Be it ebooks, blog posts, case studies, or email campaigns, everyone is scrambling to add more and more content on their website to attract more readers and additional subscribers and hoping that one day these subscribers will turn into customers.
The growing popularity of inbound marketing demands a flood of content that promises a more significant investment return.
Of course, there’s a good reason to do so: it works.
Long-form and Short-form Content: The definition
Blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and presentations are all used to reach a different audience type. But nothing in this world is random. There is a science behind choosing which form of content will be good for your audience.
The long-form and short-form are selected based upon your goals and the intent of the users.
For white-papers, ebooks, and how-to guides where the audience demands more information, long-form content, typically 2,000 words, is the best choice.
For blogs, emails, and social media platforms, around 1,000 words’ short-form content is the smart choice.
Do Content-Length Matters?
Now that you know that long-form and short-form content is what, you might think, does content length matter? The simple answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’
One study suggests that content that lengths between 3,000 – 10,000 words get the most engagement, while another survey by Cognitive SEO indicates if the content between 100 – 500 words is well-optimized, it has a better chance of ranking in search engines.
Long-form and short-form content are just tools for marketers. When creating the content management plan, it is vital to consider user intent before shipping any content.
What to Use When?
Whether you are creating content for an ebook, a blog post, or a post on social media, you must consider your target audience’s interests, purpose, and intent.
Practically speaking, long-form content might work in the following way:
- High-end products that require a deep understanding of the product.
- Products and services that require a commitment to purchase.
- The B2B cycle is often complex that demands long-form content.
- Early-stage marketing, where users are unaware of the product.
- Technical products that require more content to explain the technical features.
Short-form content is impactful in the following situation:
- When readers are familiar with your product and need a little push to buy the product.
- The product and service are less expensive, or the products’ benefits can easily be defined in short-form content.
- If the customers are ready to buy the product from you, they require a little more information about the product.
- Blogs posts and social media content where the audience only skim the content.
Whatever the case, it is essential to invest in a content writing service that can help you decide which form of content will be best suited for your brand.
For generating more traffic, HubSpot posts content ranging between 2250 to 2500 words on average. Medium follows a different approach where content with an optimal length of 1600 words get more attention and traffic because the attention span is less on the Medium platform.
5 Key Questions to Decide the Best Content-Length for Your Brand
At times it gets difficult to choose the right length of content. In those situations, it’s best to ask yourself some basic questions. These questions will determine the length of content that you need to create for your brand.
1. How Well-Informed Are Your Customers?
When your target audience doesn’t know much about your product, long-form content will be best-suited to describe your product’s features and technical details.
It will be easy to earn the buyer’s trust with more space, so they don’t leave your website without buying the product. No matter which form of content you use, you must answer the customer’s fundamental question and reduce their stress.
2. Are Your Customers Interested?
The second question you need to ask is whether your audience is interested in long-form or short-form content.
When an audience reads your pre-existing offer, they are motivated to read more about the product. The higher the interest, the greater the chance that people will be interested in your content.
But if the readers are not interested in your first offering, they will prefer short-form content before taking more interest.
Plan your content length as per the enthusiasm of your audience. That’s why you need to consider the intent and interest of your audience.
3. How much content can you produce?
The content strategy also depends upon the number of resources that you have. It takes more resources to create valuable and quality content regularly.
Indeed, long-form content takes much more research, editing, optimizing, and publishing. In contrast, short-term work can quickly be done with few resources.
Google surely ranks content that is relevant to the audience. This means that whether it is long-form or short-form content, the key is to create value for the readers.
4. What’s the Intent of the Users?
Once the content length is identified, you need to work on the keywords you must integrate into your content. These keywords must match with the intent of the users.
The right keywords will raise the SEO value of your content. Both long-form and short-form content must be appropriately broken into blocks that can easily be digested by the audience.
Ensure that any content can easily be skimmed so that it can develop some interest in the audience.
5. What Are the Business Goals?
Finally, the most critical question that you need to ask is what business goals you want to acquire with the content?
Spend more time with the resources and educate them about the business goals that you are willing to achieve with the content.
A decreased response rate means that the content lacks depth or it is not engaging. If the content is not answering the customer’s request, then it is of no use.
If there are increased refund requests, you must focus on what makes your service unique and focus on that.
Closing Thoughts
The content form should be based upon the interest, intent of the audience along with company goals. The best strategy is to go with a mix of long and short-form content. Each provides different advantages. It’s up to the brand how smartly they use the content form.
