital wayfinding solution is an extension of your brand, and when you partner with our team, we’ll ensure you get your point across.

To learn more about how we can help your business stand out, give our team a call at 651-237-5677 or reach out to us on our contact page. Ready to see what our systems can do? Schedule your demo today and prepare to be impressed!