Long-form content is a vital part of most content marketing strategies. Much of the advice out there for content writing focuses on shorter, easy to digest content like blog posts that quickly capture the audience’s attention and get a message across in a matter of seconds. But longer content pieces, like eBooks and white papers, are beneficial for SEO and can lead to more qualified leads and conversions.
Custom writing services offer you unique, exclusive content that drives your brand’s content marketing strategy in the direction you envision. While most marketers use long-form content to attract leads or reach out to clients, other organizations use it in-house or for communication with another business.
What to Look for in Custom Writing Services
Not every content writer has the skills it takes to produce long-form content that holds a reader’s interest. Longer pieces require more time and effort, and tend to be more thoroughly researched. One option is to combine several past blog posts that contain useful information and turn them into a comprehensive article. Another is to work with a custom writing services provider.
Whichever approach you choose, here are 4 great tips to help you produce effective long-form content.
1. Know Your Goal
What purpose will your long-form content serve? Are you looking to generate more leads? Increase sales? Build brand awareness? A combination of all three? Before you start creating the content, make sure that whatever your reason, it warrants a long-form piece in the first place.
2. Choose Your Topic
What is it about your product or service that is worth writing up to 4,000 or more words on? A good place to start is by studying your buyer personas to learn what your audience is most interested in. Other sources of topic ideas include keyword research, data you’ve compiled, and the competition’s websites.
3. Create Your Outline
Long-form content creation goes much more smoothly if carefully planned before writing starts. By its nature, long-form content covers a lot of information and an outline helps you organize your thoughts and determine how you want the piece to flow. A great trick is to break the content down into sections that are treated as individual short-form blog posts. Choosing your sub headers in advance can also help in creating the content you need.
4. Boost Your Visual Appeal
There’s no denying it’s a challenge to get people to read long-form content. Make it easier for them by focusing on your content’s visual appeal. Even encyclopedias use images! Audience-centric content uses short and concise sentences, two-to-four sentence paragraphs, attention-grabbing headers and sub headers that make for easy scanning, bullets, and embedded video.
Visuals have the added benefit of increasing your website’s search rank, too. In fact, top ranking pages have an average of nine images.
The Bottom Line
Short-form content will continue to rule the content marketing world, but if you’re neglecting long-form in your content marketing strategy, you’re doing your brand a serious injustice. In addition to better SEO, long-form content has also been proven to encourage more shares. It should be a vital ingredient in any brand’s content marketing mix.
Using a custom writing services provider is a simple, convenient, and reliable way to find the writers you need to create compelling long-form content. You get high-quality content you can publish on a regular basis, work with one or more dedicated writers who understand your brand inside and out, and increase customer engagement. And it can often be the difference between success and failure in your digital content campaigns.
