Content marketing stands as one of the crucial digital marketing solutions for a business looking to take off, grow, and stay ahead in a competitive industry. However, it is not just any content marketing piece. If you want to deliver value, increase the knowledge of a potential buyer, and gain approval from search engine algorithms—then long-form content marketing is your best bet at winning over the online world!
In this guide, we’ll explore the basics and audience-specific aspects of long-form content marketing, and how what benefits it has in store for your brand’s future.
Long-Form Content Marketing: Value-Driven Information Delivery
Whn experts say that long-form content benefits your business, they mean strategically-planned, well-marketed long-form content. Long-form content marketing is essentially content that is more detailed than the short-form content you find—whether we’re talking about blogs or videos.
This type of content is not a marketer’s modern-day digital marketing outbound tactics that serve as a minor distraction or a tidbit of information that customers will soon forget. Long-form content is a balance of awareness, information, comparison, and more.
As time goes on, long-form content helps you create a sizable content library, which is a treasure trove of information for your prospective and current customers.
What Types Of Long Form Content Can You Opt For?
While the term long-form content is often synonymous with 1000+ words blogs and articles, modern-day long-form content marketing includes a more diverse range. Here’s a list of the in-depth content types you need to invest in ASAP.
Blog Posts: Unsurprisingly, blog posts take the lead, offering information in a uniquely comprehensive way. Take any topic that you want to talk about for the benefit of a layman or an expert in a subject, and you’ll find no better way than a blog post to fulfill your goals. Long-form blogs can be as ‘short’ as 1000 words or even span 5000 words—the choice depends on who you’re writing one for and how much information you need to deliver.
Articles & Feature Posts: Unlike short feature articles, these content pieces are typically lengthy, the minimum word count is around 1000-1200 words. LinkedIn articles are a common example of such long-form content marketing articles. Study the LinkedIn article by HubSpot Co-Founder Brian Halligan that spans over 2000 words, yet manages to keep the reader hooked with a personal yet educational tone.
You can write articles as a way of conveying information or doing so while promoting a product/service that your brand offers. Unlike blog posts which are slightly persuasive, long-form articles offer broad perspectives on specific subject matters in an organized way.
Ebooks: One of the common long-form content examples is ebooks. These digital books cover a subject extensively and are an effective part of long-form content marketing strategy for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-customer). You can invest in professional ebook content creation services for various purposes, such as a means to break down the technical aspects and advantages of your product for customers.
Long Videos: Moving on to the mostly non-text part of long-form content marketing is long video creation, such as tutorials, documentaries, and more. Video-based content is more interesting for audiences who love something more ‘action-packed’.
Podcasts: While less common as a means of marketing a brand, podcasts continue to grow as the strongest long-form audio content. The style of podcasts is conversational in nature, featuring interviews, expert debates, and analysis. These can be great sources of information for potential customers, enabling them to learn about a subject in detail.
Why Add Long-Form Content To Your Digital Arsenal?
In a world where online users are time-poor and attention spans are shorter than ever, you may wonder why to invest in long-form content. Written well, by an expert in the cluster and pillar content style, long-form content benefits your brand in more ways than you can imagine!
The Role of In-Depth Content in Building Trust
If there’s a way to tell your audience that ‘we’re the experts’ it’s long-form content marketing. Creating in-depth content helps establish your brand as an authority in your industry, as your audience views your long-form pieces as thought leadership content.
Measuring the potential of long-form content in a quantifiable way? Know that long-form content marketing results in social shares which are higher in number the short-form content. However, as you can see in the figure below, going over 2,000 can mean reducing engagement. So, find that ideal length for your audience.
Users who are actively involved are more inclined to establish a relationship with your brand. You build trust with your audience by offering them comprehensive and valuable insights—promoting lasting loyalty and interaction!
Note: Don’t forget: long-form content covers subjects thoroughly. As a result, you educate your prospects and customers for more informed purchasing decisions—and higher satisfaction levels.
Benefits of Long-Form Content for SEO
High-quality long-form content shows your commitment to delivering useful information and ability in comprehensive analysis. This makes your audience happy—as well as the search engines!
Let’s dive into the specifics of SEO with long-form content: to elevate your website development efforts and rank webpages well on search engine result pages (SERPs), your content needs to have several excellent qualities. These qualities are search engine algorithms preferred, one of which is a diverse mix of strong keywords in your content.
There’s more in terms of good SEO with long-form content:
- In-Depth Content: Long-form content enables you to cover a topic thoroughly and offer valuable information for your audience. This helps enhance user engagement, which is a positive ranking factor.
- Enhanced Backlinks: High-quality lengthier content often gains additional backlinks from other websites. Long blog posts and articles attract over 77% more links compared to shorter ones, making these this ideal enhancing your site’s credibility and search engine rankings.
- Great Average Page Duration: the page duration refers to how long a visitor stays on a webpage. Needless to say, informative and engaging long-form content makes for long-staying visitors, boosting that content’s visibility and ranking.
- Long-Term Traffic: While short-form content gains quick but temporary traffic, long-form content has the ability to attract visitors over an extended period of time due to its relevance and depth.
How to Create Long-Form Content: A Brief Guide
Creating long-form content needs good planning to communicate your message well. If you’re ready to write a detailed piece for your brand, take a look at this step-by-step guide.
1. Conduct Content Audit & Extensive Research into the Subject
Whether you write a long-form blog post or create a detailed video, remember that extensive information is the first key to success. Review your current content to identify strengths and gaps. Next, gather as much data as possible, from as many sources as possible.
