The holiday season is a whirlwind of rapid-fire information — often to the point of overload. Everywhere you look, there’s an inundation of stimuli: from digital notifications to relentless marketing campaigns. It’s enough to overwhelm anyone, which is exactly what happens to fatigued audiences.
To ensure seasonal marketing efforts don’t fall flat, brands should give their followers a reprieve. No, that doesn’t mean marketing less; it means marketing with brevity in mind. When inputs are high and attention spans are short, it’s brief, meaningful content that stands out.
The challenges of marketing during busy seasons
Busy marketing seasons often coincide with busy audience seasons. For B2B marketers, that’s doubly true. As decision fatigue complicates the marketing landscape, potential prospects tend to disengage, rendering conventional content strategies less potent.
It’s imperative for marketers to align their content with fast-paced seasons and fragmented attention spans. It’s not enough to be seen by audiences; we have to understand their most pressing desire for simplicity and deliver relief.
The benefits of keeping content brief
Patience and attention come at a premium. As a result, content needs to be instantly direct, clear, and meaningful. Brevity becomes a superpower.
Brief, straightforward content can help marketers cut through the clutter and upgrade their messaging from received to well received. Here’s the payoff:
- Engagement: Brief content stands out. It captures and maintains attention.
- Retention: Short, focused messages stick.
- Faster decisions: Audiences process brief content faster. Faster processing means faster decision-making.
- Clarity: Clutter confuses. Concise content is clear content.
- Trust: Brief content is inherently respectful because it places more value on your audience’s time than your interests. Build trust by keeping your points short and sweet.
- More time: While it can — and should — take extra forethought, straightforward content is more manageable in the long run. It’s easier to align with campaigns, and it requires fewer revisions. So save your team some time. Be brief.
In a nutshell, long-winded content during busy seasons — that frustrates an audience. Concise content is a joy. Keep your conversions coming, your prospects engaged, and your brand remembered for all the right reasons. Go for brevity.
Strategies for ensuring brief content is still effective
Here’s how to create brief content that lands during the busiest times of the year:
- Break free from heavy content formulas. Some marketing teams rely on prescribed formulas for content, or they get carried away with the idea that good content must have certain key elements: calls to action, value propositions, challenge-solution frameworks — they’re powerful tactics, but they’re only effective if people take the time to absorb them. Keep those formulas for when audiences (and your teams) have more attention to spare. When everyone’s busy, brief is better.
- Simplify and clarify your core message. Before you even start writing, designing, or producing content, you need to know your SMIT: your single most important thing. That’s your message. When aiming for brevity, your message — the single most important thing you want people to know — is your content. Anything else? Dead weight.
- Fine-tune for relevance. Make sure your message delivers real value to your audience. Cutting unnecessary context is the secret to concise communication, but it also raises the stakes if your message isn’t relevant to the people it’s reaching. If you’re paring down on framing, your content needs to find the right audiences in the right place at the right time.
- Focus on quality over quantity. It’s not about how much you say. It’s about how much what you say means. Ensure every word serves a purpose in getting your message across.
- Use visuals to complement text. Integrate graphics and video clips to contextualize copy. Visuals can convey complex ideas quickly and effectively, helping audiences read more between lines — so you can write fewer.
Remember: Peppering your audience with more short-form content isn’t necessarily the answer. Focus on quality over quantity. Master the short-form message and be purposeful about your delivery to make an impression through seasonal chaos.
Say a lot with a little
The power of brevity is critical in fast-paced, attention-scarce environments. Holidays, mid- and end-of-year reviews, quarterly planning — busy seasons are inevitable, as is the need for concise communication and content. Cut through the noise, deliver memorable messages, and provide audiences with some relief along the way. The art of being brief isn’t just about saying less; it’s about saying more with less to ensure each word resonates with purpose and clarity — even during the most chaotic times of the year.
