The Principles of Smart Brevity

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to hear a Career Huddle where Huddlers get exclusive access to the authors of some of the world’s best-selling books. This Huddle featured Roy Schwartz of Axios and Axios HQ and co-author of Smart Brevity, a game-changing book for you and your teams. What will you learn? For the sake of brevity, how to get to the point faster, more efficiently, and in a more memorable way. Why does it matter? Because time is an increasingly limited commodity, and smart brevity will win in the attention economy every single time. I read this book, I’ve studied this book, I’m applying its principles almost every day. I think my writing has gotten better, and I was pretty good to begin with. I highly recommend reading this book then sharing it with your peers, your boss, and your teams. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers! I am thrilled to introduce you to Roy Schwartz, co-founder of Axios and Axios HQ and co-author of the best-selling Smart Brevity book. He just mentioned that they sold 200,000 copies. To quote the authors, “The cold, hard truth is most people are lousy writers and fuzzy thinkers.” Take that. Now, they need, and maybe you need, and I quote, “a straitjacket on your worst instincts or habits in communication. Even if great writing eludes you, brevity needn’t.” In today’s conversations, you’ll learn the basic principles of smart brevity and how to apply them to all aspects of your communications. Now with that shockingly brief intro, hello, Roy. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Roy: Well, thank you for inviting me on. I’m in Arlington, Virginia. I’m in the offices of Axios, the media company, and Axios HQ, the SaaS company, and we share space, and kind of nobody’s here but me.

Drew: Well, that’s exactly right. Yeah, I’ve been to a lot of offices of late, and it’s like ghost towns. But anyway, it’s fun to see them. So I feel a lot of pressure to be succinct and deliver value early in our conversation, and just to, you know, for the podcast listeners and folks there with that in mind, let’s talk about smart brevity’s core four for writing, because I think that’s like pretty core, if you will.

Roy: Yeah. Well, look, I think that the biggest takeaways for any audience, and I imagine a lot of people that are listening today are professional writers or actually good writers. They are in the minority. Most people are terrible writers. But one of the things that we’ve learned over, you know, our time at Politico and now at Axios is really focusing on audience first, right? That understanding who your audience is, really focusing on what they need, and really instead of putting yourself first on the message you’re trying to share, putting them first. We often tell people, put up a picture or an image of the person that you’re trying to reach, and that will be very helpful. It’ll also keep your language much more simple, which is another key point. Read it out loud, right? Read the content that you’re going to share out loud. Make sure that as you read it, you don’t put in words—I was actually reading an article today, and it used a couple of words that I actually had to go and look up, because I was like, “What does that actually mean?” And so you never want to have your audience have to do that. So keep it simple. Keep it focused on what they need to know. Do the “What’s New” and the “Why It Matters,” and a lot of time that isn’t spent that should be spent on the hierarchy of content, right? So what are you trying to share? What order are you trying to share it in? And remember that they’re mostly going to read what’s at the top. So make sure you focus on that first.

Drew: A lot to break down. And I want to go through some of those things first. You mentioned audience first, and that feels so obvious and close to home for marketers, because we always want to be thinking about our customers. But so much of what is written isn’t audience first, and you in the book talk about thinking about it as an audience of one, like one person, and just talk a little more in detail on what that means, and why are we thinking about one person?

Roy: We give a lot of great examples in the book about corporate speak, right? That when people sit down in front of a keyboard, they just start typing, and they’re really focused on, what am I trying to say? What am I trying to get out? Not, who’s the audience? What do they know? What context do they need? What would they care about? And when you flip it, you’re much more likely to get engagement from that audience. And what we found to be key is actually focusing on an individual, someone that you know. So if you’re writing internal communications, think of an employee that’s at the center of your bullseye, someone who’s somewhat informed, but not fully informed, so that you can say, “Okay, if I was having a conversation with that person, what would I say?” And usually, when you’re having a conversation, it’s much clearer. It’s what’s new, it’s why it matters. There’s a reason you’re sitting down. You don’t bury the lead, you don’t use words that you know I have to look up in the dictionary. It’s just a very different style. And so thinking about one person allows you to start writing in that more conversational tone, and allows you to think about the hierarchy of what to write and what’s important to them as the audience, same with external audience. We used to tell people at Politico, at Axios, you know, put up a picture of Nancy Pelosi, right? Like that’s who you’re trying to reach. And would she find this article interesting? Would she need the context that you just put in the first two paragraphs? If not, cut it out.

