Understanding how your audience will read and interact with your thought-leadership content is crucial in developing senior relationships and building reputation. A recent study into IT decision-makers’ reading habits highlighted a couple of useful points, and our thoughts on how to exploit them:

95% of people pass on interesting content to colleagues. 91% claimed to read more online now than 2 years ago. Package up information appropriately for the medium – keep online information tip- and list-based and use this as teaser content to lead your audience to longer downloads or to request hard copies of pieces with a longer narrative. The beauty of the teaser information is that it can be resused in myriad ways, all leading back to your central content: circulated throughout the IT online sites using comments fields, forming part of email communications, linked from LinkedIn profiles and group discussions etc.

Only 13% do work-related reading at work. The other 87% do it at home and when commuting (61% at home) Online information consumption is typically in small units, different from offline ”compendium style” reading. Whilst CD drive guides and mp3 downloads for commuters are worth considering – Marc Bresseel of Microsoft mentions on his blog what he’s taking to read on the plane on the way to his hols for example – why not send key contacts novel-sized collections of your best thought-leadership or top 5 most popular downloads.

Clearly the content needs to be compelling in the first place for these tips to work. But extra effort thinking through the content’s hazardous journey through the audience jungle will be well rewarded.

The full research findings are available from Vanson Bourne. A final point to note: a massive 99% of respondents include online sources when looking for information needed to support an IT decision (with 61% only doing a Google search for it)  See this earlier post about the importance of your organic search strategy and how buyers find you