Did you know there are there are 21 million tweets per hour on Twitter, over 1 million videos played on Vine every minute and over 100 million likes every minute on Insta! With this information explosion, one might wonder whether it makes sense for content creators to still explore long format content?

Having a clear understanding of your customers is key while developing and delivering content to them. Consumers now prefer informative and exciting content that can entertain and nudge them to read more. So in such a complex world, how can B2B marketers stay ahead of the game?

Why B2Bs Need to Have Long-Form Content? 

Let the numbers do the talking. According to a recent research by Hubspot, articles with a word count between 2250 and 2500 receive most organic traffic. According to Curata, Long-form blog posts generate nine times more leads than short-form blog posts. According to Orbit media, Blog content is getting longer and more visual. The average blog post is up about 19%, coming in at about 1,050 words in length. Another study by SERPIQ showed that the length of content of the page had a direct correlation to the placement of search results. All this clearly shows that Google prefers content-rich sites and long form over short form content.

Benefits of Playing it Long

As B2B content marketers, one can experiment with the information and data they have through trackers to gain some interesting insights and create content accordingly. Leveraging tools like Google Analytics does help in this regard to a large extent. Well written content that includes key industry insights by industry experts can contribute towards establishing your brand as a thought leader in a particular industry or domain. Long format content gives you more authentic opportunities to link back to other content you have created and drive more traffic to your digital assets. All of this together can contribute create an enriching brand experience and brand awareness that at the end of the day is an important end-goal for every B2B marketer. 

Few Points to Note

· There is usually no set standard when it comes to word count limits. Average word count for long form content in the past could be anything around 2000-3000 words. 

· Long form content takes the shape of articles on websites, blogs. Complement your long form content with useful infographics, videos, graphs to make it more interesting & engaging. 

· Investing time and efforts to identify the kind of topics that your target audience is most likely to click on and consume can help marketers breakdown their content strategy and marketing plans to ensure they are closely aligned to the audience requirements

· It is important for every marketer to understand their customers’ buying journey clearly & develop their content marketing plan accordingly.

 Working with an expert content marketing agency can help create high quality thought leadership content and thereby generate better ROI for your content marketing efforts.