Drew: Part of the work that we do at CMO Huddles is to help folks in transition, and one of the ways that we talk about their content creation is think of the CEO that you want specifically to read this and what value you’re going to give them. So in that case, they are really, literally writing for an audience of one that’ll go to it. And it’s funny, because I think most of the folks in our B2B world think in terms of personas, and sometimes they name it, but they often feel very generic, and they haven’t gotten it down to it’s Roy down the hall, right? They’re not really thinking about an individual, they’re thinking about this sort of cosmic, kind of amalgam of a person. And so it feels like you’re making it just a little more real and specific, and that helps.

Roy: Yes, I mean, I love the idea of personas, and I spent a lot of time in marketing focusing on personas, but I found that it was best when you actually had a person in mind, when you could actually know somebody who was matching the persona that you were trying to reach, and you would again, like, put up their profile, and they were a real person, rather than, you know, an imaginary mom of four that’s, you know, going to a this and that. And, you know, it’s out of touch, whereas most of us know one of those people. And so we can actually think, you know, and talk to them. And it just makes, I think, marketing much better when you’re, you know, putting it down to that individual.

Drew: Got it. Okay, so you talk about writing a muscular tease and a strong lede, and by the way, just it’s L-E-D, not L-E-A-D, and that’s an old term from the days when you were actually using lead to create printing press back in the Ben Franklin days. So are there shortcuts to writing these muscular teases and strong ledes?

Roy: Yeah, I mean, AI is going to be hugely helpful there. So Axios HQ actually has AI that we program from the newsroom that helps you, actually gives you, like, three different choices for subject lines, so that you can pick the one that’s going to be most effective, and we’re starting to track the open rates against that and the feedback against that. So I think over time, actually, AI is going to be very helpful to cut the amount of time and effort that you have to think about with that muscular lede, but as you’re thinking about it now, it’s, you know, how can you boil down that sentence? We often talk about like, you meet someone in an elevator, or you’re passing your neighbor and you want to tell them something. What is it that you would say to them if you know they’re in a hurry and you need to get something out? That’s a great way to start thinking about what that lede could be.

Drew: You mentioned AI, and I’m sure we’re going to cover some more. I find a lot of times that the AI-generated ones feel a little generic to me. They feel a little average, right? But I also consider myself a pretty good writer, and so I have a high standard. So I suspect if you were a bad writer, you’d look at those and go, “Oh, those are great, let’s use them.” So what’s the deal here with this? How do we make sure that we’re not just taking a mediocre writer and saying, “Oh, that looks good to me. Let’s go.” And how do we get to, you talk about, you know, strong lede and muscular tease, that’s good writing, not average writing.

Roy: Yeah. So what I would say is, there are a lot of LLMs out there, and they are going to provide, I would say, general results, right? So if you ask whether it’s OpenAI or Anthropic or xAI, and you want to develop an email, you just hired a new CMO, and you want to write something about it. They are going to be very generic, right? They’re good at writing generic emails. And to your point, they’re very good at making below-average writers average. They’re not great at making average writers great, and they’re definitely not great at making great writers excellent. However, you can start to train those models. And so we have very specific data. So you know, our data isn’t trained on the general public, it’s trained on journalists and editors. So it’s starting with excellent writing. And so we’ve seen all the edits. And so ours is, I would say, a little bit different, where you really are starting at very good and making it excellent. And I think you’re going to see AI in various parts of work where it’s very niche. So it won’t be the generic OpenAI or, you know, ChatGPT, what it’s going to be is very specific to your application at work. And so I think marketing AI, you know, social media, language choice AIs, those are going to start to get really, really good because they’re going to have so much data, they’re going to start with very good results. Just as an example, when I was mentioning earlier, the subject line generator that we use, to reinforce your point from earlier, when we look at people that have below-average open rates, we’re able to increase things by 10 points. When we look at people that have above-average open rates, we’re only able to use it by two or three points. So to your point, we can still help with that, but it definitely helps the average people become good, rather than the best people become excellent.

Drew: Which makes a lot of sense, and that’s helpful. When you noted that you and your co-founders initially sucked at Smart Brevity, which I love, and thank you for admitting that and sharing that in the book. How did you become good at it?

