Content marketing is a super competitive field. People are always looking for ways to gain an edge over the competition and pave their way to success. However, that is not as easy as it sounds. Content writers have different skills, even though they are all writers. Some writers are better at writing certain types of content than others, and vice versa.
However, there are a few common things that all content writers try to follow because they are related to SEO. A content writer’s main job is to create content that is SEO friendly as well as satisfactory for the readers.
For that, they employ various techniques such as paraphrasing and summarizing. Today, we will focus on summarizing only and teach you how it is beneficial for content marketing. We will also tell you about some ways in which you can employ summaries in your content and improve its content marketing potential.
1. Summaries Improve Readability
In content marketing, nobody is looking to read some literary masterpiece that only post-graduate students can understand. What the people are looking for is simple, and easy-to-understand content. They only want to know about the thing they searched for and nothing more.
If writers facilitate the readers by writing concise and to-the-point articles that are aimed at solving a specific problem, then their performance will improve.
The improvement will be on two fronts simultaneously, the SEO front as well as client satisfaction. In SEO, the improvement will be due to:
- No fluff
- No keyword stuffing
- Low bounce rate
- Relatively high dwell time
The last two points; dwell time and bounce rate, are direct measurements of reader/visitor satisfaction. So, why does summarized content help with that? The answer is simple when the content is too long, readers get scared and leave, but when the content is short, they stay to read.
So, improving content readability by summarizing it is a great strategy to improve content marketing strategies.
2. Summaries Improve Engagement
We have already talked about how summaries can improve the readability of content. But we didn’t touch upon engagement. If a user is very invested in your content and takes the time to read it, share it, comment on it, etc., etc., then we call such a user “engaged”.
Engaged visitors are usually the most profitable ones as well because they are the most likely to spend money on products and services. So, how does summarizing boost engagement?
The short answer is attention spans. Humanity’s attention span has decreased a lot. The average human has an attention span of only 8.25 seconds. This is a very short span, and it means that you cannot afford to waste any time. Summarized content is excellent at not wasting time.
Even with such a short attention span, most people can and will read short content, because they feel it is much easier to tackle.
3. Helps to Increase the Shareability of Your Content
What is shareability? It can be said to be the likelihood of some content getting shared through digital mediums
Shareability is a great source of exposure, and traffic. Content that is shared also has the personal seal of approval of the person who shared it. If a famous person shares something, you can bet that it will get a lot of views. This is a great outcome for content marketing, after all, positive exposure and more views are one of the basic objectives of marketing.
Summaries are great for making your content shareable. But how? Well, before we can answer that just think back to the attention span discussion we did. Now keeping that discussion in mind, think about what kind of content are people likely to share.
It’s simple, the content that they think is readable and engaging is what they will share with others. Since summarized content is both readable and engaging, it is naturally very shareable.
4. Can Be Easily Used for Short-Form Content
Abstracts, intros, meta-descriptions, excerpts, and conclusions are components of content whose job is to either hook the reader’s attention or incite them to take an action beneficial for your brand.
Intros, abstracts, meta-descriptions, and excerpts are primarily used for hooking attention. They are usually the first things people see in relation to some content. They have to be very enticing in order to catch and hold the readers’ attention. And what better way to do that than using a summary? We already know that concise content is great for engagement, so it can definitely work here as well.
Abstracts and intros are supposed to lay down the roadmap of an article/research paper. They go over what the article will discuss and what’s the outcome. An abstract needs to be a very short read. So, writers have to summarize their entire article into one or two paragraphs.
The best way to do that is to get a summarizer and make it do the writer’s job instead. A text summarizer can create extractive summaries of any content that you provide it with. With its help, you can create summaries for your content without any hassle.
You can also create meta-descriptions and conclusions with a summarizing tool. Just make sure that you add a CTA (call to action) in the summary to improve the chances of lead conversions.
In this way, summaries can help your content marketing by catching the attention of people as well as moving them along the sales funnel.
Tips for Creating Engaging Summaries
Now that you know why engaging summaries are good for content marketing, let’s take a look at some tips for creating them.
1. Read the Content that Needs to be Summarized
The first step for summarizing is to read the content that you want to shorten. A summary is supposed to contain only the core points of the content and all the unnecessary details are cut off.
Without reading and understanding, you cannot find decipher what is the core point and what is not. So, always read the content thoroughly.
2. Note Down the Core Points
Once you have understood the content, you need to go through it again and note down all the core points.
You can do that by simply underlining the sentences that best describe them or writing your own version.
Once that is done, you need to arrange the notes in a coherent and sensible manner, and voila, your summary is done.
3. Alternative Tip for Summarizing
If you do not want to go through the hassle of making a summary manually, then you can opt for a summarizing tool. You may already know this, but a text summarizer is a tool that can automatically create a summary.
To use a text summarizer, you need to go online, search for them and provide them with the text that needs to be summarized.
Be warned though, tools can only create extractive summaries. You may need to do a little bit of editing to make the summary better or adjust some keywords in it.
Conclusion
Summaries are very useful in modern content writing and content marketing. They help people with short attention spans to read content in a short amount of time. They are also good for attracting the attention of people and leading them to the actual detailed content. They are also useful in creating conclusions with CTAs which help with lead conversions.
And that’s it for this article. Hopefully, you gained something from it and learned why summaries are great for content marketing.