In-depth keyword research for search engine optimization (SEO) is imperative to content visibility, so make sure that the investigative part of your long-form content marketing process is as meticulous as possible.
2. Adopt the Content Hub Strategy for Seamless Readability
Content hubs, also known as the pillar-cluster model, are made up of a pillar page and several related topic clusters. You use internal linking to connect clusters (sub-topic) to the pillar content (core topic). This forms a seamless content structure, making both viewers and search engines easily understand the relevance and depth of the information within the content piece.
The content hub strategy also increases your chances of appearing in rich and featured snippets, improving your site’s organic ranking and overall traffic.
3. Create High-Quality, Engaging Content Throughout
Long-form content can be intimidating for many marketers for one reason: it’s challenging to make a content piece long, yet interesting. Use storytelling techniques to enhance appeal and incite engagement—and promote SEO with long-form content. By including real-life stories or case studies, you can diversify lengthy content and make it more relatable for your audience.
This long-form post by Mailchimp, the marketing software platform, is a helpful resource for learning how to create Google Remarketing Ads. The addition of a table of contents, a light and open layout, social media sharing features, and multiple language options makes it interesting from the get-go.
Enhance your content’s visual and overall appeal by adding various multimedia elements and social media snippets. Relevant images, infographics, and videos make a lengthy piece of content easier to consume.
Remember to maintain clarity and coherence. Additionally, steer clear of overly complex language or jargon that could potentially confuse your readers—especially if promoting your content for B2C marketing. Finally, before you proceed to content promotion, review and edit your content for accuracy, grammar, and style.
4. Know How to Promote Long-Form Content on Relevant Platforms
Strategically plan long-form content promotion. Create a content calendar for publishing, and follow this by sharing content to grow and retain an active audience. This includes social media shares on your brand’s account, as well as inviting your subscribers by email to check out the new content drop.
You can also add content repurposing to your content calendar, which means transforming lengthy content into different formats such as infographics, video clips, and podcasts. Content repurposing can help broaden the reach and appeal of your content on multiple platforms.
5. Prioritize Measuring the Success of Long-Form Content
Use the right metrics and analytical tools for measuring the success of long-form content:
- On-Site Traffic: A key measure of long-form content success is how many visitors are interacting with your content. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to monitor traffic and engagement data.
- Number of Backlinks: Backlinks determine the quality and relevance of your long-form content. Track the backlinks your content is generating to understand its reception by other websites.
- User Engagement: How is your audience interacting with your content? Are they leaving comments and feedback, subscribing to the newsletter, and sharing it on social media? These are engagement indicators that provide useful insights into long-form content marketing.
- Conversion Rate: When all is said and done, long-form content that drives conversions at an excellent rate is successful content. So, track the conversion rate of your content to measure its growth.
Know that long-form content marketing does not end the moment you publish a piece. Know how content fares online—so that you can use that knowledge to improve future content strategies.
Long-Form Content Marketing Strategy for B2B
Establishing credibility is crucial when you’re marketing your products or services to other businesses. B2B long-form content provides a platform to showcase your offerings and highlight what sets you apart from competitors.
That is why you need a well-rounded B2B content marketing strategy, one that incorporates various channels and techniques for lead generation.
Detailed how-to guides are one of the long-form content examples that make a strong impression on potential clients in the initial stages of engagement. Case studies and industry reports also demonstrate your expertise in the field—enhancing marketing and sales funnels.
A Look at Long-Form Content Marketing for B2C
It’s not enough to have an amazing product or service, you need to how to market it or it may go unnoticed. B2C long-form content marketing boosts brand recognition, drives sales through organic traffic, and your posts transform into thought leadership content.
In contrast to B2B marketing, where you need to appeal to the decision-maker, B2C marketing allows you to directly target the end-user. B2C content marketing strategy is more straightforward and to the point, steering clear of complex industry phrases, crafted for a layman to help them fully understand what you offer in the simplest yet captivating terms.
The Future of Long-Form Content Marketing
Long-form content marketing is a crucial component of companies’ digital plans, now and in the future. Question is: will you have to upgrade your long-form content approach moving to comply with content marketing trends 2024—and how so?
1. Content for Google’s Conversational (SGE) Results
Search Generative Experience (SGE) incorporates a ChatGPT-like interface at the top of the results page, which provides answers to user queries and enables further questioning.
As it is revolutionizing search engines, adjust your content marketing strategy for SGE by crafting structured data using schema markup. Moreover, focus on content upgrades to add long-tail keywords. The more specific your content is, the higher the chance Google will direct users to your site.
2. Social-First Content Marketing Approach
For now, most digital content involves directing users from social media to the website—or at least back to the website.
However, one of the content marketing trends 2024 we’ll see emerging is a social-first approach. Website content—including long-form content—will have to be designed specifically for enhancing social media presence.
3. Personalized, Customer-Centric Information
Personalized content is one of the content marketing trends 2024 that ensures delivering genuine value to readers. It’s about incorporating your personal touch into every content piece you craft—in a manner that resonates with your audience.
In a digital landscape where you’ll see bland 1500-word ChatGPT articles popping up everywhere, content imbued with a human touch will truly stand out!
Create High-Converting Long-Form Content With Urban Software!
We offer high-quality content marketing services, from content audit and research to strategic writing, editing, and content upgrades. Our experts help you establish your brand’s authority, improve your search engine rankings, and drive more traffic and conversions to your website.
Partner up with UrbanSoftware today! Call us today at +15595540082 / +971527174508 or email us at info@urbansoftware.tech to set up a free web design consultation today!
