Investing in content marketing is crucial to building brand awareness, showcasing your authenticity, and educating your customers. While long-form content establishes your brand and provides valuable in-depth information to your target audience, short-form content keeps them satisfied when a quick answer is needed. Read on to learn the pros and cons of short-form content vs. long-form content.
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Short-form content is snappy and direct. As a general rule of thumb, short-form content is almost always under 900 words or less than three minutes for videos. Of course, short-form content is usually far shorter than that!
Short-form content is easier to create and quicker to share a message with an audience, making it easy to consume. Some common examples of short-form content include advertising landing pages, infographics, short videos and mini-podcasts, social media posts, slideshows, one-sheets, email campaigns, and, of course, shorter blog posts.
The following are a few pros of short-form content which should be considered when deciding your content scope and length.
Listening, reading, or watching content is easier with short-form content because ideas are precise and to the point.
Short-form videos are an example of short-form content with high demand due to a faster media cycle, short attention spans, smartphone ubiquity, and other factors. This creates a need for value-driven short-form content by consumers.
Short-form content includes short, direct messages that persuade your target audience quickly. It also offers grab-and-go answers and other immediate solutions.
Short-form content is typically easier to create and takes less time and resources to produce. This is due to short-form content requiring less overarching detail and supporting data. That said, your content still needs to be accurate!
While short-form content offers numerous benefits over long-form content, there are certainly some cons as well. The following are a few of those cons:
Short-form content can be less authoritative and often delivers fewer SEO opportunities. Search engines often want to see content that shows a high level of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). In many cases, this may mean ensuring your content has the depth to truly show you have in-depth knowledge and experience with the topic.
Short-form content can also lead to overflowing low-quality content due to faster creation time. Since short-form content requires less research and presentation of evidence, more people stick to creating this type and depth of content, making it harder to stand out against the competition and deliver true value.
Long-form content often refers to content with over 900 words or videos running for over three minutes. It includes content that ranges from longer blog articles and guides to webinars, live event recordings, white papers, case studies, product roundups, and e-books. The content is often very thorough and research-intensive to deliver all the necessary information to the target audience.
Long-form content is often very detailed and includes thoroughly researched information and examples, making it ideal for searches. Typically, long-form content also cites other third-party resources and studies that allow visitors to deep dive into a specific subtopic. However, if you’re writing long-form content just for the sake of improving your SEO, you’re missing the point. Write content that truly delivers value to your audience, regardless of if it’s short-form or long-from content!
Longer content often provides in-depth topics that fully address questions and related subjects while introducing fresh ideas and thoughts around the issue. This arguably allows the content piece to potentially rank for more keywords thanks to search engines like Google becoming better at understanding passages and various subtopics within longer text.
Long-form content often outperforms short-form content as it contains more actionable information regarding the topic, making it more shareable. Think about the last online resource or blog post that you thought was valuable and shared with others? Was it shorter or a more in-depth analysis?
Brands with a healthy dose of long-form content tend to become thought leaders and inform audiences that the brand cares about their problems and is willing to invest the time to thoroughly address a topic.
Despite its benefits, long-form content has a much higher production period and requires significantly more resources to create. Additionally, long-form content can be harder to read on mobile devices.
However, you can optimize long-form content and make it easier to skim and search using various tactics like proper heading structure, formatted text (e.g. bullets, lists, and sections), summary graphics, TL;DR sections, clickable table of contents, and more.
Honestly, it depends. Both short-form and long-form content can be extremely powerful for your business. And, more importantly, both types of content can help your audience if executed properly.
The question for your specific writing topic is which type of content will work the best. To get a better idea of which format to use, ask yourself the following questions:
If you need help optimizing your short-form or long-form content, we at Igniting Business may be able to help you. We provide personalized content marketing services tailored to your goals and budget. Contact us to get started.
Alternatively, if you are simply looking for some tools to make your in-house content copywriting a bit easier, check out some of our favorite tools below:
We hope some of the above tools save you some time and effort in your content creation process. Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to get more marketing, SEO, and web design tips delivered to your inbox on a monthly basis.
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Ben Seidel is the CEO and Founder of Igniting Business. Ben has been serving hundreds of small businesses with web design and SEO services for over 15 years and covering digital marketing related topics since 2012.
Over the years, Ben has been recognized on a local and national level, including entrepreneurship awards from both the NFIB and NASE and being featured in publications such as CNBC Universal, Yahoo News, Intuit Small Business, CIO.com, Mizzou Magazine, and Fox Business.
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