Key takeaways
- Short-form content is an essential format for most of the brands we surveyed.
- Your blog is a powerful asset for attracting organic search.
- Update your blog frequently with original, insightful content that your audience won’t find anywhere else.
- Align with your sales team and subject-matter experts within your organisation to ensure your short-form content is delivering useful, accurate information.
- Align with your brand team to ensure that blog content is consistent with your brand image.
9 out of 10 organisations rely on organic search as their most effective distribution channel. Nearly two-thirds (59%) say that their blog is the most valuable channel.
After all, in terms of search engine visibility: blog posts are over 5 times likelier than other web pages to be indexed pages and around twice as likely to be indexed links.And as a result, companies with blogs attract over two-thirds more links each month as those without.
What marketing experts say about short-form content
Among the experts we surveyed, 77% say short-form content is important or very important to them.This includes blogging, along with short news articles and social media posts.
“As content marketers, we always dream of that one magical piece of content that achieves all three things at once: content that attracts traffic, is super deep and generates a lot of leads in the process. But at HubSpot, we had to break away from this idea, because there is not one perfect content piece that can achieve all of these goals. We now focus on giving each content piece a task and finding a balance between traffic attainment, depth and lead generation”, says Jennifer Lapp, SEO Team Lead for the DACH market at HubSpot.
Some of the main reasons they gave for focusing on short-form content were:
- Direct ownership of your message.
- Showcasing your thought leadership and expertise.
- Full control of your brand image.
- The ability to compete for keyword rankings.
Best practices from industry leaders
“We keep content creation close to home, in order to make sure that our identity is spread in a way we find fitting. As perception is everything, we like to stay in the lead on that part when times are uncertain”, says Jelte van der Meulen, Team Lead Content at online marketing bureau Brandmerck.
Especially among the experts who are currently representing young brands, building a strong library of owned short-form content is seen as the best way to achieve these goals:“In an early stage of a product, the best way to go is to build your own content instead of relying on user-generated or influencer content”, says Munda Kamlesh, Marketing Manager at CloudFiles.
While only 6% of the experts say they plan on working with influencers in the near future, 45% say they will work with more external content creators (freelance talent) to produce the original branded content they need.
Want to learn more about the other best practises? Make sure to read the report we made with HubSpot.
