Offer content in multiple formats
TIP
Last Updated: Sep 3, 2024
Detailed information can be hard to digest. Research shows that people absorb content differently: Some prefer to watch videos, while others find that annoyingly slow. Some prefer to listen—or may even need to listen if they're not highly literate.
An effective trend is gaining traction: offering information in multiple formats on the same page.
Imagine giving your audience the freedom to choose how they engage with your content. It's not just about convenience; it's about accessibility and inclusivity.
Here's how some innovative platforms are making it happen:
Listen While You Work (or Relax): Ohio Legal Help has a "Listen to this article" button at the top of their articles. Using AI-generated voices (which have become impressively natural), they're turning written content into audio on demand. Curious about implementation? Check out How to easily turn all your articles into audio articles.
From Screen to Script: If you're producing video content, consider offering a transcript. Place it prominently below the video or link to it clearly. This allows people to choose either method to digest the information.
This approach works best for well-structured, thoughtfully produced videos rather than those recorded off-the-cuff. Why? While viewers can easily follow meandering thoughts in a video, readers expect more coherence in written form. Even if your video is well-structured, you'll need to clean up a word-for-word transcription. Transcription tools aren't precise enough to produce a polished version, and people’s speech patterns tend to be more rambling and less grammatical than what works in written content. Remember, the goal is to create a transcript that stands as a valuable resource on its own, not just a word-for-word record of the video.
Check out Moz's approach: they pair videos with well-edited transcripts, complete with relevant images. You can tell the site didn’t just drop in the transcript—they created coherent sentences, cleaned up the grammar, and added the images needed to follow along. This type of transcript is called an “edited” transcript, distinguishing it from a “verbatim” one, which includes things like “ums” and stutters, and a “clean” one, which removes obvious stumbles but preserves nearly all the original wording.
You can always try just a few articles or videos, to see how it goes.