"Long-form content may seem cumbersome in a soundbyte world. But that's actually its strength..."
Choosing the right format of content for your online marketing campaign is not a decision to be taken lightly. You're making an investment that may not just fail to benefit you, but which actually might, if you're not careful, benefit other people.
There is, however, one format of content that's pretty safe for everyone: long-form text. And in this post I'm going to explain why. It's true that media content can be phenomenally effective in building a brand, but it has two main disadvantages compared with the good old blog article…
What do I mean by that?…
SEO POTENTIAL
Long-form, written content is the cornerstone of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Despite the aggressive advance of artificial intelligence, the machines that assess what people want to see when they enter a search term into a search engine, can still only reliably respond to a query through the written word. The more written words there are on a Web page, the better a search engine can assess that page's relevance to a searched phrase or question.
So photos, infographics, and even video, need to be accompanied by text in order to reach out to the Web-searching masses in the way a blog article does. And even when they're accompanied by text, media posts struggle to respond to so-called long-tail search queries. Long-tail queries are the more specific phrases that include a higher number of words.
For example, "weed killer" is a short-tail search query. "How to kill weeds without harming roses" is a long-tail search query. You can budget for these long-tail queries by lengthening your video or photo page titles, but the problem is that you can only catch one long-tail query with a title. Long-form text might catch upwards of fifty long-tail queries if it's really well written. And with backlinks like for like, that potentially means a lot more visitors hitting your site from the search engines.
DILUTION OF SOURCE
But the greater danger with investing in media content, is dilution of source.
Long-form, written content is the one format that can't conveniently be exported to social media or other domains as a self-contained work. If you invest in a photo, or an infographic, or a video, any member of the public can take that content from your domain and post it on a social network. And when that happens, it's likely that the entire perceived value of the work will be exported with it. In other words, viewers of the content will probably perceive no reason to visit your domain. So a site over which you have no control becomes a source of your content.
I call this process dilution of source. Instead of the source of the content remaining as a single, identifiable point on the Internet - i.e. your brand domain - it steadily dilutes so that people seeking that content are less and less likely to end up visiting you. The process is self-exacerbating, and difficult to stop. Once your infographic gets onto, say, Facebook, someone may post it on Twitter, and someone else may post it on Pinterest… And then maybe Tumblr. And as each of these platforms becomes a new source, anyone passing on the content is likely to attribute them - the platforms, rather than you - the brand.
That's a good photo! I'm looking for more stuff like that!
You should go to Twitter. That's where I found it.
In the end, unless you work exceptionally hard to get unauthorised re-posts removed, the media just becomes "Property of the Internet". Everyone loses sight of the true source, and the perceived source becomes the huge platform on which any given individual found it.
This includes Google Search. That's right, a lot of people - including some publishers - consider Google Images to be the actual source of the images they find there. I remember, some years back, challenging a publisher who was posting a lot of my images on social media. His response was that he wasn't getting the pictures from my site, he was getting them from Google - so in his eyes it was none of my business what he did with them.
That epitomises dilution of source. You invest in the content; another, bigger domain ends up serving not only as its main gatekeeper, but sometimes, in terms of perception, also its owner. As regards redistribution, the law is on your side. But time is not, and educating people who don't understand copyright or how a search engine works can take a long time.
Okay, so you accept that people are probably going to re-post your media without asking, and some will stare blankly into the digital ether when challenged. But you can put your company brand on an infographic, right? And then everyone will know it's yours, and they'll visit your site?…
Unfortunately, this doesn't solve the problem, which is not the recognition of source on the content itself, but the completeness of the export.
Whether or not people take any notice of your brand on the infographic (and most won't), they still have something they see as the complete work. The content is self-contained, so even if it's clear to them that you produced it, they still see no reason to visit your site. They already have what they want.
It can be different when you yourself are posting an image on social media. As the marketer, you're likely to add a link, and some motivation for viewers to follow that link to your site. You're using the image to catch the eye, and then using the attention the image attracts to communicate an impetus.
But random third parties don't care whether or not your site gets any visits. All they want is the applause for sharing a useful item. Even if they take the trouble to link to you, they won't take the trouble to motivate anyone to hit that link. And without motivation, people who think they already have the entire work in front of them, are not going to hit a link.
Video is a little different in that you can more easily build in your own motivations, mention your products or services, and extend a sense of your brand to the viewer. A viral video can be extremely productive if it's well planned and executed. But you still have to budget for the fact that your domain can be bypassed by the content itself.
So if you're a gardening company who's made, for example, a video on how to clear weeds from a path, people finding that video on social media will gain the information without visiting your site. And if they're not on your site with a "Buy Now" button in front of them, are they going to make the effort to find you, or just hit their Amazon bookmark and get the weed killer from there?
What long-form, written content does is package the value you're offering so that the bulk of it will almost inevitably remain on your domain, where it's easiest for you to directly sell.
When people gain value from a long-form article, they won't try to post the whole piece on social media. They'll quote their favourite line, and then link to you. That's the protocol, and that's the difference.
True, sometimes people will post the whole of your article on a forum, and scraper sites may scrape it. But a copyright violation on a forum is usually a lot easier to manage than a social media export spreading with an unknown pattern of redistribution. And Google has got to grips with scraper sites - fairly reliably recognising them and awarding them such low search priority that they're barely visible. And you can minimise the chances of your whole articles being scraped, by truncating your RSS feed.
So dilution of source can happen with long-form articles. But compared with highly attractive, uploadable media or one-line quotes, the danger is minimal. Long-form content may seem cumbersome in a soundbyte world. But that's its strength. It's too cumbersome for the Soundbyte City to import. And that keeps you at the centre of your own distribution mechanism.