One of the most frustrating – and frequent – objections we get to what we do is that marketing via the written word is a bad idea because “no one reads.”
This is a curious take on a species that spends most of its time scrolling through the content on its phone these days – and we’re pretty sure it’s not all videos and pictures of cats. (Even though we are big fans of pictures of cats.)
But this narrative has been in the business world for as long as we can remember: Keep it short. Keep it pithy. If it takes more than 30 seconds to read it, it’s too long. Everyone has a short attention span. No one reads.
This conventional wisdom is preventing a lot of companies who have great stories to tell from telling those stories – because they misread the apparent trends and they don’t look deeply enough into what’s really going on.
The idea that “no one reads” might be defensible if you’re talking about putting out information to the world at large. Roughly 999 of the next 1,000 random people who receive information from a given company probably won’t get past the first sentence. And that seems to affirm the notion that no one reads.
Yet there are reasons most people don’t read most things, and none of them justify you giving short shrift to the substance of your company’s story. When someone declines to read something, it’s because:
- The topic of what’s been written is not of interest to that person.
- The writing is terrible and neither easy nor enjoyable to read.
- The reader has no idea who wrote it and no particular reason to trust it.
- The information being conveyed doesn’t provide any value to the reader. It’s not helpful in any meaningful way.
- The writing sounds exactly like 100 other things the reader sees every day. It’s formulaic and dull.
These are the things people don’t read, and who can blame them?
And yet those same people are staring at screens all day long. Some of it is looking at pictures and videos, sure, but they’re also looking for things to read that are worth their attention.
So give it to them.
The material we write for our clients gets read because it’s:
- Targeted to reach people who already have a vested interest in our clients and what they do.
- Designed to tell the audience something that will be of value to them.
- Written by seasoned, professional storytellers who write with an engaging style.
- Written to be enjoyed and understood. We don’t tell your audience you “leverage optimized solutions.” We tell them what you actually do, and they get it.
People do read. You read this.
Now who is reading your story? Or is no one reading it because you’re not telling it, because someone told you, “No one reads”?
Let’s fix that right now.