There is no doubt that content marketing is one of the most effective ways to get traffic to your site and hopefully convert them into buying customers. A new study was recently released, however, that shows that the type of content, how it is published and other factors can have a significantly different impact based on the age of the people reading it. Understanding how your target audience wants to consume content is absolutely essential for building an effective marketing strategy.
Read on to learn about some of the valuable insights available in the study and see how marketers can capitalize on this information.
Type of Content to Publish
As you can see from this chart below, everyone loves blog posts. From the oldest of the baby boomers to the youngest millennials, blogs ranked first. In fact, the specific types of content that are consumed are quite similar until you get to the #5 ranked spot where Millennial’s prefer audio books, Gen X’ers want case studies and Baby Boomers want Reviews.
When you look at the ways people least like to consume content, it is clear that the white paper is the big loser. For an older audience, slideshares are almost as bad. Perhaps not surprisingly, baby boomers also don’t like meme’s, but other generations find them to be useful.
What to DO? Taking all this into account, you’ll want to look at the age range of your target audience and spread your content efforts out over their most preferred content types, while avoiding those they don’t like.
You can see the full chart from the study here:
How Long Should Your Content Be
Many marketers try to publish lengthy content because it allows them to get more words ranked by Google. While this may be smart for SEO, it likely isn’t the best strategy if you actually want your readers to enjoy the content.
All three generations found that they prefer content that is about 300 words in length at the highest frequency. Baby boomers seem to like it the shortest of all with nearly 20% wanting it under 200 words. Generation X respondants had over 20% preferring 500+ words, which is the longest. Publishing the 200-400 word content pieces will likely help you to enjoy the highest levels of readership.
You can see the full chart here:
How Much Time is Spent Consuming Content
Another thing to keep in mind is how much time your respective audience will spend actually consuming content. Baby boomers spend the most with over 25% of them consuming content for more than 20 hours per week. Most people from both the Millenial and Gen X crowd spend just 5-10 hours per week consuming content.
See the full chart here:
Taking the information from this study and putting it into practice can help you to get the most out of every piece of content you publish. Of course, with every project you will need to customize your efforts to find what works the best.
