This article will first explain what long form content marketing is, then why it is important in today’s digital marketing age. It will also examine how to develop ideas for long form content marketing as an in-bound strategy and how someone like me can help develop a strategy that provides your company’s digital space with evergreen, high Google Domain Authority ranking marketing content.
For Whom is Long Form Content Marketing Important?
Why should companies today give serious consideration to paying someone to produce long form content marketing as part of their total content marketing strategy? Well, to appease four very important audiences. Most importantly is the AI that Google uses to determine Domain Authority and Page Rank. The other three are those consumers that are (1) already enthusiastic customers that would like to signal their rationale for consuming your brand (2) customers that are not yet enthusiastic enough to become a vector for sharing marketing messaging but could be, (3) those that know about your product but have yet to purchase it and (4) those that didn’t know about your company’s products or services at all.
Why Does Google Care About Long Form Content Marketing?
Understanding how Google’s AI approaches long form content marketing and why it is so important for determining Domain Authority and Page Rank can be explained by asking a single question:
On a scale of one to five, with one being the least amount of trust and five being the most amount of trust, how would you rank the trust-worthiness of the below people to provide meaningful insight on a particular field of human knowledge?
- Someone that graduated only with a high school diploma
- Someone with a bachelor’s degree in a different field of knowledge
- Someone with a bachelor’s degree in that particular field of knowledge
- Someone with a master’s degree in that particular field of knowledge
- Someone with a doctoral degree in that particular field of knowledge
Most likely your answers were in ascending order: someone graduating only with a high school degree getting the lowest trust ranking and an in-field PhD getting the highest ranking.
The simple reason is that you, like Google, know that subject area mastery is best accomplished through publication of research and academic writing and not a number of small memorandum on the matter. Long form content raises a website’s domain authority, which also causes it to rank higher for certain search terms and lower the costs of Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.
Why Do People Care About Long Form Content Marketing?
There’s other reasons why long form content marketing is important besides being an oversized textual canvas with which to include many of the SEO specific terms. Long format content marketing earns more backlinks than short form and also receives the most amount of organic traffic.
Ask yourself, would you be more likely to share a 250-word post that explains something you care about in three small talking points or a compellingly written 2000-word article that contains a number of examples; quotes and original or secondary research?
Short-form content is a necessary strategy to drive engagement and build domain authority. But at a time when competition for the attention of potential customers is so high that they are seeing literally thousands of ads a day, it’s important to have a diverse approach to one’s online presence.
Because there is simply so much short form content out there, unless combined with a pay-per-click boosting or a placement/sharing of the content through another media outlet, paid or earned, short-form content’s virtual freshness is brief.
Additionally, long form content done right keep the visitor on the website longer than short form content, which Google monitors and also uses to factor Domain Authority and Page Ranking.
Long form content done correctly is also more engaging and is more likely to help make customers not just purchasers of the product, but proselytizing enthusiasts of it.
What is Long-Form Marketing Content?
Long-form content marketing can be defined as any kind of in-depth content that has been produced with the intent of giving the reader or viewer a large amount of detailed information.
Long-form content marketing can include things like investigation or exposition that uses original research, company data, an analysis of existent research or some combination thereof; a single, long format blog; a blog series; e-books; white papers; and keystone articles – articles that combine and synthesize information found in a number of already published on-site short form blogs.
It should also be noted that the difference between short and long term content is not just about length. Done incorrectly, long form content is similar to the writing of high school students on a test when they’ve not done the reading or paid attention in class – they use a large number of filler words in order to boost their word count. This not true long form content, but short form content writ large.
True long form content is able to provide more examples of style, voice and authority – some of the key components of corporate branding.
How Does Long Form Content Marketing Different from Short Form Content Marketing?
Besides just the length of the writing and the number of audio-visual assets that can be incorporated with it in an aesthetically pleasing manner, long form content marketing is qualitatively different from short form marketing content. Some of the many ways in which it is different are as follows:
- Long form content marketing availability means that an email subscription pop up could be added to grow a company’s contact list.
- Long form content marketing can be held behind a survey, the shorter the better, in order to assisting in greater understanding of purchasing profiles.
- Long form content marketing can contain an active feedback section can make it a page where potential customers and current service/product enthusiasts can engage in conversion conversations.
- Long form content marketing can contain an active discussion component that can make it a page where questions are answered that would normally go to support staff.
This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive but instead just a few examples of the benefits that can be gained from having long form content marketing.
How To Develop Long Form Content Marketing As An In-bound Strategy
In order to develop a strategy for long form content marketing you need to know how to produce so it meets Google’s preferred formatting to achieve the most effective SEO ranking possible, but you also need to know how to present the subject matter to your human audience in a manner that is pleasing. Your human audience will break down into four subcategories:
- Your existent customers.
- Those that are at some part of your sales funnel.
- Those that could be in your sales funnel.
- Those that won’t be in your sales funnel but may share the material.
Prior to looking at internal marketing data, an ideation session would occur wherein from potential topics those are chosen that best meet the SUCCESS criteria.
Based upon the different buyer personalities that exist, the ideas are adapted to fit the proper audience. Content is then ordered into a production calendar that matches cyclical or topical events and is then produced from according to any pre- or co- determined branding guidelines.
The Development Process for Long Form Content Marketing
Long form content marketing is a complex process and requires either a team or a person that is able to complete all of the following:
- Co-ordinate with the existent marketing team to determine the metrics for success, targeted audiences and how prior content marketing campaigns have fare.
- Ideate share-worthy ideas for long form content marketing that are informed by statistical insights gleaned from your existent customer profiles.
- Create a content production calendar.
- Determine which promotional route is best to follow for each and to execute according to that judgement.
- Produce engaging textual and visual content the follows Google’s formatting guidelines to maximize SEO as well as existent or newly created branding guidelines.
- Co-ordinate with the webmaster to place content on the client’s website.
- Track mentions, shares, backlinks, changes in domain authority, etc. for marketing reports.
Why You Should Hire Ariel Sheen To Plan and Execute Your Long Form Content Marketing Project
If your business is ready for increased sales via new in-bound sales funnels, decreased costs for PPC marketing, and greater brand exposure then you are likely considering the benefits of beginning a long-format content marketing project. If so, know that the full ideation and development process is part of my basic and premium level long form content marketing packages.
Contact me with what your goals and hopes for a long form content marketing campaign and together we can craft a statement of work that helps you to achieve your marketing goals.