Content Marketing: Long-content vs Short-content

Today, companies are spending times to write a quality content which is not quite relevant to the products or services that they sell but related to their industry.

As a matter of fact, they could just spend time on something that is actually adding value to their products and services. Why do they have to do that?

Before getting into "why", let us clarify what content marketing is. 

What is content marketing?

The simple definition of content marketing is that it is a strategic marketing that delivers valuable, relevant and consistent content to the customers in order to attract and retain the defined audience. (source: content marketing institute)

Often times, when we talk about content marketing, you may just say blogging, indeed, the easiest and the most popular way to do content marketing is blogging.

However, instead just blogging, there are several types of ways to create content, such as videos, podcasts, social media content or whatever media that have content. 

Back to the "why", since we know the definition of content marketing, one of the reason is to deliver relevant, valuable and consistent content to their audience. 

In fact, there are many reasons that make companies do so.

Advantages:

i. Uprank SEO ranking
According to Google algorithm, the more people stay on your page, the higher rank you will be; which in other words, Google will detect how long or how many your defined audience stay on your page and then to decide your SEO ranking.

ii. Having your own community
Having your own community means that you have your loyal audience which it will be easier for you to spread out the latest update of your company as the word-of-mouth starts to work here. 

iii. Create brand loyalty
By doing content marketing, you are most likely to engage with your audience. So, when it comes to creating brand loyalty, engagement plays an important role. 

With engagement, you are able to know what your audience really like and you will be able to target them directly and hit their pain point. Thus, brand loyalty will gradually be there. 

iv. Cost saving
While there are many companies using paid advertising to promote their product, you already have your content marketing as a backup. 

As we know, content marketing does not spend you a single cent (except if you need to buy props for your video content), you do not have to pay anything to promote your products, services or your company. This would help you save up lots of money for promotion. 

However, the number of your audience would restrict your exposure in terms of promoting to the outsider (people who are not in your defined audience list). At least, you've saved up part of the money spent on PPC ads. 

Disadvantages:

So we have got the advantages of the content marketing, let's see what have we got for the disadvantages. 

i. Time-consuming
Because content marketing is a long-term marketing, many marketers have given up on doing content marketing because of its time-consuming, as they think that content marketing would not show the result as soon as they want it to, which I will bring to the second point.

ii. Takes time to reach the audience
According to a research (source: FRACTL, 2016), it usually takes at least 6 months to see the result from on-site content marketing. 

Jones, who's the writer of FRACTL, added that there is no exact answer or formula to know the result, however, there is a benchmark that helps you set the realistic expectation towards the result of your content marketing.

Now we know the advantages and disadvantages of content marketing; so, by now, you should ask that long-content or short-content, which one is better for you?

Long-content vs Short-content
Here's the story. 

Content-marketing have existed since 2004. People could not really accept the content story.

In order to have readers go through all the content, after a couple of experiments, marketers found out that readers are more likely to finish all the short-content.

Therefore, before 2013, short-content is the best way to retain customers. 

However, Google realized that there were too many low-quality short-content bombarding the server, which might affect the quality of Google users experience, they intended to stop it.

In 2013, Google changed its algorithm in order to prevent low-quality content and change the way they define quality content.

How exactly Google define quality content?

Google does not actually release how exactly the algorithm works on quality content.

However, according to Sukhraj (source: impactbnd), in almost every case, when you ask Google a question, they would most likely to give you the answer that they believe it's high quality. Usually, the answer is in long-form, which the content is over 2000 words.

The reason is that Google believes that the longer the content is, the more informative the content will be. 

In some point, it does work that way because the longer the content, the more information the writer has to put into.

Buzzsumo (source: Buzzsumo) also agree with Sukhraj with a proven evidence saying that content that contains 2000 words and above earn a higher ROI. (see chart below)

We have been saying that long-content is better than short-content. But how good is long-content? 

The advantages of long-content

i. Higher shares
Humans are interesting, most of the time people would not finish the whole long content, however, according to the research above, people are more likely to share out your long-content. 

ii. Higher conversion/ROI
You might be wondering how does it have higher ROI when your audience did not finish your content? 

In fact, it is proven that the longer your content, the higher your conversion. 

Jamie, who wrote Behind the scene: A/B testing, did an experiment on content length, found out that compared to short-content, long-content surprisingly increase his sales by 37.5%. (source: signalnoise)

iii. Increase Search Engine Optimization ranking
As we know, Google cares about the quality of their users' experience. 

So if you have a content that they believe it's a quality content, which is relevant, long and informative, your post would be most likely appear first when someone searches for a certain line that is related to your post. 

Other than that, if your content is long enough, people tend to spend more time on your page or site, which will lead you to a higher ranking in terms of SEO.

Disadvantage

i. Time-consuming
Compared to short-content, you definitely need to spend more time on conducting a longer-content as there are loads of research have to be done before writing a long-form content. 

For short-content, it usually takes you 1 days or 2 maximum, however, for long-content, it may take you up to 4-5 days to complete one informative content.

ii. Most people won't read all
Above mentioned that long-content got higher shares, the reason behind is that most people won't read all the content, they share, however. 

Through sharing, they will be able to track back the content that they have not finished previously. 

Therefore, often times, they don't finish the content right away, but to finish them right after or probably forget that they have read your content before.

Conclusion
To conclude, although content marketing does take time to see results, undeniable, it is still a must to maximize your conversion. 

Nurture, foster and educate your community so that those people in your community list will become your loyal customer, not even that, they are your way to promote your products, services or company brand through word-of-mouth, which is pretty important for business.

Long content vs short content? In current stances, long-content wins it all. It is vital that to create a long yet quality and informative content in this (Google) era.

Last but not least, don't be upset if you have not seen your result from content marketing because every good thing behind is the waiting time. 

So, start planning for your content marketing strategy and I will see your success in the near future. 

Before I end this content, here's a tip.

i. Do not hard sell your products or services at the end of your content. You will just simply get none conversion.

As mentioned you need content marketing in order to do an effective Pay-Per-Click ad. 

Check out this link to create amazing ads: https://goo.gl/vxZdkv

To create epic content watch now: