Is the message the only thing that matters?
As a B2B marketer in the digital age, it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed. You see your competitors creating more and more content. And sometimes, you even see them creating better and better content.
How do you compete, and win, when you can’t clone yourself (or your superstar subject matter expert) or magically double your budget for the coming quarter?
You look at the content and campaigns that are really moving the needle—and you do more of that, and less of everything else. Even if that means challenging some long standing assumptions.
For example, there’s a myth that’s been passed down by generations of B2B marketers. The myth runs something like this: “The message is everything. Only find the perfect message, and the people will read, understand, and buy. Eventually.”
That myth has fueled the creation of countless PDF whitepapers, eBooks, and brochures that no one’s ever submitted their email address to access, let alone read from cover to cover. And like so much ancient wisdom, it rapidly disintegrates under the spotlight of modern science.
Research shows that your chosen medium—the content format, the visuals, the design—has a profound effect on reader engagement, even when the message is exactly the same.
Few people understand engagement like the attention scientists at Lumen Research. In a recent study, they used eye-tracking technology to discover how people read the same content when it’s presented in a PDF versus a Turtl Doc.
Compared to the Turtl Doc, the PDF lost 90% of reader engagement. It’s a result that reinforces the findings of numerous other studies on what engages us quickly and persuasively, and what doesn’t.
Research by 3M has found an additional 50% of people will be persuaded by an argument when it’s presented in a format that’s visually rich. We’re also more likely to remember we’ve been persuaded; according to Brain Rules, we recall information 5.5x better when it’s paired with a visual image.
Put simply, what your content looks like really matters. And so does the level of active engagement it supports. In one of CMI’s major annual surveys, 87% of marketers agreed that interactive connect outperforms static content when it comes to winning a reader’s attention.
If we dive deeper into Lumen’s study, we see just how substantial the impact of a visually rich, interactive experience can be.
On average, Lumen’s participants spent just 16 seconds viewing each page of the PDF on the screen of a desktop device. But when they viewed the visually rich, interactive Turtl Doc under the same conditions, the figure was 117 seconds. They also spent 815% more time engaging intently (i.e., with their eyes actively focused on the visuals or text).
Interestingly, presenting the same messages in a Turtl Doc didn’t just move the needle on engagement. It had a measurable impact on participants’ overall perception of the brand behind the content. After viewing the Turtl Doc, participants were 367% more likely to view the brand as “friendly” and 41% more likely to view the brand as “scientific”.
The fact is your medium matters at least as much as your message. Get the medium wrong and your audience won’t engage with your content. Which means your message, however well-considered, will have a much slimmer chance of hitting home.
Worse, you risk creating a negative impression of your brand, and making your audience even less receptive when your next content offer arrives in their inbox.
(Incidentally, none of this will be news to the news channels. Reduce the top stories to their fundamentals and the messages are always the same. That’s why channels spend so much time optimizing their ‘medium’ to win and retain viewer attention—and why most of us B2B marketers could learn a lot from the analysts at the BBC and CNN.)
Happily, you don’t need to hire your own team of attention scientists. Simply follow the research and you’ll give yourself an edge over many of your peers.