In Word, =lorem(35,5) will give you a thousand words in tight, punchy paragraphs … but, obviously, meaningless.

AI can give you a thousand, more meaningful, words, but often succeeds in being both flat and over-wrought. Analyst Ben Evans often refers to generative AI as infinite interns. It’s a useful comparison – an intern can produce a useful report but you’d never put that in front of your board without reading it first. But AI’s like a waggy-dog intern in another way, too – its lack of subtlety, its cliched phrasing and anxious need to over-engineer with big words and extreme, declarative statements.

So, how do you really create effective, persuasive content?

It has to begin with a deep understanding of your audience and your offering.

That’s true whether you’re trying to change government opinion, raise investment or sell widgets.

Content foundation

The deep understanding begins with brand values, buyer personas and especially the value proposition and messaging framework.

Then, armed with a clear business objective – are you building awareness, changing attitudes, driving sales? – and an understanding of the gap you need to close, you can create your strategy … and the effective, persuasive content to fill it.

Content strategy

At its simplest, this is a matrix of buyer journey (AIDA + R for retention and advocacy) against decision role (for B2B: BDM, TDM, economic decision maker, end-user, influencer, champion and gatekeeper). What do you need to move each role through each stage?

There are other factors to consider – such as the role, routing and architecture of each piece of content – but the overarching goal is simply to move the buyer into Awareness, through to Action and then Advocacy, whether you’re selling a product, an investment or a point of view.

Some of that will be best achieved by short, punchy content that dives Awareness.

Some of it will be the dry-but-essential, factual  content that enables Action (price lists, product specs, T&Cs etc.)

And some of the content you create will be the rich, persuasive and insightful, long-form content that builds credibility and authority, carries your audience through Interest and Desire and helps underpin ongoing Advocacy.

The longest of long-form content is often best considered as the cornerstone around which a campaign  is built and from which other derivative content (blog and social posts, articles etc.) can be created.

The right to be long

Long copy sells, but only when it’s earned the right to be long.

That means putting in the work before the words get written: understanding your audience deeply enough to know what moves them, mapping the journey they need to take and building a strategy that holds everything together.

When the foundation is solid, long-form content can then build trust, authority and conviction that delivers against business objectives.

Photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash

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There are many overlapping effects at play, some even accidental or incidental to the creation of considered, value-add, long-form content. For example, in good-quality, printed form, a nice weighty report can be a powerful signal of your brand’s seriousness. It clicks so many buyer decision-making heuristics (as described in Robert Cialdini’s seminal book Influence): the social proofs of evident effort signalling credibility, expertise and authority; the evocation of commitment and consistency in the reader/customer; even a degree of reciprocity.

There’s also the effect of immersion, as described by Paul J. Zak, and related to narrative transportation (below).

But, let’s look at two core theories that relate to how the brain processes information.

The two routes to persuasion

In 1986, social psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo published their Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion.

The ELM suggests that when someone encounters a message, they  process it through one of two routes. The first is the central route, which is a careful, deliberate, analytical engagement with the actual substance of the argument. The second is the peripheral route – a superficial response that relies on surface cues (the heuristics described by Cialdini, Daniel Kahneman and others): Does this person seem credible? Is the design impressive? Is the brand familiar?

Both routes can produce attitude change. The critical difference is what happens next. Attitudes formed through the central route – through genuine engagement with a strong argument – are more durable, more resistant to counter-argument, and more likely to predict actual behaviour. Peripheral-route attitudes are shallower and less stable. They’re the ones that can evaporate when a competitor shows up with a shinier brochure or a slicker video.

What does that mean for content? Short-form content (social posts, 200-word blogs, banner ads and the like) almost inevitably work via the peripheral route. There simply isn’t enough time or cognitive processing power for anything else.

Long-form content, by contrast, creates the conditions for central-route processing. It gives you the space to make a real argument, to address objections, to demonstrate expertise through depth rather than assertion — and to persuade in a meaningful, lasting way.

This is particularly important where the purchase decision is large or complex. A CFO evaluating a six-figure SaaS contract, or a board approving a significant strategic investment need substance to evaluate the solution (and vendor) and reach a decision.

