The words written by you, for you and about you are important to your company’s growth. As part of your content marketing strategy, you have blogs, white papers and other documents to attract, engage and delight customers. If you have just been writing (or accepting) short articles and blogs just to have content, it’s time to rethink that approach. It turns out the longer your blog the better.
Length, it turns out, plays a significant role in how effective your content is. The impact includes how you are viewed as a thought leader and whether what you say can be trusted. You want to provide something of true value to your customers through your posts. That kind of writing frankly takes a bit more room on the page(s).
Many bloggers keep their content short, to not wear out the reader’s attention span. 500 words and you’re out. Content marketers are finding that long form content, at least triple that length is actually better when it comes to engaging your customers. What is behind what seems to be a change in tactics? Let’s see if we can discover why long form content should be making its way into your content marketing strategy.
With the rise of short-form social media such as TikTok, it would appear that the trend is towards shorter content, but that’s not quite true. Today, the average blog length is 1,236 words. That’s 53% longer than just six years ago. The trend towards lengthy content has actually been going on for some time now, with more and more content rising to about 2,000 words.
Before we delve into the why, let’s confirm the what. Although there are varied opinions, long form content is usually somewhere between 500 and 2,000 words. Some would suggest that both ends of that range should be higher; 700 words as the minimum, but stretching a preferred length to as large as 3,000 words. Longer posts often take the form of white papers, articles, ebooks or even podcasts. Often this type of content is “gated”--requiring the reader/viewer to provide contact information before being allowed to see or download the content. Depending on what your primary focus is in creating the content (e.g. Thought leadership, SEO improvement, brand loyalty, etc.), there are even more specifics directing the creation of content. We’ll get into that later.
Great search engine optimization (SEO) is what brings you customers before your competitors. Your content can play a role in how your online presence ranks in search engines. Consider this: One criterion Google uses to determine your web presence ranking is the number of times your content is linked by readers to other social media (think of it by being quoted by your customers to other prospective customers. A recent research study by the SEO training firm Backlinkio suggested that longer-form content received nearly 75% more links than shorter posts. In terms of social media shares (also a critical benefit of content marketing), the same analysis shows longer content performs better than short form.
When you and your company are known to be knowledgeable about something your customer is interested in knowing more about, you build your status as a thought leader. This builds a higher level of trust between you and prospective customers. This also requires going deeper into topics that are important to your customers, and that more often than not will mean a longer post is appropriate and expected. It's an opportunity to build respect within your industry and customer population.
The longer a consumer stays with you on your website or on your social media channels, the more likely they are to become a customer. Longer-form articles or content serve that purpose as well. They are meant to be read, rather than skimmed. But this isn’t just a matter of making a piece longer. The information has to be engaging and useful to the people you’re trying to reach. That should be part of the prep work before any post, regardless of length: Is the topic relevant to my customers? Is there value for them?
Customer loyalty is at a premium these days. One of the lingering impacts of the supply issues of the COVID-19 pandemic is a downturn in customer loyalty. During the pandemic, consumers were often faced with moving from their favorite brand(s) in favor of anyone who had a needed item in stock. The supply chain continues to recover, but some aspects are taking longer to regain their full nature. The damage to customer loyalty has been done. The good news is that well-placed and well-crafted longer content can (and does) restore that lost sense of authority and trust. Supply issues have since cleared up (for the most part), but the damage to customer loyalty has already been done. Content that provides value to your customers can win back, or solidify your customer’s goodwill.
As a thought leader, you are, for the most part giving “unbranded” information regarding your product or service. While there is some expectation that the piece will contain information about your business that you hope will satisfy current customers and intrigue new ones, it won't work if you appear to be hitting the reader over the head with a sales pitch. There is nothing wrong with focusing on your services or products, but for prospective customers who are not that far along in the sales funnel, it has to be a bit more subtle, or risk sounding disingenuous. With longer-form materials, it's easier to provide solid, useful unbranded information while ensuring your business is represented.
