There’s a lot that a digital marketing team has to do in order to gain the attraction of the audience, improve brand awareness, and build brand credibility online. From designing a cutting-edge yet user-friendly website to streamlining social media channels, they have to keep tabs on various digital tools, all at once.

Among many digital ways to generate business leads online, content marketing is surely taking a leap above everything else. However, many business owners, especially newbies, tend to ignore the importance of an end-to-end content marketing plan. Moreover, there’s also a significant learning gap that creates several misconceptions about content marketing objectives.

Content marketing is not just about writing blogs and articles for a business website. It’s a whole world of metrics, content types, analytics, KPIs, and SEO.

Among many types of content that go up on websites every day, long-form pieces are topping the list of best-performance tools. With Google’s ever-evolving algorithms and increasing content scrutiny along with changing online audience’s needs, content marketers need to adopt the long-form content practice in 2022.

This detailed post will teach you the why, what, and how of long-form content creation for business growth and success.

So let’s delve into the details right away!

A Statistical Overview of Long-Form Content

SEMRush is a leading online platform offering resources and statistical data on the performance of SEO, content, social media, and other digital marketing activities. According to one of its latest reports on content marketing, long-form content has proven to be the best, most-highly engaging content tool.

The report showcased the following statistics:

• Long-form content comprising at least 3,000 words gets two times more shares and pageviews from online readers.
• Longer content blogs and articles with detailed products and services descriptions can quadruple your website’s traffic and increase conversion rate.
• Shorter content pieces with 300 words or less are the least effective. They don’t add any significant value to a reader’s knowledge base and attract 21% less traffic.

How Did Long-Form Content Gain Popularity?

Not more than four to five years ago, the digital content marketing practices were limited to traditional press releases, blog posts, and articles. IBM was one of the first long-form content trend adopters in the digital world. It’s not only a go-to resource for businesses, but a pioneer of setting long-form content growth to the right track.

Soon enough, award-winning digital marketing professionals like Neil Patel started highlighting the impact of long-form content on a website’s traffic, conversion, bounce rate, and page clicks. Other digital marketing mediums like Craze Egg, Search Engine Journal, and KISS Metrics revealed that long-form content of more than 1,000 words can help business websites cross as much as 100K web visitors per month!

Another renowned digital marketing platform, HubSpot, published a study about the performance of different content forms. This research revealed that 70% of the digital marketers started working on long-form content marketing from the start of the pandemic.

With more people spending more time on the internet during the lockdowns, revamping the content practices helped small to medium-sized businesses increase their online popularity by 4x!

Writing Long-Form Content for Guaranteed Results—A Guide for Businesses

Now that you’re all caught up with the statistical performance and popularity of long-form content, we’re here with some expert tips. These will help modern businesses get accustomed to the latest content creation practices, especially when it comes to writing long posts.

Firstly, you need to understand the main purpose of writing a long-form blog post. A long-form content piece isn’t just about the product or service your company offers. It should strike a beautiful balance between precise statistics, new, unveiled information, and strong industry data support. Next, you need to keep the knowledge and literacy level of your target audience in mind.

For example, if you’re targeting housewives or stay-at-home moms to sell detergent products, you cannot expect them to understand the complexities of ingredients. However, you need to help them understand the unique features and benefits of your detergent.

On the flip side, if you sell engineering parts and tools for automobiles, your content will have to be more research-intensive and technical. It has to contain information that’s new and accurate for engineers and parts buyers.

Therefore, understanding your target audience is the first key step toward content marketing campaign success.

Things to Consider when Writing Long-Form Content

Long-form content allows a web visitor to spend more time on a website. This is a high-priority metric used by Google to determine whether or not a website should be ranked high on a SERP. And it’s just not about writing good content; long-form articles and blogs also need to be search engine optimized with high proficiency. When writing and publishing long-form posts, keep the following things in mind:

• Usage of accurate and relevant keywords in the right proportion (for every 200 words, use not more than one or two keywords).
• Long-tail keywords are better than short-tail counterparts.
• Comply with third-party websites if you’re publishing articles, guest posts, or press releases.
• Break down content in paragraphs and make it skim-able by using smaller sentences
• Form comprehensible paragraphs.
• Section off ideas and stick to a content plan.
• Try to be conversational as much as possible. You don’t want to have a long-form log that gives a textbook vibe.
• Don’t forget to add attractive, eye-catching, and relevant images to the content.

With this, we think you are ready to test out the long-form content marketing strategy for your business.

A&L Creative Marketing—Your One-Stop Platform for All Digital Marketing Needs

Having a reliable and expert content marketing team by your side can help you grow your business using foolproof strategies. With increasing competition in the market, running a business can be a major challenge. From keeping track of ever-changing Google algorithms to creating new content to please customers, a lot has to be done.

This is where A&L Creative Marketing steps in. We offer robust web design, SEO, business listings services and reputation management services CA among many others. Whether you’re looking for professional blog writers or SEO experts, contact us now!