I wanted to share with you today how one fantastic piece of long-form content can serve you well for a few different reasons and fill your content calendar in one sitting.
I am going to cover with you today;
- What long-form content is (and isn’t)
- How it helps you gain authority
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Full transcript (un-edited)
Emma Drake:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy that Works, with me, Emma Drake. For those of you who have listened to the podcast for a while will know this, but just in case you tuned in today, I’m an in-house communication strategy expert turned external advisor to businesses. And I’ve worked with many types of businesses, but I love to work with businesses that are funded to grow and have ambitious plans to be bigger companies one day. I’m making it my mission to help you break down some of these big topics about communicating your business and help you work out how to implement these into your business to create value, build trust, and save you time, money, and energy.
Emma Drake:
Hi everyone. How are y’all doing today? I hope you’re doing okay. Sorry about the pinging there if you could hear that. I wanted to share with you today how one fantastic piece of long-form content can serve you really, really well in your business, for a few different reasons. I’m going to cover with you today what long-form content is and how it can help you gain authority and create really quality content that lasts you a really long time. So let’s dive in.
Emma Drake:
First of all, I’m going to run through with you what long-form content is and what it isn’t, okay? I’m going to explain some of the differences. Long-form content is usually around 700 to 2000 words minimum, and it takes a topic in-depth and gives a perspective on it. Okay. So often taking the form of a report or sometimes called a white paper. Short-form content on the other hand, just to explain that, is more like 300 to 500 words, and it’s what people call snackables. We can get through it pretty quickly and quite easily and skim read the key points as well. And then micro content, if you wanted to take that a bit further, is things like tweets. Okay. So really, really short pieces of content. And if you look at that on a scale, long-form content will last you a really long time. It can last as long as the research lasts.
Emma Drake:
And tweets, I think I read some on the other day, I think I may have included this in a previous episode, but tweets can last about 18 minutes, I think is the current life cycle of one tweet. So just to give you an idea of the difference. So this type of content is it’s designed to provide value to your audience. It has, as I said, a really long lifespan as long as the research lasts, as long as it doesn’t go out of date. They’re more on that in the moment. So it needs to add real value and give something to your audience. And it’s contextual so it takes time to consume. People actually have to read it. You can’t skim read this sort of content. And usually, it could be downloaded from maybe your website, for example, sometimes also in exchange for an email address as well. So it’s gated content sometimes.
Emma Drake:
So how do you go about creating long-form content and how can it help you? Well, the first thing to think about is you need to have a goal and an audience in mind. This is really important with this type of content. So planning it takes time. You’ve got to research the topic, often undertaking interviews or reading other reports. I like to do a desktop analysis of the subject as well so that I’ve got a really good understanding of what’s already out there if I’m producing some of this for a client for example.
Emma Drake:
I actually worked with a copywriter on really long pieces of report writing or long-form content. And just to give you an idea, for a white paper of around about 3000 words with interviews, et cetera, she estimates about four to four and a half days of writing and interviews for example. It is a little bit of upfront investment and cost, in that sense, but obviously, you were going to reap the benefits of this in the long term. Also, it needs to appeal to your audience specifically. It’s not something that can be written for a really broad audience or for an audience with very different needs. So we need to think about how to establish the person in the center of the long-form content. So if that’s establishing you as the expert, what do your audience need to know and how can you provide it to them? It’s important to think about your business objectives here and not bite off more than you can handle. So I would suggest focusing on one or two things that you’re going to want to measure this against.
Emma Drake:
Needless to say, having a clear topic of focus is super important. Big topics like sustainability, or let’s take furniture restoration, are really broad topics. But to drill that down, if we said sustainability in wood-based furniture production for manufacturers of wood-based products, that’s super specific, right? Okay, the dog’s growling. I’m not going to turn off the microphone so hopefully it won’t get to bad.
Emma Drake:
The type of content we’re talking about here, often, because it’s so many words it will need diagrams and infographics to explain some parts of it. The production timeline can take a while so you would need to plan this in. It’s something that can be completed in like a week or a day like a blog. The topic is really important as you can imagine. It’s worth playing around with a few topic areas and really trying to get that right. And it needs to be niche enough to be specific, but broad enough that you can reach your word count. You’ve got enough to say, but without it turning into a novel. So it does need a bit of planning and thinking about.
Emma Drake:
In terms of researching and structuring a piece of content like this, I always like to start with the big questions, okay? What is your audience struggling with and how can we find the answers to that through this long-form content? So by researching the questions, we can start to build a picture of the answers and we can also add our own perspective on top of that, okay? So adding our own twist. Now, first-hand research is always going to be more media friendly. So when we get down the line and we want to launch this final piece of content, media are going to prefer first-hand content. It’s going to be more interesting generally if you talk to other people and do interviews as part of the research, making it very much grounded in data is ideal, and this should be our goal really.
Emma Drake:
Moving on to the big benefits of long-form content. The main one I said at the beginning is longevity. There’s a lot of investment upfront for this really in-depth authoritative piece of content, but it will last as long as you want it to last for. So written well and meeting all of the criteria I’ve gone through, it can last a lifetime literally until the research runs out or it needs updating. It’s also more shareable. It can outperform short-form content because it can be shared multiple times over and over again. There’s lots of ways you can do that.
Emma Drake:
I’ve created whole campaigns for clients around launching a white paper, having a speech written on it, so a topic for a talk. You could have a whole event on the topics or a round table to sort of pick apart the topic as well. Or you could do a round table as part of the feeding into the report, which is a really good idea to get those perspectives. You can feature on podcasts of the topics you cover. It’s really good for media content. So, taking the graphics out and some of the main headings and doing social media posts.
Emma Drake:
Also, if you’re going to launch it to the media, they like to have the graphics to run alongside it, so that’s really useful. And if there’s case studies in it, you can pluck those out and use them as thumbnails to go alongside any media, a good material or as to go alongside blogs. There’s so many different ways you can use the information contained within this one piece. I mean, even if you’re thinking of, “Well, I never do that much content anyway.” you do this one piece and you’ve got so many different blogs you could write just from doing that one piece with using the case studies or using the questions you prompted in the first place to hang some blogs around or a theme of a blog, series, or something like that. Your content calendar is going to fill up really super quickly if you invest the time in this one piece of long-form content. And one of the things I like to do as well is actually take the section headings into LinkedIn articles or shorter thought leadership pieces for publication.
Emma Drake:
I hope this has been a really good introduction. Just a quick overview, really, into long-form content and the benefits it can bring to your business. You’ve learned how investing once and reaping the rewards is a really good strategy, especially if you’re growing a team or have limited resources, and how it can bring you focus on purpose to concept planning that supports your business goals, as well as reaching your ideal audience with content that really, really helps them.
Emma Drake:
Don’t forget to head over to my Facebook page for more daily tips and advice. You can also connect with me on either Twitter or LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you next time.
Emma Drake:
Finally, thank you for listening to this episode of Communication Strategy that Works. Don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned. And I’d really love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave me a review. And also, if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please share this within your networks. I’ll just say bye for now and see you next time.