Roy: I will say that I wish it was easy. It’s one of the things that I equate sometimes writing in smart brevity is like going to the gym, right? You want to go to the gym, but sometimes you get there and you’re like, “I don’t know about this.” It does take extra effort, because what it means is you have to really plan what you’re trying to say. You’ve got to put it into a hierarchy. And so even when we were good at white space and bullet points and bolding and being brief, we weren’t always good at the hierarchy, and that actually takes a little bit more time. I’d say that takes the most time, right? What are you trying to say? Why are you trying to say it? What’s the order in which you want to say it? That takes planning. Now I would say I’m very good at writing things in smart brevity, in terms of the format and being brief. And I’ve always been actually very good at being brief because I’m dyslexic, and so my brain kind of goes to short, concise sentences in order for me to better understand them. But the layout, you know, thinking through what am I trying to say? What’s the organization of this content? That has been super helpful to me, but it does take some work, and I think that that extra effort is rewarded by better engagement, better understanding, better alignment from the people. And you mentioned this earlier when we were waiting for people to join. We run the company using smart brevity, right? We run the company using Axios HQ. So we send out weekly updates from every department. We have, marketing updates, sales updates, you know, accounting updates. Everything is a weekly update in Smart Brevity, and I can get through all of them in two to three minutes. Or, you know, each one of them, and they’re all shared amongst the executive team as well. So we’re all very aligned. And I think that that is the future. With remote work, with so much happening, you’re going to need more alignment than ever before.

Drew: So it’s definitely a case of practice, practice, practice. There’s also part of this, which is sort of measurement. I mean, it’s easy with emails, because you get an open rate and so forth. In terms of external emails. What’s harder is, did it land with internal employee communications, right? I mean, did it, did the idea land and the expectation is that maybe one time we’ll do it. And obviously that’s not the case. But I want to go back to a couple of things. One, there was an acronym in the book BLUF: bottom line up front. And I love that because it’s such an easy thing to remember. And that’s the thing that feels to me in most of the stuff that I read is really missing.

Roy: Yes, yes, they’re burying the lede on purpose. It’s unfortunate, but people were trained to do that because they were trying to get people to read more words. They were trying to sell more ad space so they needed longer articles on the web. You actually wanted people to scroll down the page. And so unfortunately, a lot of training was about burying the lead so that you would get people to read through and see all these different ads, and unfortunately, that’s continued. We’re actually even taught this at school. Right when our kids are given an essay, it’s not about, hey, can you make your point as quickly and efficiently as possible? It’s, I need you to write 3000 words on this topic. But, but why? If I can make the argument in 500 words, and I lay it out, and I think about it in a very intelligent way, isn’t that more productive? And so unfortunately, we’re trained from school all the way through into college, that longer is better, and that you want people to read all your words, and that somehow it’s art. And unfortunately, I don’t, you know, I want to be clear. I’m not saying that there’s not room for long form. I love a good book, right? I’m reading right now the book on Elon Musk, right? That thing is, that thing is giant. It’s like a huge paperweight. And I’m enjoying it. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, but that’s because I have the time to enjoy it, because everything else is short and to the point. So, you know, emails within Axios HQ, I mean, I probably get 300 to 400 emails a day, right? And if I can save each email by 30 seconds or a minute, it makes it much easier for me to do my job. And so that’s one of the things that you know can be transformative to a company. If you start absorbing smart brevity in all of your communication, you’re not just saving yourself time. You end up saving the company hundreds of hours of reading. And unfortunately, that 300 email on average for an executive is only going to get worse, right? Content is actually going to become easier and easier to produce. And so we’re all going to get, unfortunately, more emails, more text messages. And so being brief is going to be very important.

Drew: Right. And It’s more than just being short. I want to be clear on this. This is not just saying, “Okay, I’m going to tell everything I need to tell in a paragraph.” It’s part of it is understanding the priority of the information that you’re delivering and making sure that there’s, like, there’s one thing that’s newsworthy that’s here, and I’m going to put this right up front, because this is so I make sure that at minimum, this one thing was communicated, or one thing that requires an action, and I feel like this is, you know, I may be restating what you just said, but that’s the thing that’s missing in so much, is, why am I reading this? And you know, we had Matt Abrahams, who wrote the book, “Think Faster, Talk Smarter,” and one of the formulas that he had was “what, so what, and now what.”

Roy: That’s actually very close to the “What’s New” and the “Why It Matters,” right?

Drew: Exactly. And that is for spontaneous conversation. But it also applies to the communication thing. So keeping going. So we’ve got the what and the so what and you use “Why It Matters” throughout the book. Why does that matter?

Roy: Because so often you finish reading something and you end up wondering, why does it matter? Like, why did I just read that? And it’s not that the author doesn’t have a point, it’s that they haven’t made their point clear. And so what we found at first, we didn’t write it, so it was kind of interesting. The axioms, the concept of axioms, the “What’s New, Why It Matters, Bottom Line” – that actually came later. We had sort of constructed smart brevity, and we were training people, and we were putting, you know, we were training them to say what’s new and why it matters. But we didn’t actually write it. What we found is that when we started to write it, it actually made the writers better, and it made the people who were reading it understand the content much more clearly. One of the best pieces of feedback that we received was BP actually has trained now probably 2000 people on how to write in smart brevity. So they use it for everything, everything from safety information on oil rigs to all internal and external communications. And so they’ve really absorbed smart brevity. What they told us was that when people had English not as their first language, they were often confused with some of the things that were being sent out. So sometimes they would send out an article and they’d say, hey, you know, this is really interesting. Blah, blah, blah. You know, read this, but they didn’t understand why. It’s not that they couldn’t read the English. It’s that they weren’t understanding the why it mattered part. As soon as we introduced smart brevity, they actually wrote in, they wrote into the author, and they were like, thank you for putting the What’s New and the Why It Matters. I now understand why you’re sending this to me and what I should be looking for. And so you know that type of information can be super helpful.

Drew: Well, not to mention that if you can’t actually rationalize in a very short period of time why it matters, then you probably better not send it. That’s absolutely right, because whoever is getting it isn’t going to get it, which is important. So the discipline, those two things, is kind of profound in that it is something that anybody could do. They may not be able to define what’s new, articulate well and briefly, but they can at least do what’s new, and they can at least explain why it matters.

Drew: Now, one of the hacks that you talk about in the book, and it’s great, I use it all the time, and I use it with my phone, is you talk about talking your ideas first, as if you were communicating with the person that you were communicating with and I just take my phone out, and I dictate to my phone, and then I read it later and see was that coherent or not? Talk a little bit about why that’s so effective and why you recommend it.

Roy: Well, I would say that there’s actually two things related to that. The first is, rather than necessarily dictating it to your phone, try and think of it as a conversation with a person, because when we write, even when we dictate, we sound differently. It’s interesting. We get into corporate speak, we start using language that you would never use when you’re just having a conversation. So when I try and record what I’m going to say, I actually try and do it as a conversation. And so I think of it as a conversation, like, if I was talking to you right now. How would I make a point? That’s how I speak, and then I listen to it to make sure that I’ve avoided the corporate speak, the language that wouldn’t be used. As an example, when you sit down and type, you might use the word “aforementioned.” You and I would never say that to each other, right? We would never use that in just a conversation, and there’s lots of words like that, that for some reason, they’re fine when you type them, but they’re not fine when you say them. The other thing is, is that when you listen to it, you’ll know when you’re rambling, you’d be like, “Oh my God, you’ve just said that point 2, 3, 4 times.” That will allow you to help cut and to your point earlier, it’s not about being brief. That’s why we use brevity. Brevity being it should be as short as it needs to be in order to convey the point, not just short for short’s sake.

Drew: Interesting. I’m thinking about CMOs a lot, as we do at CMO Huddles, and they’re under a lot of pressure right now on pipeline and revenue, and we’re asking them to spend some time with us today, to talk about brevity and that. How do we help them connect the smart brevity journey and the relentless need to drive pipeline and revenue?

Roy: So it’s an interesting time, right? A lot of CMOs are also responsible for internal communications, or they’re working very closely with the people doing internal communications. I think it’s really important to speak with one voice, and for a lot of marketers that I talk to, one of their core audiences that they’re trying to reach are employees, right? They’re trying to make them feel good about where they’re working. They’re trying to help them become references and referrals for new employees or even clients. So I do think that it’s really important to be very aligned internally and externally. I think that if you can bring smart brevity, not just into what you do externally, but also as part of the process and part of your team, you will become more efficient. I think it’s just an efficiency hack, so it’ll become easier for you to get caught up. One of the things that you know, Chris, who’s on the call today, who’s my CMO, when he sends me, he sends me a weekly update of how things are going. From a marketing perspective, usually that read is, you know, two, three minutes, if I can read through that. It allows my one-on-ones with him to be far more productive, right? It allows us to get to a level of detail where I’m not just asking him, where are we on those numbers? I’m really trying to understand the trends and the why and the insight as opposed to just the facts. And the more you can do that, I think the more we can get to strategic work as opposed to tactical work. So getting these updates from your team, from your vendors, training them to actually provide you with the information that you need in a very efficient way will ultimately save you time, but it does take a little bit of upfront planning. I spend a lot of time thinking about the format and the template of what I want people to send me, so that I sort of, I find it to be very valuable, and I’ll change it every so often. You know, sometimes I’ll go back and go, “You know what, that segment isn’t actually very interesting to me or isn’t very useful?” I’ll go ahead and change it.

Drew: Yeah, I love the idea of making your vendors actually deliver on that. Because, again, I get so many emails that it’s like, okay, what was the point? What’s the action here? Where’s the news? And it’s just, it’s nowhere to be found. And it’s like, I want to send them all to the smart brevity class, which is, it sounds like you ask all your vendors to do. I love that.

Roy: I really think that’s why we sell so many books. I’m pretty sure that most of them are gifted to other people that are long-winded. It’s like, “Hey, can you please read this? I need you to write more briefly.”

Drew: Oh my god, it’s like giving someone a bottle of mouthwash who has other issues. That’s hilarious, and it makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it ought to be part of your onboarding at every company.

Drew: So I’m just thinking really quickly. How long does it take, you think, if you get on this journey, you read the book and you start applying it. When do you think that you become proficient as a brevityist?

Roy: It probably takes you several months to be honest, if you’re doing it often, you’re gonna get there, but immediately people are gonna see a difference. Immediately people are gonna go, “Oh, you’re being much more thoughtful in how you’re laying out the information, you’re thinking about.” I bet nobody right now thinks about white space when they write an email, right? And the issue is that when you look at eye-tracking studies and any research on how humans absorb information when they reach a block of text, they actually get sad, like physically get sad. And so if you can introduce white space and bullet points and headlines and things that just make it interesting to read, you’re just going to get more engaged people, more engaged employees, more engaged results. So I would say it takes a little time to become really good at it, but almost immediately people are going to say, “Oh, I really liked your email.” Like, almost immediately they’re gonna say, “Oh, I really like that communication that you sent out.” And again, we have software that makes it easier. We have, you know, AI editors. It’s like having an Axios editor over your shoulder right to help you write in smart brevity. But even without that, you know, it just takes time and practice.

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Drew: So you mentioned “Make it interesting,” and this is a point where we can sort of pivot a little bit into the personality. It’s not just about making it brief. It’s about making it interesting. And you talk about newsletters, for example, and how having a story somewhere, or a bit of humor somewhere, really dramatically increases the likelihood the person is going to look forward to the next one. Let’s just talk about character and personality as an overlay on top of brevity. Where does that fit?

Roy: One thing that I now advise any of our clients (we have about 700 clients that work with Axios HQ) is to have these once-a-week updates, but at a minimum, have a once-a-week all-hands update that goes out to the entire staff. The person who writes it doesn’t always have to be the CEO, but the person who writes it has to have their personality come through. It has to seem genuine. It can’t be corporate speak. So, you know, fun use of emojis if it is genuine to that person, personality coming through, stories about them coming through. 

One thing that we’ve seen is that in a lot of organizations, the person who writes it ends up becoming almost a celebrity inside of the organization because people start to pitch them stories. Because they want to be featured. They want their initiative to be featured. They want people to know about their update. And so they start pitching them as if they’re sort of internal journalists gathering information. 

So definitely let your personality come through. Think about how to be genuine in that. Look, if you’re not a funny person, don’t try and be funny. But if you do have a great sense of humor and you know a joke is easy to come by, then I would try and insert those things. And we always talk about the front and the bottom, right? At the front of the note, at the very beginning, this is a great place for you to talk about yourself, about your family, about something that will give them that personal touch. And then at the very end, we try and leave things with one fun thing. So try and think about how you engage your audience with something that you care about. It might be music, it might be trivia, but it’s something that you can leave them, and if they don’t like it, they can ignore it, because it’s at the end. But again, it humanizes the communication.

Drew: Interesting. And so for the folks in Huddleland, if you’ve been getting the recaps, you know that at the end, I don’t give you that, so I’m working on it, thinking about it, but I do give you that upfront story most of the time, and it usually is personal. So I acknowledge that as an important part of this thing, part of this is being empathetic. One of the things that CMOs struggle with is that they can’t always have an immediate impact on pipeline and revenue, given sales cycles, right? But what they can do is have an immediate impact on culture and brand internally, as you described it. And so if, for example, there isn’t a weekly newsletter that goes out, volunteering to write that is a tremendous opportunity to sort of begin to make culture and brand and bring things together and have a huge internal impact. It could be the plus. And I know this for a fact that Jeff Perkins, who I had on the show way back when, was the CMO of ParkMobile, did exactly this. Wrote the personal email every single week on what’s happening at the company. He probably started it right at the beginning of COVID, and it was really, really popular. And eventually, he became president of the company. Because you were right, he became sort of a star, an individual star. So I just, I guess that’s just me saying, big check on for CMOs who aren’t doing this, learning the skill of writing a good newsletter and then volunteering to drive that with an internal company, feels like a big opportunity.

Roy: People sometimes get intimidated by the word newsletter. You know, the way I think of it is, it’s an update, right? So I would start with your team or the stakeholders that really care about marketing, where, at least on a once-a-week basis, you’re giving them a smart brevity overview of how things are going and what your thoughts are. You’ll start to get really good at that, and people will start to comment about it. It’s amazing the way in which people respond when you’re giving them useful information about the business without them having to ask for it. Then they can go back and refer to those notes. So I love the idea of once-a-week department updates. I think if you’re not doing it now, I would highly recommend it. 

Then, as you think about the full company, now you’re starting to think about the culture, the mission, vision, values of an organization. And it’s so interesting to me, when people aren’t doing that, how do they expect vision, mission, values, culture to go through an organization? You’ve got to talk about it all the time. You’ve got to write about it all the time. And if you haven’t written it to the point where you’re sort of sick of it, then it hasn’t broken through. And that’s kind of the issue, like you’re constantly having to remind people of what those things are in order for them to understand how their job fits into it.

Drew: And I imagine as the CEO, you’re getting all your department heads updates, and you can tell who’s sort of drinking the culture and who’s just giving you stuff.

Roy: Yeah, and I take information. What’s very valuable is I can take information from those updates and then see what I want to send out to the entire company. So I can drag and drop content from one to another, because I may see an update that my head of product wrote and say that will be really interesting. Like recently, Marcus, who’s our Head of Product, read “Crossing the Chasm.” So I took a piece of that and included it in our all-hands. That is something that, you know, if you don’t have that structure, it’s really hard to do that. And then you’re sort of emphasizing culture, right? I’m emphasizing that he’s learning, he’s reading, he’s trying to apply something to the company, and now I’m sharing that information with everyone else. And so part of our culture is continuous learning, so I’m sort of living those values.

Drew: Yeah, which is critical. So I want to switch gears quickly too. So I describe marketing, or did on a podcast recently, as an epic battle for mind space, which fits pretty neatly into your emphasis on focus and brevity. Can you just speak to the overall power of a simple message and perhaps provide an example of that in action?

Roy: So one thing I’ll say is that we are all now competing against time. Time is what we’re all competing against. It’s kind of interesting. You know, media companies used to think they only competed against other newspapers, or they only competed against a specific online website. It’s not true anymore. You’re deciding between YouTube or TikTok or Facebook or reading The New York Times or reading The Wall Street Journal or watching a movie on Netflix. Everything is about time, and that’s true, by the way, at work as well. And so we all are going to have to become much, much better at distilling our message in order for it to break through. Because that person that used to be at work and sitting in front of their desk, and you know, you were able to maybe send an email or have them see an ad and breakthrough. That is becoming much, much more difficult. 

And you know, it’s going to compound with what might happen with search, right? So when AI starts answering questions, a lot of really good articles recently about how AI might answer the questions, meaning that you won’t have to go visit the site in order to get that information, meaning that there won’t be the ads that went alongside that content. So it could really change SEO. It could really change publishers and advertising. There are a lot of changes that are going to come from that. Bottom line is, we’re all going to have to get much, much better at grabbing people’s attention, and the war for attention is going to get even tougher than it is now, and it’s already extremely, extremely difficult. 

And so, you know, formulating your message, I think what it does do is it puts more pressure on you to say, what’s your value proposition? How are you different? What are you trying to say for that person that’s going to save them time? Save them money? Save them effort or make them more productive? You really have to distill that down, ideally to a couple of sentences in order to be able to break through.

Drew: It’s rarely that line, though, that closes the deal, but it does sort of start the conversation.

Roy: Opens the door, right? It opens the door. I mean, in many ways, look, take our business, right? You know, Chris and I talk all the time about, how do we open the door? How do we get people so that they will come and eventually get to a demo? Once they get to a demo, they’re going to love it. I’m not worried about that, but I got to get them interested enough, hooked enough where they want to spend 30-45 minutes looking at the product. And so, you know, how do we understand the value that they’re trying to create in order for them to say, “Oh, if I do this, then I’m going to achieve that result.”

Drew: So does long-form have any role anymore for B2B marketers? Long-form content of some kind.

Roy: I think long-form is, to me, sort of when I want to take a step back and enjoy a movie or a book or a novel, right? I think it’s going to be hard in the business world because I don’t really want the white papers. I don’t really want to sit back and enjoy a 30-page AI write-up, right? Like I need quick information, or I need to move on because I just don’t have the time in my day. So I think long-form becomes much more about your off time and your free time when you’re not feeling the pressure and the anxiety. I think there’s so much FOMO going on, there’s so much anxiety about time now that it’s going to be very hard, I think, for you to be able to sit back and read a piece of content that you kind of know is marketing, but has a valuable lesson in it, unless it’s done incredibly, incredibly well, you know? 

So I’ll give an example. My kids love watching Red Bull videos, like all the crazy stuff on the Red Bull YouTube channel. They will watch all of that, right? And that is for them, actually long-form. Even though, you know those videos are maybe five to 10 minutes. They would consider that to be long, by the way, but they’ll watch them, even though they know that they’re an ad, because they’re incredibly well done and they’re fun, right? And so you know, you have to be able to check those boxes if you hope otherwise like white papers, I think white papers are completely dead. If anyone’s writing a white paper, if anyone’s writing a sustainability report, a jobs report, and it’s over a few pages, like, who is reading that? Who has the time to read that? You may have people that you’re trying to reach that have to have that information regulators, people who are doing policy, but that’s fine have that as a go deeper, but if you’re trying to get that out to a larger influencer audience, they’re not going to have time for that anymore.

Drew: I’m going to push back a little bit on a couple of dimensions, and I think that so you’re selling $150,000 software system that are 14 different people are involved in. There’s an engineer, and there’s a CSO somewhere back there that’s checking to make it secure. They want a lot of information. That’s why it takes them six to 12 months to purchase something like that, and in those cases, and we’ve seen that from other research studies that with SEO that some of these long-form documents, if done right, have a huge impact for late-stage purchases. They could be third-party reviews. There’s a lot of information to help someone make a very big decision.

Roy: Look, I would always say that brevity is different than brief, right? And some things just need the space. So even Axios, the news organization, we did a very deep dive on Trump when he was still in office, and it was pretty long for us, it was a few thousand words, but every word mattered. And so I would still say it met the expectations of smart brevity, but no one would have said it was brief, and that may be the case right then. There may be things that you need to write in a certain way. But I can tell you that we, you know, we have a services team, professional editors that help organizations. Take sustainability reports, take jobs reports, take safety information for oil rigs, and bring it down. They are always able to cut and even with the lawyers’ approval. So, you know, again, I’ll go to BP as an example. They had oil rig safety information that was long. No one was reading it. They were having lots of accidents, there were things happening because people weren’t able to get through the content. We redid the content in smart brevity. We probably halved the amount of words that were in it. We had their lawyers review it all. They said everything that needed to be in there was still in there. And then they rolled it out. And guess what? People engaged in it. They read it more, and safety went up. And so I think you can have brevity. If you’re selling an incredibly complex technical product, the technical software, of course, you’re going to have to have a lot of information integrations and all these different, you know, things that the specs that people will need, however, even there, there is room for brevity, even there. And so, you know, I bet, if you know, take one of those documents, I guarantee you, I could give it to one of our editors, and they would cut half the words from it, and it would still be fine, yeah.

Drew: I totally agree. The challenge is that people who have the expertise about the specific product or service are not writers,

Roy: Really massive arguments. I was giving a speech, and I didn’t realize that half the room were academics. And afterwards, oh my god, that I hear it about this exact topic, where they were like, “No, we’ve got to get into the detail and blah, blah.” But then I had someone come up after me and go, “Well, now that all of these papers are digitized and we know exactly how far people are getting, you’re totally right. No one’s reading any of this stuff,”

Drew: Yeah. And so there’s no doubt. I mean, you give me any email that I have ever seen, I could edit it, I could get it down from whatever it was, and that most of the time helps it. But I think you’re right, there’s a difference between brevity and short for just to be short, that there are levels of communication that need to happen, and you have mechanisms that you’ve built into your system to help people want to go deeper, right? And that you allow people to get from this very high level, you know, what is it, what’s new, and why it matters to you, individually, by name, to the details that you may need. And I think that’s the key point for me, is we can’t just stop at that first conversation.

Roy: Totally that is the essence. And the go deeper is so critical, right? Because everything is like a funnel, right? And marketers know funnel is better than anyone else, but you’re trying to get your message out to the largest number of people. You want that message to be short and to the point, then people want to go a little deeper. Great. Give them some more information. The way we construct it is the go deeper is all the way through the person who’s reading the, you know, 10-page report, they’ve made it all the way through that funnel, right? They’ve bought into your argument, your marketing, sort of all the way down, and now they are looking at that technical piece, right? They do care about those 10 pages. And so there at the bottom, the problem is, most stuff is constructed with that at the top. You have to get through this, all of this stuff, and so you’re immediately shrinking it down to a very small audience that might have been interested, but they weren’t interested in those details.

Drew: A lot of it is, when do they need it? And making sure that the information is shared at that moment. It’s like if you get an auto manual, and the first thing isn’t how to turn the car on, you’ve got a problem because you can’t drive the vehicle.

Roy: Great example, right? So if you bought a car recently, there are two documents that come with your car. There’s a quick start guide, which you read and use, and then there’s a manual which you will try and use, but never be able to use and be searching for that one page that’s trying to help you do something. But the Quick Start stuff, they are able to boil down most of the things that you need in the manual to, like, six pages. And that’s what I’m talking about.

Drew: And it’s interesting. I’m gonna go on a tangent for a second, but software companies have a real problem, because oftentimes the customer is only using 20% of the capability, and that’s because they just read the quick start guide, and you can’t get them to the other thing. But at least they’re customers, so now it’s a different marketing challenge, which is to get them to see the expanded capability. Alright, before we wrap up, let’s assume at this point everyone in the audience has bought into the notion and importance and power of smart brevity. Can you provide a tip or two on how to train your team in this?

Roy: Well, the nice part is, we’ve got different levels for it, right? So the first is, it’s easy to buy the book and share the book and have people read it and hopefully buy into it. There are lots of examples in there, and then people can start practicing it almost immediately, right? So you can start breaking down an email. We have training classes where we do workshops, but the basics of it are, we look at a piece of communication, we try and reconstruct it using the rules of smart brevity, and then we come out of the other side with much clearer, much easier to read copy, and so all of that is in the book. That’s the simplest level. Then, as I said, we offer training, or you could try and do the training yourself. I think that, you know, the training that we offer at this point, we’ve trained thousands of people at hundreds of companies on how to do it, and we do everything from a one-hour overview all the way to a two-day workshop where we actually use your content and help rewrite your content so that it is in smart brevity. And so, yeah, all of that is available and you can see it on the website.

Drew: Okay. So the point, though, is this is not something necessarily that you could just hand them the book and say, off you go.

Roy: I think you hand someone the book. And then what I would do is I would ask for someone to rewrite a piece of communication specifically. Like, “Hey, the reason I gave you this book is because I read this note. I struggled. I had to reread it, like, three times. I struggled to find exactly why it was being sent in the first place. And I think it could be done better. And so, you know, let’s work on this together.”

Drew: Yeah, which is a nice way and a better way than just doing what I’ve often done, which is just rewrite it, right? Because that doesn’t help anybody. Yeah, I’m a good editor, but that doesn’t solve the problem. We want to create good communicators.

Roy: Yes, that’s right.

Drew: And that is understanding the priority of the communication. So, let’s just wrap up now, maybe you could provide even if it repeats some of the things you said. Two do’s and one don’t when it comes to applying the principles of smart brevity.

Roy: I think I have to go back to, you know, put up a picture of the person that’s right in the center of that bullseye. It’ll make all of your communication better, because you’ll be talking to a person, as opposed to doing corporate speak, and then read it out loud. The don’t is to focus on yourself and what you’re trying to say, right? Make sure you take the time to put on paper why it matters to them. And the moment you do the “What’s New” and the “Why It Matters,” I think it’ll change the way you communicate for the better.

Drew: I couldn’t agree more. Roy Schwartz from Axios HQ, thank you so much for joining us.

If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOhuddles.com.

Show Credits
Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!