For an introduction to a new topic, blog posts are wonderful. Concise and skimmable, they provide your audience with the information they’re looking for at a high level. But for topics that require an abundance of context, a deep dive into data, or plenty of space to construct an argument, there’s nothing quite like long-form content. Ebooks, white papers, and reports are the perfect avenue for this, and all generate tremendous value for your business.
Over the years, we’ve produced countless pieces of long-form writing at MarketSmiths. While ebooks are the most common, we’ve tackled everything from long, data-heavy reports to beautifully designed sales brochures. We’ve learned a few things along the way, too, to make sure every message shines. Here are the common challenges we’ve witnessed while producing long-form content, as well as our pointers for success.
Why create long-form content?
Between social media and blog posts and newsletters, you might feel like you’re already putting sufficient content out into the world. Why spend the many hours required to make a polished piece of long-form content? Longer pieces confer quite a few benefits to your audience and your business. Use long-form content to:
- Prove your expertise. An insightful piece of writing can go a long way in positioning your business or your executives as leaders in the field. While this is great for brand recognition among consumers, it’s also important for building trust in a B2B environment. Say you provide a product or service to an industry that regularly faces regulatory challenges like healthcare, finance, or pharmaceuticals. Before partnering with anyone, companies in those industries need to do ample due diligence to ensure the vendor is knowledgeable and trustworthy. Demonstrating your track record through content is a great way to win them over.
- Boost SEO. Google rewards high-quality, authoritative content. While longer doesn’t always mean better, if you can keep the quality high on your long-form pieces, you can climb your way up the SERP ladder on your topic of expertise, earning more website traffic. They can also keep readers on your website for longer, improving bounce rates.
- Increase customer loyalty. If you create an exceptionally thoughtful piece of content, customers are going to remember you. For instance, a cookware brand might produce a recipe book filled with mouth-watering recipes that prospects can download for free. When it comes time to buy new knives or baking sheets, they’ll know where to turn. Long-form content can have an excellent return on investment for this very reason.
- Close a deal. Prices, features, specs—a long-form asset is one of the best places to communicate essential details about your products or services. Ebooks provide you more space to make a comprehensive case for why a prospect should buy your product, or offer all the details necessary to make a purchase in one place.
Long-form content can bring tremendous value to your business, allowing you to dive deep into important industry topics, meaningfully explore problems your audience cares about, and position your business as a leader in the field.
Barriers to successful long-form content
To reap the benefits of long-form content, you may need to put some thought into your approach. Experience has shown us that there are a few potentials for delay and error when creating long form content.
- Readability: The best long-form content engages and educates, making the pages pass by breezily. The worst long-form content is dense and dry, sending readers running within the first 50 words. Ensuring your content is instructive but still accessible to your audience is essential. Aim to be concise and choose simpler words and phrases over more complex ones.
- Stakeholder management: If your content is based on input from subject matter experts or other personnel inside (or partnering with) your organization, stakeholder management is a critical consideration that can make or break your project timeline. Spend some time getting everyone on the same page before you start writing.
- Budget: Writing long-form content takes time and, as we all know, time is money. Set yourself up for success by making the process as efficient as possible, and taking steps to mitigate common pitfalls in the writing, editing, and approval process.
4 steps for getting it right
Now that it’s time to put pen to paper, here are our tips for quick and effective content generation.
- Consider your goals and strategy. While you may have a topic idea in mind already, take a moment to make sure it aligns with your goals. Is this something your audience has asked for, or has indicated an interest in? Will this material help your team sell something? Does this topic have legs beyond one blog post—like a webinar, social media campaign, or blog series? Think about how this fits into your broader strategy and whether you can repurpose it to get more mileage and value.
- Start with an alignment call. To get the level of depth necessary for a winning ebook, you’ll likely need to gather some input from non-marketers in your organization. Whether you’re talking to your sales, legal, or product team, it’s best to schedule a call with everyone who needs to weigh in so you can align before you start writing.
- Collect research and data. Get everything you need before you start writing. Ask stakeholders if there are any stats, quotes, graphics, or points they would like to include in the finished piece early on in the process. Reworking your draft—or worse, a piece in design—to incorporate new pieces of information can be time consuming and compromise the overall quality of the content.
- Create an outline. In addition to making the writing process easier for the first draft, an outline is a simple way to get stakeholder feedback before you invest hours in writing a draft. Send your outline to anyone who will need to approve the final draft and get their input in advance to avoid a major change in direction after the first draft and save time and money.
With an outline in hand, now you’re ready to get writing. Or, if you need support from a team who’s been there before, contact MarketSmiths for your next piece of long-form content.