If your product or service is anything even slightly out of the mainstream, consumers may not know it exists, or how it would help resolve their pain points. Longer content is the perfect spot to create and drive interest in new areas. When you publish content on rare topics, you are drawing attention to it, introducing consumers to solutions they didn’t know existed, much less where to find those solutions.
As mentioned earlier, there are a variety of forms long form content can take. In-depth information can be the foundation for a white paper, or ebook. It can be an article about news in your industry or sector. First and foremost it has to be engaging, so you have an idea of who your customers are and what their interests might be. Read more about marketing and sales strategies for CEOs here.
How-to pieces or engaging lists (“Top five reasons you should X”) have the tendency to get shared more often.
What it looks like may be determined by the channel you are using, but here are some general guidelines to follow when creating long form content:
Long form content needs to be engaging from the start. It should capture and hold the attention of your customers past that first paragraph. It has to have substance and purpose–it has to be useful. That doesn’t cut down on the topics available–the concept of useful, is broad. If it is interesting and engaging, customers will see the value in it, whether it's a topic of particular interest to them or not.
It seems simple, but writing with poor form or something hard to read will not have the effect you intended. Paragraphs need to be organized in comprehensible sections, with each section chipping off a piece of your main ideas. End each section with an answer to the question, “So what?” How it “reads” can say a lot about you and your company.
Somewhat reliant on the type of content you’re creating, tone can be tricky. Making the tone conversational is always good, but when writing an in-depth piece on a serious topic, the tone should be just as serious. Conversely, If there is humor in the subject, your tone should reflect it. Just remember to stay respectful.
White papers, ebooks, and other “information-dense” content require you to know what you’re talking about, and in some cases, back that assertion up. Citations, references, and links to authoritative exterior sites will show you know what you’re talking about and others agree. It’s one of the ways a long-form piece can rise above obvious fluff or filler. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also can be impacted by those external links.
Long, unbroken paragraphs of text can be daunting for the reader, regardless of how interested they might be in the topic. Breaking up those sections with graphics of one sort or another will help. Pictures, graphs, and even tables of information can be used to provide visual variety.
Just like poor writing can be an issue, so can good writing–that doesn’t have a point. Sticking in sentences or paragraphs just to up the word count will be obvious to many readers, and effectively remove any benefit from all those sentences and paragraphs. Some topics, forms, or channels will take more, or in this case less, and pushing beyond those limits can be less than optimum.
Everyone is talking about AI, and all the ways it impacts business. Some are now relying on such platforms as ChatGPT for some aspects of document creation. Is this going to work for long-form writing?
You plug in a few facts, an outline of what you’re looking for, and determine how long you want it to be. You push the button, and out pops a white paper. Sounds great, yes? Well, rest assured that’s a bit of an oversimplification. It may be a tool you want to use, but the bottom line on AI-generated content is to be very careful. AI content can, despite your best efforts, produce copy that is not in your voice and not in the direction you wanted or can plagiarize someone else’s work, With highly technical content, the AI bots can be wrong. If the topic is esoteric enough, without a lot of information out there, the risk of unintended plagiarism increases. Some risk-averse companies are already putting in strong limits on how AI-generated content can be used.
Content needs to be fresh, regardless of whether it's long or short. That means new articles, new blogs, and more. That’s hard to do when you’re also trying to run a business. One of the best ways to “feed the beast” is to partner with a content marketing company. Here at Marketing Monsoon, our staff has decades of experience in writing blogs, technical papers, ebooks, white papers, podcasts, and more. We have first-hand experience in the cleantech sector, plus a number of other industries so we can understand what your customers would be interested in hearing from you.
Marketing Monsoon, LLC is a growth agency specializing in lead generation, sales enablement, and customer engagement for alternative energy, healthcare technology, and staffing and HR companies. Our expertise includes strategy development, content marketing, lead generation systems, local search marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. Get started on your strategy today by reaching out to Marketing Monsoon at (866) 851-1793.