There’s a general admonition for content marketers that some take as the gospel truth, the law: readers like short, simple articles.
It’s probably true. Except when readers are prospects, people who want to buy something big and complex and expensive. Or something inexpensive, but important to them.
Then they want more information, in-depth, detailed, long pieces that can give them all of the things that they want to know without forcing them to synthesize it from a thousand little bits.
People who are trying to make up their minds want information. Deep, revealing information. Can you do that to their satisfaction in 100 words?
When they say, “tell me more,” do you?
I just finished a piece for a client, 2,500 words, and I barely scratched the surface of the topic, but far longer than most content marketing gurus would recommend. My client can use dozens of small and short articles to point to this single, longer piece. If they ask, I could write an entire in-depth book on the subject. That would give them even more things to break apart and direct readers to. And from my experience, prospects would love it.
Long form is difficult. It’s expensive. And it’s what your readers are often looking for.
Don’t disappoint them. Give the people what they want. All of what they want.
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Randy MurrayContent Marketing: Short Is Best Except When Long Form Is Better by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
