Death of the One-Pager

"Thanks for this review, all the information was really helpful. do you have a one-pager I can share with my customers?"

I hesitated. I almost lied and said I didn't have one, but I did. I didn't want to send my participant the document for one simple reason - one-pagers are for the most part, ineffective communication.

Think about the last one-pager experience you had. Can you even recall it? If you can, what was your initial reaction to it? Were you excited to open it up (likely from the email it was nestled into)? Or did you begrudgingly double click, only to find out that it was, as usual, hard to read, boring, and forgettable?

Can you even recall the product name? You may recall the company, or perhaps the industry, but an actual product name… maybe not. What about a value proposition? After reading it, could you articulate it in conversation?

I’d venture to guess, based on my own experience with one-pagers, that you’re not able to recall most of what might be important in a customer conversation.

If one-pagers are part of an Ecosystem Enablement strategy, then it's probably time to rethink the strategy.

The reason why one-pagers are such a fail is they are trying to communicate general information in an age where general audiences no longer exist. There are tools, resources and platforms that can get the right information to the right audience with pinpoint accuracy. So content needs to be hyper-focused on specific audiences, or delivered in such a way so that the specific audience finds the content.

You have never heard of a one-pager going viral. So we have to stop thinking about them as a viral video that everyone should see.

One-pagers don't have an audience in mind Most of the ones I have seen focus more on look and layout than the information that is trying to be conveyed and are usually out of date the moment they get approved.

Most one-pagers are created by graphic designers and the copy comes from different sources, like a company website - which has a totally different purpose and intent. Or, the copy comes from a hodge-podge of internal teams each vying for a little piece of real estate on that one-pager. The result is no cohesive story, no call to action that makes sense, and the basic information that the audience might need (like joint value proposition) is buried and hard to pick out.

In addition, they are impossible to read on a mobile device because the user has to pinch to zoom and scroll in multiple directions which is not user friendly.

For the longest time, the one-pager has been the keystone of partner enablement. In the new age of Ecosystem Enablement, the one-pager will be a thing of the past. It’s time to move forward and leave our old methodologies, priorities, and delivery methods to a by gone era. Ecosystem Enablement needs to be agile, highly focused, customer centric, and delivered just in time.

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