Picture this
Why design is the crucial ingredient to better engagement.
Graphics and visuals have the power to capture attention and convey messages more effectively than text alone. They also contribute to greater read time, which leads to better top- and bottom-of-the-funnel results. Marketers should invest the same attention to detail and deep analytics into understanding the design of content as they do in gathering insights into the personas and needs of their audience.
Ask any marketer what makes a piece of content engaging and they’ll likely say customer insights. And it’s true – tailoring your subject matter, salutations, CTAs and case studies to fit the specific needs of individual customers can achieve upwards of 84% more attention and engagement than generic content.2
“But persona-based content isn’t a differentiator anymore” says Serge Pérignon, Global Head of Tata Consultancy Services’ Thought Leadership Institute. “We're all putting out good ideas backed by strong data, but we're competing with so much content.
At all hours a day, [customers] are looking at not just thought leadership content but live social, news and other content feeds. It's difficult to break through the noise. How you present content is where you can stand out.”
Blog posts
Videos
White papers
Infographics
Research reports
Podcasts
2 Source: Turtl Labs analysis of Turtl Content Platform dataset, May 2022
Lumen, a specialist company that uses A/B testing and eye-tracking technology to analyze audience engagement, found that readers spent 34% more time engaging with content in an interactive Turtl document – like the one you’re reading – compared to the same content in a regular web page format.3 A separate study by Lumen also commissioned by Turtl found that viewers spent 10x longer on Turtl Docs and generated 5x more positive brand sentiment than regular PDFs.
3 Source: Lumen Research, PDF vs Turtl: Which content format is most engaging, 2021
There’s more to this data than a reason to partner with Turtl (you can find plenty more reasons here). These findings prove that dynamic, interactive, and visually striking design does more for engagement than the value of the content alone.
To investigate the impact of design on engagement further, Turtl collected data on thousands of customer documents and compared the visual elements with the average read time– or how long a customer spends engaging with the content.
Cluster A
Cluster B
Cluster C
Cluster D
Read time
188 seconds
177 seconds
144 seconds
122 seconds
Images
47
23
37
7
Links
15
10
2
1
0
Words per page
159
117
88
135
Layout elements per page
5
9
4
Reading ease
43
41
48
38
Table 1 shows a snapshot of the data. You can see the characteristics of four content “clusters” made up of thousands of documents that have been grouped according to average read time.
The Lumen research by itself suggests that more visual elements equal higher engagement. Turtl’s deeper analysis shows a more complex and nuanced story. For instance, some pages with lots of images and “layout elements” (which can include images but also widgets like maps, shareable pull quotes, polls, audio players, and more) have a lower engagement than those with fewer.
Turtl CEO Nick Mason explains: “The data shows that there is one way to do content badly – Cluster D – and that’s to put no effort into the visual elements.
The data shows that there is one way to do content badly – Cluster D – and that’s to put no effort into the visual elements. But it also shows there are almost infinite combinations of how to design your content, which vary depending on the content you’re serving and the customer journey, and which will affect the engagement.
But it also shows there are almost infinite combinations of how to design your content, which vary depending on the content you’re serving and the customer journey, and which will affect the engagement.”
What does all this mean for marketers? Creating content tailored to your customers’ challenges and objectives will only get you so far. To cut through the noise, you need to elevate your presentation.
