Turn dry content into juicy narrative – five graphic or interactive ways to present your thought leadership content

You don’t have to be Bill Gates to know that creating compelling studies and thought leadership content is an essential part of becoming recognized in your industry. However, today people have higher expectations of how they experience thought leadership pieces, white papers and studies.

Compelling information must also be presented in a compelling manner and if a picture is worth a thousand words then your dry, 10,000-word document could be communicated in images, visual graphics or videos. 

Try to harness the power of digital mediums to boost engagement with your key content.

Here are five suggestions on how to this:  

1: Create online videos

Would you be more likely to watch a 2 minute video or read a 10 page document? Creating online videos as a way to present your ideas on a particular topic or study will not only ensure more people digest the information but will help you with search rankings too.

Getting your content or website to appear on the first page of a Google search result is near impossible but creating a video as a way to present your ideas will help. Google now presents “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down traditional web results.

Google has a newfound enthusiasm for video, meaning if you create a professional video you have a better chance of it appearing in the first page of a search. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first page ranking.

Here are some great examples of corporations presenting their thought leadership content in video format:

Ace issues video >>

Video on online videos >>

These examples were created by Beyond Media a partner of ours, if you would like more information regarding Beyond Media or video please contact us.

2: Make data visual

We hope it’s not presumptuous to state that most people prefer to look at well-presented, bright and lively graphs than a bunch of data and statistics in a Word document.

If you have ever tried to present statistics or reports to your superiors or potential customers you probably know that if you make that data visual you will have a better chance of capturing your audience’s attention. Also, data presented in a visual way will help your audience digest the information quickly.

Most corporations are starting to realise this and a great example is LinkedIn’s creation, LinkedIn Maps, with the tagline ‘visualize the professional world’. Take a look here:

  

So if you want your audience to pay attention to the information you need to present it in a visual way, create a graph, a mind map, anything other than numbers on a page!

3: Create an app to house your content

Kudos to KPMG who have come up with one of the most creative ways to share their thought leadership pieces with their current and potential customers. They created an iPad app that houses a library of all of their ‘business insights’ or thought leadership pieces.

The marketing around the app was brilliant as was the tagline “The KPMG App for iPad is like having a business guru in your pocket: providing deep insight into today’s complex business issues.”

4: Move away from linear; choose your own adventure

If you don’t have the budget to create online videos or visual data you can simply create an interactive email newsletter. The content in the email newsletter can be arranged so that people quickly get a snapshot of all the information and can pick and choose what they want to read.

Example newsletter >>

An email newsletter allows you to present information in a variety of ways. You can include links to videos, content or graphs so that the recipient can choose how they want to digest the information, which should ensure you cater to everyone’s information preferences.

5: Interactive PDFs

Interactive PDFs allows the user to skip pages, fill out sections, and interact with the document.

Yes, they have been around for a while but they offer a more interactive way to present information so they deserve a mention. With interactive PDFs you can insert videos, turn pages and skip sections so the user has options on how they would like to consume the information. 

Interactive PDFs also give you reporting options so you can see how well your information is being received.

To create an interactive PDF simply speak to the creative department of a digital agency to ask for help and make sure they have a good knowledge of digital publishing platforms.

If you would like more information on any of these suggestions simply contact us at: