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Leverage B2B Micro-content to Get More Mileage from Thought Leadership

Micro-content is exactly what you think it is. It’s not a complicated buzzword or anything that needs dissection. It’s digestible, short-form content. Social media platforms may automatically come to mind, but micro-content isn’t new. 

According to The Department of Informatics at The University of Hamburg report “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” getting a user’s long-term attention online is harder than ever:

25 percent of all documents online are viewed for less than 4 seconds, and 52 percent of visits are shorter than 10 seconds.

The answer to the pint-sized attention span of today’s buyer is short, highly visual content. Many of the 93 percent of B2B marketers that use content marketing are not getting enough mileage out of long-form assets they are creating. Let’s face it — white papers require significant time and resource investment to create and, if you don’t have brand awareness and trust, users will likely not invest the time it takes to read through 10-20 pages of thought leadership content. Micro-content can offer readers a preview of the perspective and primary points you’ll be making in longer resources, like white papers, webinars, etc. 

Micro-content can be social media, short and visual e-books, infographics, or video clips. As B2B marketers, we typically operate in “bought, not sold” categories. We have to inform consumers on the benefits of our technologies. And thought leadership has its place here. We need information-packed content. But what other types of content can you create from your thought leadership pieces? 

Here are a few examples of effective micro-content in B2B: 

  • Turn a white paper into several e-books. Think about how your content is consumed and break down your thought leadership assets into bite-sized chunks. If a white paper has several sections, each of those can be a highly-visual, digestible e-book. 
  • Turn an e-book into several blog posts. Add additional context to the content by explaining why you thought there was a need for more information around a certain topic. Dive further into each main point you make with your e-book and break those out into several blog posts. 
  • Turn blog post content into social media updates. Did you curate some impactful stats in your latest research? Did you conduct primary research that you want to share with the world? Break out stats, quotes, and single-sentence points into graphics to be shared through your social media properties. 

Every medium is now a visual one. So bring your content up to speed by breaking down those larger thought leadership pieces you have in your library into smaller pieces of accessible content and get more mileage out of the information you share. 

Here’s an example of an e-book from TSCIU:

How can you get more out of your content today?