Over last weekend I watched the portrayal of Freddie Mercury's extraordinary rise to stardom as the lead singer of Queen in the film Bohemian Rhapsody. A well worthwhile spend of 2 hours on a Sunday evening!
I am going to keep this analogy short and sweet, but essentially when it comes to creating content there are a few similarities between the written form, and as in the case of Queen, producing records and albums.
Now the point I wanted to make is that sometimes when writing a piece of content, it can be tempting to attack a topic and provide a comprehensive 'War and Peace'-esque style write up. Instead, and taking the lead from the music industry here, you can break your post into more digestible insights around a connected theme/topic.
When Queen were producing their album A Night at the Opera, it would not have made sense to collapse all their singles into one long record, nor would the consumer market be interested in listening to a 47 minute record.
This is backed up by research from Edelman & LinkedIn, highlighting that senior b2b decision-makers prefer shorter-form styles of content which are easily consumable.
"Be Concise: Short formats are overwhelmingly preferred by busy professionals" - 2019 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study
Furthermore, by having multiple singles in an album (provided that they are good!) you can increase your coverage in the charts. Point in case, Ed Sheeran currently occupying 3 out of the top 5 singles in the UK. Authoring a series of insights gives your audience a greater opportunity of seeing and engaging with the topic as can be leveraged in multiple formats.
There are some excellent examples of content series across the Passle network, a few of which I have shared below:
- Katee Dias - Senior Solicitor (Employment), Goodman Derrick LLP: Fair and Decent Work (Good Work Plan Part 1/3)
- Emma Haywood - Associate (Innovation & Tech), Slaughter & May: Adtech (part 2/2) - the ICO says "I see you"
- Tom Thurston - Consultant, Cello Health: 5 part series on targeted therapies in Biotech
- Ariel Cassan - Technology Senior Manager, everis UK: GraphQL – is it the new REST? (Part 2 of 4)
- James Barclay & Tom Elgar - Head of Client Success & Co-Founder, Passle: Writing about Professor Robert Cialdini's 6 Principles of Influence
- Jon Bircher - Chief Commercial Officer, Cello Health: The 6Ds of competitive strategy...The first 'D'
- Laura Macdonald - Head of Consumer, Hotwire Global: Posts around CES 2018 - 5 Disasters at CES 2018 – And What We Can Learn
- Jane Stewart - Head of Innovation, Slaughter & May: Innovating for diversity: (1/2)