Content is critical for lead nurturing. Whether it is a case study, new research on some aspect of your industry, a how-to guide, or a whitepaper, content is what makes your lead nurturing programs work – and lead nurturing is what helps marketing drive more revenue to sales.

However, the internet has changed how buyers make B2B purchases, and more recently, it's begun to affect how they consume content. Rarely does a business buyer have time to print out and read an entire whitepaper, watch a 60 minute webinar, or read more than a few bullet points on a website.

Instead, today's buyers have become accustomed to consuming bite-sized chunks of information in small free periods. Before the internet, those periods might have meant a minute of mental downtime, but today buyers have Crackberries, RSS feeders, YouTube, and so on to feed them snippets of content all day long.

In this post, Are You Feeding the Snack Culture?, John Jantsch writes that capturing buyers early in the sales cycle means you need to feed them snack-sized pieces of content:

…education based marketing materials are essential for the prospect that is ready to be nurtured [using long-form content], but I think it's equally important that you find ways to deliver the snacks of information that can help people begin to develop the relationship that makes them want to deeper.

A few tips from Foneshow blog: Snack-sized content needs to have a single idea, should be easy to share, and should require little or no commitment. If it can be viewed on a mobile device during an elevator ride, you are on the right track.

Oh, and by the way, I know my posts can be too long!

Sponsored by: Demand generation software from Marketo, coming soon.