While the pros and cons of short form content and long form content have been hotly debated in marketing circles for years, which is the better choice in 2022?
According to market leader Hubspot, brands are thirteen times more likely to see positive return on investment when they put regular blogging as a top priority. However, there’s a number of reasons as to why brands fall flat with their blog content, and it usually either boils down to a lack of time, passion, experience or resources – even though the potential rewards can be lucrative.
For those who are brave enough to give content marketing and blogging a red hot crack, the next question is usually whether short form content or long form content is right for them. While both undeniably have their own sets of benefits attached, the length of your blog or article can have far reaching effects.
Why Size Does Matter In The World Of Blogging
The bread and butter of any good content marketing strategy with a focus on boosting a brand’s Google presence is your website’s blog. When properly optimised using keywords, titles and headers, plus a meta description, a blog or an article can come in many different formats. Popular themes that many budding content marketers tend to gravitate towards are blogs that are list based, how to guides, or even interviews in news style editorial, with the aim of the game being to write evergreen content that will last forever and not expire.
However, many people tend to come unstuck when it comes to determining the right length of a blog, which is when deciding between short form content or long form content usually happens. Sometimes, long form content can be overkill and a waste of resources. At other times, and depending on your topic or keywords of choice, it’s a necessary evil if you want to have a decent shot at ranking online. In comparison, short form content has a reputation for being unfavourable “click bait” in the eyes of Google algorithms, but that’s often because people are unaware of what it actually is.
Although the exact definitions have changed over the years, short form content is generally considered to be a blog or article under 1,000 to 1,200 words, while long form content is any published piece that has a word count beyond this. As a general rule, marketers very rarely publish a blog post that is shorter than 500 words, and that is only reserved for pieces supplemented by something visual like an infographic or video, or for breaking news.
The primary attraction for writing short form content is that it takes less time to produce, and caters to the shorter attention spans of many audiences – people are busy, and they want answers to their conundrums quickly. For the less experienced blogger, the workload is smaller, and provides them with a chance to build their content library with a quicker turnaround time.
However, it’s for good reason that long form content is becoming increasingly favoured. The internet is a busy marketplace, and Google has had to make some changes with how it delivers the best possible content to consumers. Today, the search engines no longer just look at how many times a keyword appears on a blog or article, but also measures a website’s overall authority, it’s speed, performance on mobile, behavioural factors, and you guessed it – length of published content. Understanding the key SEO ranking factors will not only help you to write better blogs, but will also help to ensure that you’re not wasting your time on content marketing efforts that won’t necessarily work.
Although long form content also provides an opportunity to target more keywords and potentially expand your audience, it still needs to be easily digestible. When going big, aim to break down chunks of text with formats such as lists, posts that compare products or services, tutorials, and comprehensive guides. Long form content is becoming increasingly popular as the go-to blog length and format, but it’s certainly not for the faint of heart.
While you might fancy yourself as a budding blogger and ready to conquer the internet, understanding the technical side of business with content production is often where ambitious brand owners come unstuck. A lack of time, energy or resources are often serial offenders as to why many brands ignore content marketing all together – but what if we told you that there was another way of making your mark online while minimising the workload?
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources – and you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that. Avoiding blogging for business altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice, but investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times. It also means that because you have a monthly credit, you are going to want to make sure you use these up – and so do we – meaning that your digital content is always consistent.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
