The Most Expensive Thing Your Audience Gives You is Their Attention

Attention is probably the most valuable thing your audience will ever give you, and a surprising amount of marketing treats it like spare change.

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to earn clicks, impressions, visits and opens. Then someone finally gives us what we wanted, lands on the website and starts reading, and we reward them with 900 words before getting to the point.

The internet has no shortage of content that earns a click and immediately wastes the next thirty seconds of someone’s life. Most of it seems to have been created under the assumption that the reader has nothing better to do.

Your audience almost always does.

That’s why I think the real job of marketing isn’t simply getting someone to the page. It’s earning enough of their attention that they decide to stay there. After enough years sitting in marketing meetings, you start to notice a pattern: the longer it takes us to explain why someone should care, the less likely it is that anyone still does.

The Old Advice Was Right

Long before analytics dashboards, engagement rates and heat maps, Shakespeare wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit.” It turns out it’s pretty good marketing advice too.

People don’t read most marketing content the way marketers imagine they do. They scan. They look for something relevant. They make a quick judgment about whether the next paragraph deserves another few seconds of their time.

If the opening feels like work, they’re gone. There is no announcement or exit interview. They simply move on to one of the approximately nine billion other things competing for their attention.

That doesn’t mean everything should be short. I don’t believe there’s a magic word count for good marketing. A complicated idea may deserve 2,000 words. A simple one may need 200. The problem starts when we confuse length with substance.

The right amount of content is the amount necessary to make the point useful.

Different Audiences Give You Different Amounts of Time

One of the reasons blanket advice about content length doesn’t work is that different audiences want very different things.

If you’re writing for engineers, depth can be the value. They may want to understand the architecture, integrations, implementation requirements and what happens when the API decides to behave creatively at two in the morning. Cutting all of that information in the name of brevity doesn’t respect their time. It wastes it by forcing them to go somewhere else for the answers.

An executive audience is usually different. They’re often looking for signals. What’s the problem? Why does it matter? What’s the business impact? What decision needs to be made?

Give that person six paragraphs of background before answering the question and you’ve probably lost them.

The same idea can therefore require completely different amounts of explanation depending on who’s reading it. Good marketing starts by understanding not only what the audience needs to know, but how much they need to know before they can make the next decision.

More Explanation Doesn’t Always Create More Clarity

Marketing teams have a natural tendency to add things. Another paragraph makes the argument feel safer. Another feature seems important. Someone from sales wants one more benefit included. Legal adds a qualification. The CEO has a sentence they really like. Eventually a simple idea is carrying around seventeen pieces of luggage.

Every sentence can be perfectly reasonable on its own while the page becomes exhausting as a whole.

I’ve seen websites that remind me of a tour guide who refuses to stop talking while everyone else is trying to enjoy the view. Nothing being said is necessarily wrong. You just desperately want the person to stop for a minute.

Good marketing writing requires deciding what the reader actually needs in order to understand the idea and removing the things they don’t. That’s not dumbing down the message. It’s respecting the person receiving it.

Sometimes We’re Writing for Ourselves

There’s another reason marketing gets longer than it needs to be, and this one is a little harder to admit.

Sometimes we’re trying to prove how much we know.

The person writing the copy understands the product, industry or problem deeply and wants the audience to see that expertise. So all of that knowledge starts making its way onto the page. The nuances come in. The terminology gets more sophisticated. Every possible objection gets answered before the reader has even had one.

The writer wants to demonstrate expertise. The reader just wants to understand the point.

Those are not always the same objective.

Real expertise often shows up in knowing what can be left out. Anyone can keep explaining something. It takes considerably more discipline to understand the subject well enough to make it simple without making it simplistic.

Attention Has to Be Earned More Than Once

Getting someone’s attention isn’t a single event. You have to keep earning it.

The headline earns the opening. The opening earns the next paragraph. Each section has to give the reader enough value to justify continuing.

That’s especially important because people rarely consume marketing in ideal conditions. They’re reading between meetings, checking something on their phone, comparing three companies at once or looking for an answer while fourteen other tabs are open. Your beautifully constructed brand narrative is competing with email, Slack, a calendar notification and whatever just happened in the group text.

That doesn’t mean every sentence has to be dramatic. It means every section should have a reason to exist.

If the reader gets halfway through a page and realizes they haven’t learned anything new in several paragraphs, you’ve probably spent more of their attention than you’ve earned.

Saying Less Is Usually Harder

The challenge for most marketers isn’t producing enough content anymore. We have tools that can generate more words in seconds than most companies could reasonably publish in a month.

The harder skill is editing.

It’s recognizing that a paragraph you like doesn’t actually help the reader. It’s removing the fourth example when two already made the point. It’s resisting the temptation to explain something again because you’re worried someone might not have understood it the first time.

Sometimes the right message needs a detailed article. Sometimes it needs three sentences and a button.

The discipline is knowing the difference.

Respect the Attention You’ve Already Earned

Marketing spends a lot of money trying to get people to pay attention. Advertising budgets, content programs, SEO, social media, email and websites are all competing for the same limited resource.

So when somebody finally gives you that attention, treat it like it cost something.

Because it did.

Say what needs to be said. Give them enough information to understand why it matters. Go deeper when deeper is useful, and stop when it isn’t.

The goal isn’t to make everything shorter.

It’s to make sure every additional minute you ask from your audience is worth the one they just gave you.