Creating engaging and motivating mobile content might sound easy, but in reality, many people struggle to write content that audiences love. Luckily, there are a few easy steps to guide you towards an easy and fun content creation process, so there is no need to stress!
In this article, we’ll look at the 3 key pillars for great content:
- Short, bite-sized information;
- Fun and informative visuals;
- Engaging and creative media.
Short, Bite-Sized Content
Keep it short and fun
It may sound obvious, but when writing content for mobile, always keep in mind that your audience will be reading it on their mobile devices. So keep the information as short and concise as possible, otherwise it becomes very difficult to consume a lot of content on small screens.
Keep it friendly
Try not to create an uncomfortable distance between you and the readers by being too formal. Most of the time, it’s best to simply use “I”, “we” or “you” when writing content. For example: “At our stores, we believe in creating a pleasant atmosphere for our customers, how can you achieve this? Multiple answers are possible”.
Try to create scenarios where you sketch a situation and ask a question about it. This is a more appealing way to help your audience to visualise a specific scenario. For example: “When you see a customer entering your store, clearly looking for a certain object, what do you do?”
- “I give the customer some time to look around.”
- “I immediately approach the customer to help him or her.”
- “I welcome the customer into the store and ask if I can help.”
Keep those brains in mind
Try to remember that the human brain can only retain so much, so don’t overload readers with overly-complicated content. Introductions should be clear, easy to understand and as short as possible. For example, try to replace all difficult words with easier to understand synonyms. Brainstorm about what you would really like to teach your employees and write these ideas down on a big sheet of paper. Once you start working on those ideas, it will become easier to create an entire learning-path for your employees.
Keep it relevant
Always keep your target audience in mind. It’s essential that you know exactly who you are writing for. The content creation process will be different for each target group, eg. the style of writing would be quite different for engineers as compared to your sales team.
Nonetheless, no matter who you write for, try to keep it fun and engaging; the whole purpose of mobile-learning is to get everyone on board in a fun and motivating way. Constantly analyse and rewrite the content you create, ask your co-workers for advice and always double-check your spelling.
Keep that feedback coming
Getting the right inspiration for writing good content might not always be easy. You can always base your information on manuals, online courses and the entire internet of resources, but the challenge remains keeping it creative and unique. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to ask your potential audience what kind of content they would like to receive: what type of questions they prefer, what kind of information they would really like to learn more about, what kind of writing style engages them etc.
Once you’ve published the content, always ask for feedback, either through face-to-face meetings or a simple survey. Content creation is a continuous process of improvement and optimisation until you find the perfect level of engagement.
Fun and Informative Visuals
Switch it up
The goal of using a mobile-learning platform is to create some fun variety for your audience. Instead of creating overwhelming 3-hour long courses where most people will forget 80% of what they have just learnt, you want to keep it fun, short and motivating to increase knowledge retention.
Visuals are a perfect way to do that. By introducing different kinds of visuals such as photos, infographics and animations you create great variety. Online, you can find plenty of royalty free photos. (Check out sites such as Unsplash or Pexels). Try to find the most relevant, high-quality images; one tag-word is usually enough to find the perfect image to introduce or support your content. Use creative photos as an example of how certain things should or should not look, this makes your content more memorable.
Info-what?
A creative way of providing interesting content is through infographics, which is a visual representation of information or data in a chart or diagram. Creating an infographic is a very easy process: there are several tools which can help. (Try Infogram or Piktochart). All you need to do is to provide the content to the designer and give him or her an idea of what you would like.
Engaging and Creative Media
Engage the management team
There is nothing more motivating for employees than seeing how engaged their management team is with your chosen mobile platform. Once you explain the benefits of mobile-learning to your employees and show them – perhaps in a video – that you too use and enjoy the app, your employees will get on board even faster than you think.
By filming your existing trainers, managers or other employees and using these videos in the training-platform, you create your own mobile-learning culture. When recording a video, always remember to film horizontally and not vertically as a horizontal video looks much better on mobile-platforms. Try to use professional equipment if possible, although most smartphones these days have excellent video specs!
Once you’ve actually recorded a video, it’s best to upload it on a (private) YouTube-account. This way you can easily copy the YouTube link into the mobile-learning platform. Keep in mind that the quality of the video depends of your internet speed. This means that you might upload a high-quality video but, depending on your internet, it might look different.
Thank you, Google
Don’t have the time or resources to record these videos yourself? No problem! Luckily there are plenty of perfect videos available online. Some are free and others cost some money, but it is always a good idea to invest in good videos as you will be able to use them over and over again. If you’re feeling creative, you can even provide the entire script and idea of the video and online designers can create a personalised video for you. Freelancer sites such as Upwork or Fiverr are easy, affordable ways to do this.
Creating mobile content isn’t as difficult as you think- so what are you waiting for? Start the creative process today!
As a company, MobieTrain is first focused on the retail industry, as the knowledge crisis is prevalent here. Stores are challenged to provide a consistently good customer experience, and this means training a diverse and mobile workforce on an ever-changing topic base. That is why the third component of MobieTrain’s solution is a comprehensive dashboard, that gives management mirror insight into exactly what is happening at their stores.
