The skinny on dense content

By signal

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In a world where attention spans have fallen to mere seconds, every word counts – and high-quality writing makes the difference. Enter “dense” content, which offers readers “a lot of good, perceived value in a little bit of time.” Professionally written, dense content helps you tell the best story. It also serves up SEO, usability and lead generation benefits. Here’s what you need to know.


The basics

Forbes magazine notes that “a new trend may ignore length entirely, focusing on providing as much information as possible in the smallest possible space – dense content – to appeal to readers.” (Some may say that the emoji is the perfect dense content. But don’t scrap the English language just yet!)

Dense content combines the best of both snackable and long-form content. Think of it as “snackable done right.”

  • Snackable works well because people generally don’t have time for long reads
  • Long-form offers a valuable in-depth, authoritative exploration of a topic

The benefits

Snackable but low-quality fluff doesn’t provide value. People don’t read it – and they certainly don’t share or link to it. High-quality dense content, on the other hand, gets much higher engagement from your audience. When you pepper it with the right keywords, it also helps your websites rank higher. Bonus: Easy-to-read dense content also increases your site’s usability / accessibility.

Long-form content has strong educational and thought leadership value. Consider using dense content as a feeder, driving potential leads to fill out a form for a longer content offer, such as an e-book or white paper. When your feeder is high-quality, you earn respect with readers and pique their interest in more content.

How to write dense content

DOs DON’Ts
  • Edit well. Good revisions can help you trim the fat.
  • Make it chunky. Use bullet points, short paragraphs and graphics.
  • Mind your quality. Writing is an art, so use your best writers – or hire professionals.
  • Think mobile. Many of your readers will be accessing your content on a small screen.
  • Be verbose. Rambling on and on loses your audience.
  • Complex words. Keep it smart and simple, not stuffy or full of buzzwords. Test yourself with the Hemingway App.
  • Big chunks of text. There’s an acronym for this – TLDR, which means “too long, didn’t read.”
  • Confuse readers. Define and use key messages / message platforms to keep communicators on the same page.

Quality is more important than quantity – especially when it comes to content marketing. Let the Signal team’s professional writers deliver the dense content you need.

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