Undeniably, there’s a pile of free information about internet or content marketing myths floating on the web. Although, there’s no scarcity of ‘free’ marketing tips from self-proclaimed marketing ‘gurus’, many people fail terribly to successfully running their content marketing bandwagon.
Following is the data that digital marketers have put forth, and it’s a great way to consume the industry insights for better business operations;
Table of Contents:
Step 1 :- Syndication
Step 2 :- Time
Step 3 :- Expense
Step 4 :- Readership
Step 5 :- Longer content doesn’t always mean; it’s good
Step 6 :- Conclusion
DATA IS IMPORTANT
It’s also found that; there’s no shortage of people, even qualified marketers, who only come to a conclusion by seeing the data. Getting data is very useful, but it is much more important to plan a perfect strategy that can pave the way for the company to really know what was missing or what was working.
When we are talking about content marketing, the most common mistake in the marketplace is to write a long piece of content to drive quality traffic and thus increase CRO. However, we’ll be thinking about how many popular blogs and bloggers have evolved by doing the opposite of overwhelming subscribers.
Syndication
Often short articles will improve the most credibility and readability than long articles of over 5000 words that behave like a Bible. And really, who does have time for these long articles?
James Clear, the owner of jamesclear.com, has embraced this approach and has greatly increased his blog traffic by writing short articles (less than 1 K words) and reaching 200 K blog subscribers. He syndicated well with Business Insider and the results were overwhelming with an increase in social shares by 69% via 59 articles.
There are plenty of studies that have been conducted and voted in support of long-form content, but the consequences of syndication are not considered.
Syndication can outperform long-form content in short articles and takes less time to produce them. And, the outcome? Share, traffic and views increase etc.
Time
Time is a crucial factor, which most studies fail to account for. Simply put, you are creating a couple of short articles in time that you consume in creating a lengthy one. Hence, it would be unfair if you count the shares of a short article against long-form content.
Every time, you create content, your loyal readers will bump back to the website to read, and your content will send you more traffic when it will get shared on various social media channels.
Undeniably, writing can be a hectic and daunting process. Writing a long-form content can eat up your huge amount of time because you want to write the topic in-depth and well researched if you are churning out 5K words.
Moreover, you will like to spend an extra amount of time in marketing the content that you have spent a whole lot of time in creating.
Monthly Blog Posts Indexed Traffic
0-2 100
5-10 140
16+ 350
According to an elite social news platform, Buzzsumo, long-form content gets more shares. The average shares were 8859 for long-form content, word count ranging between 3,000-10,000 words. On the other hand, short articles got half number (4615 shares) of shares opposite to long-form content.
When you write two or three short articles against one long content; you increase your chances of getting more shares and offering more content on different topics. It’s just a matter of fact; how you are using your content marketing skills to gain more reach and views.
Expense
Blogging isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and as we discussed earlier, it takes time to pursue new concepts and compose thought-proving content that can attract popularity and drive traffic to the website. Many companies can’t afford long content because it’s very costly in nature. Creating a long-form content takes weeks, and sometimes longer, if you find its update and then it’s marketing.
Copywriters come with a price-tag. More the value, the more the price for writing a piece of content. According to Payscale, even an average copywriter in the US costs an average of $60k per year and experienced costs way more.
This basically means that a long-form material is going to cost you thousands of dollars, and many businesses don’t have the resources to shelve that kind of money. In fact, the customers will rely on you to keep the service running. Consequently, the cost of creating content will become continuous and you will end up giving a large part to a copywriter who is really wondering about your business.
When you run a business then you need to make a budget to invest in advertising as it will eventually reap the most lucrative benefits for you. You need to see how you use the tool for full efficiency, though.
Readership
Neilson Norman conducted a survey to understand the readership response for short and long-form content. He concluded; people love reading short content and want to gain insights without spending much time reading long-form ones.
Since search engine regards long-form content as best for traffic and ranking, marketers need to create short-form content time-to-time to engage every kind of reader in their post and don’t let slip of any of those that might be their future customer.
On the other hand, Demand Gen Group conducted its study in which 95% B2B buyers preferred short time content at any time of the day.
Let’s see on the other side of the problem. According to Psychology.com, average readers read only 60% of the article and bounce to other websites or consume other content. Maybe, the attention span plays a huge factor because the internet world is dynamic and it’s very hard to grab the attention of a visitor, or a reader.
Nonetheless, 55% of readers bound back within 15 seconds from the website. The bottom line is; people are very busy and especially on the web when there are a lot of options available, the attention slices down to nothing. Hence, the short content is a great tool for the main readership and even increase it.
Longer content doesn’t always mean; it’s good
When you’re talking about making long content then you’ve got to make really good content. Not all long content is good, if it’s not good, then chances are slim of its critical success which is desperately needed by your company.
There are several bloggers who created original content but still struggle to get a Google ranking number one for their targeted keyword. One of the factors that determine is that there is a lot of content in a particular niche already floating on the web, and it certainly gets hard to get the ranking.
Conclusion
It’s an ongoing debate that who is superior to other. However, we have listed down some notable points for you to consider and decide which type of content you want to create.
While long content has room for long-tail keywords and is better to market; short content has its own advantages and it shouldn’t be ignored by any serious marketer.