Shorter, stronger stories: Three alternatives to long-form thought leadership

[Jahangir655]

For several years now, content marketing gurus have evangelised about storytelling. But what if, despite all your hard work, your story is just a little bit dull? Should you tell it anyway?

In a word, no. Telling a boring story is much worse than not telling it: it alienates your audience and undermines any ambitions you have to be a thought leader.

So what makes a story boring? In thought leadership, it usually comes down to one thing: it’s too long. There may be some excellent insight in there, but it’s buried beneath pages of waffle about well-covered issues that don’t tell you anything new.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that longer reports are redundant, or that long-form argentina mobile phone numbers database thought leadership can’t be extremely powerful. There are also plenty of subjects that are too nuanced or complex to fit into anything shorter than a full-length white paper.

But if you are going to produce a lengthy report, you need to be able to fill every page – without resorting to ‘stuffing’. If you can’t, it’s best just to tell your story in a different way. And it makes sense in any case to use a variety of channels and formats as part of your content mix, to suit the varied tastes and time pressures of your audience.

With that in mind, here are three alternatives to long-form thought leadership and some thoughts on making them work.