1. Put experience first

Apply basic psychological principles to your content and reap the rewards

Content creation with no thought for experience

The majority of consumers say the experience a bank offers is equally as important as its product or service. This is hugely relevant to content creators in the financial sector, many of whom are still creating their content in the PDF, a format that was created in 1993.

They churn out guides and whitepapers in the PDF and pray that people are interested enough in the topic to force their way through a static 20-page long-scroll document. When FinTech products and services are making the experience of banking fun and engaging, financial marketers need to keep pace with how they're delivering their content.

1. Visuals are everything

Did you know that 90% of brainpower is spent on visual activity? In fact, our vision has literally cannibalized our other senses. Scientists believe that our modern need for increased visual processing power has led to the irreparable damage of around 60% of our genes related to smell. Visuals matter.

An endless block of text isn’t good enough. If there are no visuals, then you’re failing to engage 90% of your reader’s brain. You’re creating an even greater obstacle against yourself in the battle to persuade.

2. Get your image/text ratios right

A study found that people who read a text without imagery can only remember about 10% of it three days later. By comparison, the same piece of text alongside contextualized imagery can cause that to increase to 65%. Using imagery throughout your content can help your writing “stick” in people’s brains for longer.

How you split up your documents in terms of images, text, and empty spaces should be determined by psychology.

Focal Points

Thanks to our evolutionary survival instincts, our eyes are always drawn to the most prominent things around us. Help your readers skim for the content that's most relevant to them by altering font sizes, headings, and contextualized imagery to draw them in.

Chunking

Take large blocks of text and break them down into smaller groups. When we read long sections of text, our brains “run out of memory” as they try to process it. Small paragraphs give the brain little breaks that allow it to reset itself and avoid cognitive overload.

White space

You don’t need to cram everything onto a page. White space refers to any space in a design that doesn’t contain any focal points. It doesn’t necessarily have to be white, but it needs to be an area in your design that sits between the most important content in order to highlight it.

Find out more here:

3. Choose the right format

Even if you've created the best content in the world, if it's not in a format that encourages engagement, you're going to struggle to make an impact. The reason formats like the PDF aren't good enough anymore is because they fail to satisfy one essential psychological need.

Self-determination theory

This psychological theory is behind how we essentially like to experience everything. We're driven by intrinsic motivations and a desire to act autonomously. These decisions might not always be the best thing for us, but it's our human nature that drives us to want these independent experiences.

Non-linear navigation

We don’t like to read by dictatorship, which scrolling documents (like the PDF) force us to do. We like to go back and forth, choose what to read and what to skip, and engage with content on our own terms. This is why no one reads a magazine or a newspaper from beginning to end - they skim until they find something that interests them. Choose a digital content format that allows this kind of non-linear navigation.