Interesting Infographics: How the Brain Processes Content

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Content marketing is an art, but I’m here to tell you that it is also a science!

This week, I want to take a bit of a psychological perspective and look at the way that our brains react to content. After all, content marketing is all about grabbing audience attention – but the type of content you should create depends on the type of response you want from them once you have it! This infographic from MainPath Marketing examines the ways that the brain responds to different types of content. Let’s check it out.

First things first – different ways of presenting content are processed by the brain in different ways. This changes the impact that your content can have, so it’s important to know what your goal is first – and then figure out how to present your information.

So, what are the different content types, and how can you use them to get your messaging across?

Written Content

Examples:

  • Blog posts
  • Website content
  • Case studies
  • e-Books
  • Whitepapers

Written content is great for building the relationship between a brand and a customer. When people read written content, they tend to identify with what they are reading. When you read a book, you put yourself in the shoes of the narrator or hero, right? Written content is also great for emotional resonance because our brains react the same way to the things we read about as they do to the things we see in real life.

Written content is great for:

Growing trust in your customers, highlighting your experiences and expertise, sharing positive customer experiences with your product, and discussing the value of your offerings.

Graphic Content

Examples:

  • Infographics
  • Slideshows
  • e-Books

Graphic content helps people to understand and remember information, including complex ideas. Why is that? Well, our brains are incredibly good at dealing with visual input. That’s no surprise, considering up to 50% of our brains are set up to process it. It only takes about 1/10th of a second to understand a visual scene and 250 milliseconds to attach meaning to a symbol. Plus, images store very well in long-term memory, which works out pretty well for your message!

Graphic content is great for:

Making your content memorable, sharing complex ideas and data, making a persuasive argument, attracting attention.

Interactive Content

Examples:

  • Quizzes
  • Interactive graphics

Interactive content gets people directly involved with your information, which makes it easier for them to remember the key points. Since interactive content combines visuals, stories, and participation, it gets more parts of the brain involved than most other kinds of content.

Quizzes are an especially effective type of interactive content, in terms of sharing and engagement. Quizzes and quiz results are the most shared type of media on Facebook!

Interactive content is great for:

Creating shareable content, engaging with an audience, developing a memorable interactive experience.

Video Content

Examples:

  • Video blogs
  • Facebook Live
  • Brand/culture videos
  • Webinars
  • Instructional videos or demos

Video content is the best way to build an emotional connection with your audience because you can use body language, tone of voice, expressions, and other behaviors in combination to shape your message. Video is also processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text, and it doesn’t require as much energy to process.

Video content is great for:

Sharing personal stories about your brand, building an emotional connection, demonstrating how to do something or explaining how something works.

Hopefully, this helped to shed some light on why certain types of content are better for certain messages. Does your business experiment with different content delivery methods? Have you ever created quizzes or other interactive content that made a big splash with your audience? I’d like to hear about it in the comments.

Interesting Infographics: How the Brain Processes Content

 

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Louis Foong
Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc., one of North America's most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. With more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis is a thought leader on trends, best practices and issues concerning marketing and lead generation. Louis' astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision of the evolving lead generation landscape has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large.

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