Show Notes:
Which converts the BEST when marketing your business: long-form or short-form content?
Option A: One form allows you to produce a well-researched, in-depth content that creates confidence in your audience with the kind of knowledge you share with them, making you look and sound more credible.
Option B: This allows you to gap the short attention span your audience might have by only revealing the tiny, juicy, and digestible information in your content.
So, which one is best to use in your marketing?
❌❌❌
Correct answer: NONE OF THE ABOVE.
There is no ONE exact way to get your audience attracted, engaged, and converting into sales 💰💰💰
Both forms have their strengths and you can lean in on those strengths when you use them both at the right time, the right moment, with the right audience, and the right strategy.
The secret to success in engaging your audience is not with the form but in knowing when to use the short form or the long form.
Still unsure about your content? 🤔
🎧 Listen to the new episode of Marketing on Tap and let’s put an end to this long-form vs short-form debate.
Key Takeaways:
Long-form vs short-form content: What works best for you?
✅ Long-form
📌 Allows you to explore topics in greater detail
📌 Provides audience more knowledge
📌 Demonstrates your expertise and authority
📌 Works well with SEO search engines
✅ Short-form
📌 Short, bite-size content appeals broader audience who have short attention span
📌 Information is easier to digest
📌 Might result to higher engagement
📌 Enables you to create and publish more content more frequently
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Get the Transcript here:
Long-Form vs Short-Form Content
Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies.
Jessica Walman: Hey. Hey guys. Welcome back to the Marketing On Tap podcast with your host Jessica Wallman, myself and you guys. It’s getting hot. Here I am in Arizona. Summer is approaching and. We’ve already had a hundred degree days. Yes. 100 degree days. And it’s hot. It is hot. I’m in my office. We’ve got AC blowing, but the sun sets, where my window is and it just gets super hot in here.
So I’m like putting shorts on. Closing my blinds fan on. Trying to cool down with a nice cold brew coffee, to cool myself. so if any of you guys are in hot weather, like you, Florida people or Floridians, I’m not sure if that’s a thing. y’all feel me? You guys feel me? Except for, thankfully I don’t have the humidity like a lot of you guys do.
We have the dry heat here and I love it. Love, love, love the dry heat. I am just used to it, I guess. And now humidity. To me, it’s just gross. It is just nasty. It might be good for your skin, I guess, but I don’t like it anyways. now that I’m sweating over here, I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about a debate, a topic, and this will be a probably a relatively shorter episode.
But there’s been a debate that I’ve been hearing from several, of my friends in the entrepreneurial space. and it’s really the, debate of short form versus long form content. Soand which is better. I’ve heard some people just bash short form content saying that.
it just doesn’t do the job right. It’sI’ve heard ’em bash that. I’ve heard people bash a long form content and saying that’s not necessary to go that in depth, et cetera. So I kinda wanted to dive into them. now the difference for me that I would say between short form and long form content, is, it’s either written or video.
That’s why I’m saying content, not necessarily copy. short form content in meaning, let’s say you’re doing a blog post versus a short post, on Facebook, you’re doing a long, 30 minute or, hour long YouTube video versus a, you 62nd, 92nd, two minute, video or reel.
it’s really short. So that’s kinda the difference between short form and long form. And some of us really thrive in that long form content and some of us don’t. And some of us love that short form. Really snacky, like short piece of content, golden nuggets you can give out. and don’t really like going into long form content.
And I get both sides. I’ve been on both sides of those. but I wanna talk about which is better and really ultimately what you should be thinking about for your own business and how to market your business and what’s going to attract your right ideal client. So what’s interesting though is you can actually find a lot of research out there showing the importance of both, right?
I saw a recent, SEJ article, and it revealed that short formm content can be better than long form content depending on the goal. Then I saw another S EJ article that said long form content was better than short form content. So listen,how that can that be? How can the same site say
two completely different things, right? Really, it comes down when you’re thinking about creating your content. It comes down to the purpose and the user intent. You see, long form content and short form content are just tools that us marketers use in our business. So neither tool is necessarily better than the other, but when they’re used and how they are used is key.
So I want to dive into, what that looks like. Let’s give a scenario to help make this more visual in your head. Okay, so let’s meet Tammy. All right, so Tammy’s made objective here is to attract as many of her ideal clients as possible through her content. So she decides to focus on like short form content.
She has a couple of things she does. These really short bite size, articles, maybe like 500 words or less. and she also does these really short form videos that are like anywhere from a minute to two minute. Now, these are providing quick, informative content to her readers, right? Covering whatever topics she covers.
Sarah notices that her short form content allows her to publish more frequently, right? Capturing maybe the attention of a broader audience cuz they’re short, right? So her audience might appreciate that. Really short, easy to digest content, resulting in.
higher engagement, more shares, et cetera, and she sees that they perform better. Fantastic. Then you got, let’s say Matt, on the other hand, who believes in the power of long form content, all right? Whether that’s, he has hour long YouTube videos. He writes 2000 word articles, and really he notices for his audience that long form content allows him to.
Really explore topics in greater detail, which you can do when they’re long form content, right? Providing his readers with way more knowledge. obviously, SEO search engines really favor that. and long form content in general can demonstrate, your expertise and authority on a subject more, right, because you’re able to go more in depth.
okay, if you were to compare the benefits and challenges of both of these two examples and the challenges or that they encounter in their content, the first one, she is creating short form content. And while it might attract a bigger audience cuz it’s easily digestible, the one issue could be the lack of depth, the lack of comprehensive information, because again, it’s just kind of golden nuggets, right?
