3 Best Practices for B2B Long-Form Marketing Content Success
As a B2B marketing manager, it’s hard enough keeping up with daily tasks, let alone planning out and writing long-form marketing content for your business, such as an e-book, guidebook, or white paper. But it’s one of the most important marketing tools at your disposal, so don’t overlook it!
What is long-form marketing? Generally, it’s considered a written piece of at least 2,000 words - far longer than the average blog post. Long-form pieces such as e-books, guidebooks and the like take a great deal of time and research to create, and therefore have a higher perceived value.
Marketing guru Neil Patel says that the value of long-form content marketing is that it simply can get you more of what you want. Here are just a few of those goals that long-form pieces can help you achieve:
Positioning your company or business as an authority in your industry
Improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results
Providing your clients or potential clients with an item of great perceived value
Content for social media engagement
What’s your goal?
So, what are the best practices for creating long-form content? If you’re going to invest the time and effort, you want it to be the best product possible. Before embarking on writing a long-form piece, decide exactly what your goals are. Is it lead generation? Raising awareness? Improving your website’s SEO? Positioning your company as an industry expert?
Depending on your goals, you can then decide if your long-form content will be gated or ungated. If, for example, your goal is lead generation and building your contact list, then you’ll want to keep the piece gated. If you want to increase the SEO for your website, then you’ll make your piece ungated and easily available to anyone on your website.
2. Choose the right topic and headline
It goes without saying that a headline must be eye-catching, engaging, and make your reader highly interested in the content that follows!
With attention spans averaging 8 seconds while reading online content, you’ve clearly got to have an enticing headline to grab your readers’ attention and hold it. Writing a compelling headline can be challenging, but here are some great tips to take some of the guesswork out of it for you.
While it does need to be catchy, it’s important that your headline authentically reflects the content in the piece. Otherwise, your readers will quickly disengage, or worse, get annoyed and scroll away with a negative impression of your company. Keep your piece authentic all the way through and you’ll be sure to avoid the clickbait trap.
So, your killer headline caught your prospective client’s eye. But the content has to hold them there and hopefully have them reading through to the end. Your content has to demonstrate that you truly understand your audience; you know their pain points, you recognize the topics that are of great concern or interest to them, and you have the solution and expertise to solve their problems. It’s as simple as that.
With long-form content marketing pieces, it’s also a good idea to incorporate top-notch graphic elements such as visually pleasing design, clean and professional fonts, and infographics. You’ve got to make your content visually appealing and engaging.
Have a lot of data to share? When it comes to presenting data, infographics can make or break whether or not your reader understands and retains the content you are presenting.
A clear and concise call to action (CTA) is also essential to quality content. You have to make it clear beyond a doubt what next steps you wish your readers to take. Schedule a personalized consult? Call for more details? Book your services? Make sure the CTA is obvious, along with multiple ways for the reader to contact you: email, phone, etc.
3. Make sure your audience knows where to find your content
This last part may seem obvious, but it’s critical to the success of your long-form marketing content: get it out there! A beautifully written and designed ebook won’t benefit anyone if it doesn’t reach its intended audience. Your promotion strategy is everything.
If you’re keeping the content ungated, get it posted on your website. If it’s gated, create a landing page that builds the interest in the piece and requires submitting an email address to access the content.
Engaging social media posts, building interest through email marketing and even contests can also be a great way to get your long-form marketing content some great exposure.
While writing a guidebook or e-book requires a greater time investment than most marketing strategies, long-form content is unquestionably a great asset for your marketing plan.
Looking for expert writers to write your long-form marketing content? Our team at Comma can help. Schedule a free consultation with the Comma Copywriters team to get started.