Don’t ask your audience to make sense of your messy ideas.
It’s your responsibility to distill the ideas down.
I don’t want to go on an intellectual Easter Egg hunt🥚in search of your brilliance.
Whitepapers consistently bury the lead idea.
The big idea is often on page 30 in a small graphic.
Videos are also guilty of this.
Lots of build up — time spent telling me about “what I’ll tell you.”
Before we get to the substance.
Please, no.
Stop.
Don’t make me dig through thirty pages to figure out if your big idea is relevant to me.
Don’t make me watch a video for 2 minutes hoping you’ll say something helpful to me.
✅ Lead with an infographic or key sentence.
✅ Be a bit provacative
✅ Produce surprise, delight, or dissent
✅ Evoke my curiosity to know more.
Give me enough info to make a fast choice on relevance.
That’s your job as the creator of an idea.
And it’s my role to make a fast decision on your idea’s relevance to me.
That’s the social contract.
P.S. My apologies to all those who have at one point or another said “what the heck is Bill going on about?”
#OrgTL #ThoughtLeadership #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy
