The CISO quote that killed our whitepaper pitch

Last Thursday I sat in on a sales call where the prospect's CISO said 'we don't read whitepapers, we skim threat reports.' It hit me that our whole marketing engine at the Austin office was built around 40-page ebooks. I pulled our last 6 months of gated content data and the average time on page was 47 seconds. We're now testing a 2-page incident breakdown format with a single chart and a direct action item. Has anyone else seen engagement drop when they went long-form, or is it just our niche?

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amy97412d ago

Guess our whitepaper downloads were really just a free PDF version of Ambien. Forty-seven seconds sounds generous, that's about how long it takes me to decide a cracker isn't worth the crumbs. We tried a 3-page thing once with a flowchart and my boss asked if we were mailing out coloring books now. Short and ugly with one actual point feels like the only way to get past anyone's spam filter these days.

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