Have you ever started reading a news article…and stopped because it was simply too much effort? I know I have, and then I turned to some other news article or distraction.

Do you think your prospects have ever quit reading a piece of cybersecurity marketing content because it was too much effort?

According to Ben Sawyer, an assistant professor in the University of Central Florida's Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems and director of the Readability Consortium, a group working on readability research:

“Marketers need to think about their content as teaching tools. A failure to teach a prospective customer about their products or services is a failure to demonstrate the opportunity that whatever they’re selling can benefit the customer’s work or personal life.”

What is the impact on your marketing, if as many as 67% of the people who started reading it, quit?

The importance of readability

Having a powerful value proposition and set of key messages is clearly important when marketing a cybersecurity solution. We all know that and invest time in that effort. But how much time do we invest in how we communicate those messages, and in particular, in the words we choose?

At Altitude we recently used Readable.com, a service that scores content using standard readability metrics, to scan over 1,000+ pieces of cybersecurity content from 10 leading providers. The results were revealing. We’ll share more about them in a future article.

While the readability scoring likely isn’t perfect (e.g. it may not recognize more common cybersecurity-specific terms, it can’t evaluate the value of supporting graphics), it gives a reasonable indication of how easy it is to read cybersecurity marketing content.

Losing your audience. The impact of poor readability

To help you understand the potential impact of poor readability, here’s a paragraph from a piece of content we scored, with the company’s name replaced.

“When combined with CYBERCO’s Security Monitoring, Vulnerability Scanning automatically correlates security events with scan data. The enriched data reduces false positives and provides further context to CYBERCO security operations center (SOC) analysts for improved incident handling and response. You gain an integrated view of your risk posture and insight for thwarting future attacks.”

And here’s the score. On a readability grading scale from A to E, this one scored an E. More importantly, readable estimates that it is only ‘easily readable’ for 33% of the potential audience.

Theoretically, that means 67% of people will be somewhat challenged to read the above paragraph. Many will simply choose not to and move on to something else.

I would bet that if any one of us ran a café, and we saw 2 out of 3 potential customers line up and then walk away without buying, we would immediately make a change to our business model. Just because we may not be able to see that people aren’t finishing our content, doesn’t mean that it’s not happening to us as well.

As Sawyer points out: Simplifying content might be the way to reach larger audiences. Between the amount of digital noise Americans must endure and the differing abilities of individual readers, too-complex content tends to get lost.

Ensuring your content is more readable makes great business sense because you will engage more potential customers!

In Josh Bernoff’s book about writing clarity, Writing Without Bullshit, a book I highly recommend, he coined the Iron Imperative: Do not waste the reader’s time, and the Golden Corollary: Treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own.

Very wise words. If we all did that, how much more readable would our cybersecurity content be?

You might be wondering…how did this article score? Not perfectly, but a bit better than the cybersecurity example!

At Altitude, we’re focused on creating content that delivers the ‘most relevant information’, in the shortest amount of time.