Whereas on the other hand, Matt’s content, these long form articles and these hour-long YouTube videos, while very in depth can also be intimidating and really time consuming, considering nowadays people just don’t have time for this stuff, right? So if somebody wants a quick answer, he’s not able to provide that.
So the question becomes which is better: short or a long form? And here’s how I’m gonna answer that. It’s really using a mixed strategy of both, combining both short and long form content. So you can cater to a broader range of your ideal client, because your ideal client, you can put them in a bucket all you want, but you’re still gonna have those that like the shorter content and those who like the longer content, right?
So for example, If I look at our agency clients and the content that we push out in ads, we have what we call audience building and nurture ads. And what we do in these ads with their content is we have a mix of both. So audience building for us is top of funnel. Brand new cold audience. We’re trying to build an audience and we normally do this strictly through video.
you do it through a blog post? Sure. It’s just not super ideal. We really try to do this through video, and these are shorter content videos, usually a couple of minutes long. These people don’t know you yet, so you really don’t wanna put anything out too much longer than that because they’re just not gonna listen through it.
Right. And your goal is to. Get their attention and keep their attention and you want them to say, wow, I’d like this information. I’d like this golden nugget. I’d like to learn more about this person’s approach, and what they have to offer. So this is where you kind of use that short, form content.
From there, all of our clients are, if they don’t, we recommend that they have a way to also create long form content. So whether that is having a podcast episode, a YouTube channel, a blog that you like to write, whatever that long form content is. Being able to have a source and just one. You don’t need to have.
I know so many people are trying to do all the things and they want to have all the different channels and all the different ways to create content. And really, you don’t need that, especially if you’re not hitting a certain thing. You if you’re probably not hitting 500,000, a year, or even a million a year, then you really need to be focusing on one and that, the one that works for you.
If podcast works for you, great. If YouTube works for you, great. If long form blog post works for you, great. Pick it and just move forward with that one thing. And so a lot of our clients will have one. And that is what they are doing weekly or sometimes twice a week. And we utilize
that in our ads, and we push that into the ads, you know, a dollar, $2 a day on that content piece to their existing warm audience. Because now that the audience knows them, we built that audience through audience building. They can have existing warm audience from people who visited their website organically or who found them on social media.
So then in these nurture ads, we are targeting all of those people, all of their warm audience and we target them to both short and long form because again, we wanna make sure that there’s options available for everybody in their audience. we’ll link them over to the podcast episode so they can go listen to that.
We’ll link them over to the blog post so they can read that. We’ll link them over to their YouTube channel, or we’ll actually put the YouTube video in there. It teaches you not as great, but we’ll do either or. The point is we’re pushing them to long form content, but we also have our clients create short form content as well.
So whether that’s a really juicy. short form post. a lot of our clients, we prefer video because video is so powerful. So they’ll do, 1, 2, 3 minute short videos. they can create four and that’s it for the month that’s one a week, plus their long form content, it’s technically two pieces of content a week that they have.
That’s fantastic. And they, we can just push that out to their audience. So you guys having both. Is super important, but understanding that how to use them and when to use them, is important. So, I think it’s also important to understand what your audience is looking for. So if they’re looking for like a really quick, simple howto, then you know what?
That’s a kind of, short form content piece that you create. Here’s a really quick howto. My five step did this. If you wanna create that, and you really think this is something that people search for, this is something that people are looking for, I wanna create a content piece on that. if you wanna talk about your method for this really juicy topic, and you want to go in depth, That might be better than, oh, here’s my five tips for this.
When, you know people are gonna want more details about that, right? This is something they’re searching for, and they’re looking for meaty content. So really understanding like, what kind of content am I gonna create? How powerful can I make it? can I create a short, really juicy, quick two minute video?
Or does it need to be a long podcast episode? Like for this one, this will be a little bit shorter. I’m gonna end it here in just a minute. It’s gonna be a shorter podcast episode. I possibly could have made this into a short form two minute video, for sure. Wouldn’t have been able to go into his depth, right.
like I did a podcast episode last week on the four levers of conversion. I could have just created a really quick video, two minutes long. Hey guys, here’s my four levers of conversion. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Been really quick. And that could been really juicy.
But then I also probably, create another one that’s a little bit longer like my podcast episode to give more depth so that I’m really being attentive to what my audience wants and needs. And not everyone wants to listen to this long podcast episode. Some do, some don’t and some are really cool with that.
It was a really cool two minute video. Jessica did those four lovers sound awesome. I’d love to learn more from her and that’s all they need. So really understanding that behind, you the reason why when you’re creating the content. it guys. Like there is no right or wrong, and I’ve heard this debate I feel like for the last few weeks now.
I’ve seen some podcast episodes where they’re like, this is the way, and I just wanted to put it out there and say, there is not one way. They both have their place and you just have to know when and how to use it and intermingle both. If you’re just doing one, you are missing out on the other type of your audience that doesn’t want that, who doesn’t want long form or who wants more in depth.
So please look at the kind of content you’re putting in now. See how you can mix both long and short form content into your strategy. And hopefully this was helpful you guys and I will see you guys in the next episode. Bye.