Getting lost in a story

There’s another mechanism at work, too. It’s related to the immersion described by Zak and it’s the narrative transportation theory, proposed by psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock in 2000.

Their research demonstrated that when a reader becomes truly absorbed in a narrative – cognitively, emotionally and imaginatively – they enter a distinct psychological state in which their receptiveness to the beliefs implicit in the story increases significantly. (Green and Brock, 2000)

Simply, a well-told story persuades in ways that a data sheet or snackable content can’t.

Green and Brock’s research showed that the immersive experience of the narrative is doing persuasive work that pure logic, delivered cold, simply can’t replicate.

This isn’t an argument for fiction in B2B content; it’s an argument for narrative structure. The case study that opens with a real challenge, builds through the detail of how it was addressed, and lands on a concrete, credible outcome (Aristotle’s Pity, Fear, Catharsis) is narrative transportation at work. So is the long-form thought leadership piece that begins with a vivid description of the problem your reader is living with right now, before offering a framework for thinking about it differently. The reader is drawn in, their natural resistance drops, and the argument lands more cleanly.

What short-form content can’t do

Short-form content can create awareness. It can spark curiosity. In the right hands, it can be memorable. But it can’t engage the central route to persuasion or create the conditions for narrative transportation. There isn’t the narrative space for the creator or the cognitive space for the reader to invoke either.

The peripheral cues that short-form content relies upon – brand recognition, visual design, the implied credibility of an expert, talking head – are real, and they matter. But they produce shallower, less durable attitude change. For high-consideration B2B decisions, that isn’t enough.

Daniel Kahneman’s classic Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) makes the same underlying point. The book describes thinking processes as being either System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) or System 2 (slow, deliberate thinking). Most easy-to-consume, mostly short-form, content engages System 1. It’s processed quickly, automatically, with low cognitive effort. System 2 is where genuine evaluation, complex reasoning and durable conviction happen. Long-form content, at its best, is one of the few formats that reliably engages it.

The practical point

Short-form and long-form content serve different purposes at different stages of the buyer journey, and the smartest content strategies will use both deliberately. Short-form for reach; long-form for depth. Short-form to create the conditions for engagement; long-form to convert engagement into conviction.

But in a world seemingly biased towards short-form content, those organisations that invest in well-researched, well-written, long-form content are differentiating themselves in a way that psychology suggests will matter where it counts most: at the point of decision.

As Ogilvy, and the evidence of today’s long-form film and television storytelling, tell us: “Long copy sells.”

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The danger is that we might be missing our audience.

We worry about the endless scroll, but we also live in a world of long, complex storytelling like Dune (2 films so far, 5 hours); Game of Thrones (8 seasons, 81 hours); Succession (4 seasons, 39 hours); the Lord of the Rings, recently re-released in extended format (over 11 hours, plus another 9 for the Hobbit films); and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy (1,900 pages).

The problem isn’t attention, it’s engagement.

And audiences will engage where and when they see value.

Short content can boost vanity metrics like impressions and likes, but you need to ask whether it’s driving meaningful engagement with the ICPs you require?

Shorter content is better for reach, for top-of-funnel awareness and virality, but longer, more immersive content delivers depth of engagement, attitude change, trust, credibility and persuasion. The audience of those who commit to reading long-form content is smaller, of course, but they are much more engaged. They’re further down the funnel and more open to persuasion.

Well-executed, long-form content is also an evergreen asset because it’s built on strategic insight, long-term trends and deeper research, not just a tactical response to moment.

What can long-form content do?

Well-structured, long-form content can:

• Establish your brand’s authority and category/sector leadership
• Ease the decision-making process within a client’s buying group (especially where the solution or the decision-making process are complex)
• Influence the big debates in your sector.

In good-quality, printed form, a nice weighty report can also be a powerful signal of your brand’s seriousness. It clicks so many buyer decision-making heuristics: the social proofs of evident effort signalling credibility, expertise and authority; the evocation of commitment and consistency in the reader/customer; even a degree of reciprocity.

When is long-form content most powerful?

Well-researched, well-written, long-form content is particularly effective towards the middle and the bottom of the funnel., where prospects are seeking more, and deeper, information, but it can also be effective in generating awareness and interest further up the funnel.

