The straight answer
Being specific and honest, because almost nobody is. In the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn study, buyers rated only 15% of what they read as very good, and 60% said they’d pay a premium for good material. Write down what your industry keeps getting wrong, what it costs people, and what you do instead, including the part that’s harder or slower. That piece beats most of what your competitors publish.
Edelman and LinkedIn asked three and a half thousand people who buy things for a living what they made of the material their suppliers publish.
Fifteen percent of it was rated very good or excellent.
Fifteen. Which means that in whatever industry you’re in, the bar is currently somewhere around your ankles and you have been stepping over it apologetically for years.
The rest of the survey is the good news
The 2024 study is worth reading properly, because it does something most marketing research refuses to do. It measures behaviour instead of vibes.
Sixty percent of those decision-makers said they’d pay a premium to work with an organisation publishing genuinely good material. Not “engage with.” Not “feel more positive toward.” Pay more money.
Eighty-six percent said good material would get an organisation invited into an RFP they wouldn’t otherwise have been in.
Then the fifteen percent. Sixty percent will pay more for it, eighty-six percent will open a door for it, and almost nobody is producing it.
That is a gap you could drive a lorry through, and I have watched people who could close it in an afternoon decide instead that they’ve got nothing to add.
Why is nearly all of it so bad?
Look at who writes it.
The material coming out of most professional firms is produced by people who have never done the job. Marketing coordinators, agencies working from a brief, junior staff handed a keyword list, and now, increasingly, a machine with a prompt and no supervision.
All of them can produce something readable. None of them can produce the sentence that makes a buyer sit up, because that sentence requires having been in the room when it went wrong.
Meanwhile the people who have been in the room are busy doing the work, and are quietly convinced that everything they know is obvious. I hear it on nearly every first call. Somebody explains something genuinely fascinating about how their field actually operates and then says everyone knows that.
Nobody knows that. Fifteen percent, remember. Nobody knows anything.
What “very good” means to a person who buys things
Buyers are not scoring your prose. They’re scoring whether it was useful, and useful has a very specific shape.
It changes a decision. Not context. Not a trend summary they could have got anywhere. A thing that means they will do something differently on Tuesday.
It’s specific enough to be wrong. Real claims, real numbers, a real position. Material hedged into safety scores badly for exactly the reason it feels safe: it commits to nothing, so it risks nothing, so it says nothing. Your legal team will love it. Nobody else will finish it.
It cost the writer something. The mistake you made. The engagement that went sideways. The thing your industry gets wrong that you gave up correcting around 2019. Generosity is legible on a page, and so is its absence.
It reads like a person. After three years of machine-smoothed text, a human voice with opinions and a slightly odd rhythm now stands out like a flare in a car park. That is a genuinely new development and it gets more valuable every month.
Why a book is a different instrument
Articles and posts and the odd webinar all count toward this. A book does something they can’t.
A buyer can read an article and remain unsure whether you’re actually the expert or just the person whose turn it was to write something that week. Three hundred pages settles it. You cannot fake your way through a book in your own field. Anyone who has tried has the scars and usually the reviews.
A book also sits on a desk for years, gets handed to a colleague, and turns up in the room when somebody is drawing up a shortlist and you are not there to argue for yourself. That eighty-six percent figure is describing exactly that moment, and a book is the only asset that reliably shows up for it.
Where to start, since fifteen percent means you don’t have to be brilliant
You have to be specific and you have to be honest, which almost nobody currently is.
Write down the thing your industry keeps getting wrong. Write down what it costs the people who get it wrong. Write down what you do instead and why, including the part where it’s harder or more expensive or slower.
That’s a piece. It took a specialist about ninety minutes. It will outperform everything your competitors published this quarter, and the only reason it will is that they are still producing content about how the landscape is changing.
Eighty-five percent of what’s out there was rated mediocre by the very people it was aimed at. That’s your competition. Not the best minds in your field. A wall of content written by people who don’t do the job.
Say something true and specific and you win. That’s the whole strategy. It is faintly embarrassing how well it works.
Your Next Fave Read
- The Storykeeper Manifesto: Why Your Most Powerful Business Asset Hasn’t Been Written Yet
- How to Turn Your Business Into a Book Without It Reading Like a Case Study
- How to Build Your Author Platform Before Your Book Is Written
Ready to get your wisdom into the world, however you write it? Book a free validation call. I’ll figure out the right approach for your specific book and your actual goals, whether that’s coaching, ghostwriting, or the two of us writing it together. writewordmagic.com
