Too often, we feel the more we say about a subject, the better. Not the case, especially in today’s marketing.
In our fast-paced social media world, people don’t have time to read extra f l u f f .
Think of long forwarded emails that fill up your inbox. Have you ever made it to the bottom of even one of those digital novellas?
You skim, so do your customers.
Which of these knife ads makes an impression on you?
The text at the bottom says, “Sharper than you think” but you didn’t even need that did you!
….. bla bla bla bla bla……
Simplicity is great right? But editing is hard.
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter,” said Blaise Pascal.
We don’t want to take away parts of our advertising that we worked so hard to construct! It may be genius, but it doesn’t matter if it’s
too
far
down
the
page.
So how can your message be condensed, yet impactful? I would argue that the two go hand in hand.
For instance …
German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
We should all take a page from his book, or should I say, his ten sentences. And now that I’ve reached the 13th paragraph of this blog post, I’m starting to wonder if Shakespeare, Pascal and Nietzsche would rather me take their quotes out than reach this ungodly length. Ok, I’m done now.