Because it gives space for cogent, coherent argument that includes validation, data, proof points and perspective, long-form content is powerful where your proposition and/or market are complex.

For similar reasons, long-form content is important where the purchase decision is high-consideration or high-risk.

Proof that long-form content works

How do we know that longer content is effective in building credibility, authority and trust?

• Longer content gets more social shares. 1k-2k words is the sweet-spot, but even 3k-10k gets more than articles less that 1,000 words. (Backlinko and BuzzSumo, 2019)
• Long-form content gets 77% more backlinks than shorter content. (Backlinko and BuzzSumo, 2019)
• Thought leadership material (likely but not necessarily long-form) builds trust: “73% of B2B buyers consider thought leadership to be a more trustworthy basis for judging a company’s competencies than traditional marketing materials. Earning trust among buyers translates to action, with 54% saying that organizations which consistently produce thought leadership content have prompted them to research their offers and capabilities.” (Edelman, 2024)
• Longer content can also yield better lead generation than shorter. In one example from Crazy Egg, a new homepage 20x longer outperformed the original by 30%. (Conversion Rate Experts, Crazy Egg, no date)

“Long copy sells more than short copy…”

“… particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money.” So  said advertising guru David Ogilvy.

There’s another post’s worth of the psychology behind why, but the key takeaway is not to be fooled by the misapplied attention span debate, long-form content helps you cut through complexity with the audience you need.

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

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… a writer is a person who writes. Not someone who thinks about writing or dresses like a writer or talks about writing, but someone who actually writes.

I was in the very wonderful London Library yesterday and amongst the diligent writers and researchers, and the elegantly casual readers, there’s always someone who dresses like a writer.

Floppy hats, extravagant scarves and interesting boots aside, however,

Writing is more of a craft than a profession. You learn by doing.

Read the full essay on Substack.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

The post Michael Wade on writing appeared first on Burning Pine.

One of the headline findings is “Brand is Back”, supported by Building Brand Differentiators being the second highest emerging trend  in the survey (after AI).

As the report says,

“[Brand] rises in value because the market is louder, more automated, and more crowded. When many firms can generate “good enough” output quickly, trust and clarity become differentiators.”

But trust, as the old saying goes, can leave on horseback having arrived slowly and deliberately, step by step, on foot.

It takes time and consistency to build.

Trust is essential in fintech markets but, where the market is complex – as in many B2B markets – it requires clarity and fluency (as well as time and consistency) to establish. It’s no surprise therefore that the top GTM strategy “believed to be crucial” for 2026 is Content Marketing (77% of those surveyed).

The necessary speed, reach and variety can be powerfully augmented with AI, but it needs to be grounded in core, cornerstone assets of rich, well-argued, well-grounded, value-add content. Such content takes time to create but has a shelf-life well beyond the ephemera of social posts and banners.

Building quality, evergreen content is an investment in building brand trust.

Read the full report, here.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash.

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Yes, it can be difficult to attribute the impact of a piece of content to closing a deal when B2B decision cycles are so long and have so many stakeholders. And, full-blown, revenue-attribution models can appear expensive and complicated – even if they deliver the insights you need.

You don’t need to go that far to begin to see which content CTAs, channels and platforms are driving meaningful engagement. But you do need to reach a little beyond simple page views and visitor counts

Here are three simple steps that can help you understand the return on your content investment:

1. Use UTMs everywhere that readers can click through to your site: emails, social posts and ads, embedded in PDFs, etc. Enforce a strict taxonomy so you can easily track where traffic came from, then analyse regularly using Google Analytics.
2. Map journeys through your site. Again, Google Analytics is your friend. If someone arrives at your homepage, blog post or campaign/content landing page, where do they go next (and next after that)? Dwell time and bounce rates are helpful here too, but if the next click is off to cat videos maybe your content isn’t converting (unless cats are your thing, of course).
3. Ask! It’s the obvious things that can make a difference, so establish a discipline that always asks (and records), at first contact, “Where did you hear about us?” That first contact could be inbound calls or emails, web contact forms, in-person at events, etc . If you don’t ask, you won’t know.

With those basics in place, you’ll soon be able to see which content – and which routes to the content – are having the greatest effect. You can also begin some simple A/B testing to trial different headlines, different social media ad/posts or different email CTAs.

Understanding true ROI on content marketing is critically important, but notoriously difficult. With these three steps, you can begin to see what is playing best with your audience.

(I posted a shorter version of this post on LinkedIn.)

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Today: line editing vs copy editing vs proofreading.

Well worth checking out.

(I originally posted this on LinkedIn.)

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“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

Building a library of stories

Our client was a leading global provider of cloud services. Its UK marketing director and PR lead shared a belief in the power of customer evidence that delivered persuasive stories. They engaged Burning Pine to create a body of evidence that reached across geography, vertical, segment and use-case.

Initially, the programme was focused on UK customers but soon expanded, based on results, to include customers in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. In each case, Burning Pine combined desk research, briefing interviews and end-customer interviews to create the case study.

The result was a rich library of stories where individuals described, in their own words, the challenges they resolved using our client’s technology – authentic, credible, persuasive.

Evidencing advocacy

In total, Burning Pine produced one third (32%) of the client’s globally published stories.

Those stories generated over ¾ (78%) of all social shares for the client’s global stories, demonstrating increased customer advocacy and greater reach.

In fact, the client’s six most shared stories were written by Burning Pine.

• 1/3 of client’s stories globally
• 3/4 of all social shares
• Top 6 most-shared stories

Feeding future content

The sharing of stories by the end-customer and their teams helped drive mind-share and reach. But, the library of authentic and engaging stories also fed sales engagements and additional, more in-depth, content.

Sales teams shared and summarised relevant stories in their proposals.

Burning Pine also created ebooks, blog posts and other long-form content that focused on specific technologies or verticals. Leveraging the library of stories each article was underpinned and underlined by real-world examples, solid data points and end-customer quotes that helped demonstrate the breadth and depth of our client’s expertise.

In this way, the client’s investment in customer evidence not only increased customer advocacy but also improved its power to persuade across different content and channels.

“Burning Pine has a natural ability to glean strong stories from customers and can quickly get under the skin of a business.”
– Client PR Director

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“Writing is a form of thinking on the page. As you write something down, then edit and rearrange it, you literally build a thought. When a machine spews out fully-formed paragraphs for the passive reader to repurpose and call his own, this crucial skill gets lost.”

It reminds me of Michael Gove’s watch-word, “Think in ink.”

If we are trying to communicate (rather than broadcast), especially on complex topics, there’s always merit in putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and working through the thought, the logic and the message . Otherwise, as Stock warns, we’ll be in a world where “there will still be lots of text but there won’t be much writing.”

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

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Whatever you do centres on you. That’s not an ego thing. It’s just that clients are buying “you” – the unique blend of experience, skills, understanding and relationship you bring.

Here are a few tips and reminders for those who find they’ve inadvertently become their own brand.

Understand your USP

It’s probably not your professional skill. If you are a designer, writer or accountant, your clients are probably not (just) buying pictures, words and numbers. You may be an average financial adviser or marketer who is exceptionally good at listening and empathising. You may be an SEO expert or trainer on the invoice, but your value is in being a sounding-board, informal coach or counsellor. It can be hard, but you need to understand what the client is buying, as well as what you’re selling. That’s not easy to put in a brochure, but it’s what drives loyalty, repeat business and referrals.

Make your client look great

That’s your job. Leave your ego at the door and make your client look great to their boss or the board. That’s what pulls you up through their organisation and across the organisations of their career path, building a network of contacts and new clients as you go.

Always be professional

Get up, get dressed, be at your desk. Even though “dressed” is seldom a suit and tie. Even though “desk” isn’t in an office with a PA. Written back when Blackberry was still a thing, there’s a lot of value in Nicholas Bate’s Professionalism 101 (here as a handy download). Nicholas is now at Hunter Gatherer 21C.

And, always be tolerant, patient and resilient

• “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.33)
• Be patient: you’re not your client’s top priority. You’re not top of anyone’s mind all day every day.
• Be resilient: “Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.7); “More things frighten us than really affect us, and we are more often afflicted in thought than in fact.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics, 13.4)

What do you think? What have I missed?

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