Longform: What is long-form journalism and how does it work?

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In our post, you will find plenty of information about longform content, its concept, reasons behind its use to obtain a better position in organic results, and a complete guide to creating top-quality articles. Learn more about this topic with Rock Content!

Melina Pereda

Jan 13, 22 | 8 min read
longform
Reading time: 6 minutes
For a long time, very short, highly objective posts have dominated corporate blogs, botim database however, this landscape has changed and today we need to pay attention to long-form journalism: longform content.

Given the importance of longform publications for the good performance of the Content Marketing strategy , we decided to create a publication focused on the essence of the concept, as well as its main objectives and benefits.

In addition to this information, in the last paragraph we provide you with a detailed guide on the most efficient measures to create top-quality long-form content.

Are you excited to learn more about this topic?

So, don't stop!

Longform journalism: Understand the concept
Reasons why we should invest in this type of content
The perfect guide to creating the best long-form content
Longform journalism: Understand the concept
Digital transformation has impacted the dynamics of many professions, including journalism .

Following the emergence of digital channels such as social networks, blogs and websites , journalists and communicators have had to modify the way they approach and convey their message to their audience.

Until recently, to improve their position in organic search engine results, companies needed to feed their blogs with concise, objective content with a limited number of words, following Jakob Nielsen's inverted pyramid model.

Nowadays, we see that the effectiveness of short content is not a rule, so it depends largely on the correct structuring of a brand's digital strategy, even mixing other types of publications such as long-form content. But, at the end of the day, what does it consist of?

We define long-form content as posts that are data-driven and constructed to address topics in depth and comprehensively.

In terms of language, these contents include longer texts and detailed subtopics, as well as multimedia resources such as photographs, videos, audios and infographics.

In fact, the relevance of longform content debunks the idea that only the most objective content has a place in organic searches.

This is because there is demand for this type of content . However, in addition to being guided by organic traffic derived from existing audiences, it is essential for companies to feed their target audience with content that stimulates and increases the consumption of long-form content.

For example, you can create short blog posts with enough information to make the user curious and interested about a certain topic and, therefore, want to delve deeper and learn more details.

You can also encourage the consumption of this type of content by including multimedia resources that effectively attract the attention of Internet users , such as videos, self-explanatory images, and other useful tools.

Therefore, the combination of new technologies and journalism can bring excellent results in your Digital Marketing practices.

In this sense, beyond ensuring that your target finds an explanation about certain topics, you open up space for the provision of in-depth, sensitive and highly relevant information for their learning process.

Objectives of longform content
As we said before, long-form content should be more comprehensive, addressing the central topic from a deeper perspective and attentive to the information demand of potential readers.

For this, longform content must have a minimum number of words, however, how long must an article be to be considered longform?

In fact, this is an aspect that generates a lot of discussion. Some say that starting from 800 words, while other professionals point out that to configure a longform, the text must have at least 1500 words. And does this really matter?

First of all, it is worth noting that there is no ideal or magic number, so the success of a content depends largely on whether it can meet the objectives of our content strategy.

Regarding the objectives of a longform content strategy, they can be of two types:

Structure a lasting bond with users;
Achieve an interesting rate of participation, known in English as user engagement.
Taking into account the objectives of the strategy, we can define the following specific challenges:

Newsletter registration;
ad clicks —PPC—;
monetization in affiliate programs;
direct sales.
In addition to basing yourself on these objectives, it is important that you know in detail what SEO is and check the number of words that the competition has used to occupy a good position in search engines. In the same way, it is interesting to find out which content has presented the best performance on social networks.

With this information in hand, you can now define the length of the text. Generally speaking, it is worth mentioning that longform content has a minimum number of 1200 words.


Reasons why we should invest in this type of content
We know that a good ranking in the most acclaimed search engines today does not depend solely on the number of words. To reach the top positions in this search engine you must pay attention to 172 Google positioning factors !

However, introducing this type of content into the strategy has become a powerful critical point to seduce the algorithm and, therefore, conquer the top positions in search engines.

Below, we provide you with a list of the main benefits of long-form content, with the intention of raising awareness about its importance and encouraging you to adopt it in your content strategy:

They are more shared on social media
As we mentioned earlier, long-form articles attract the attention of Internet users, including the audience present on corporate networks who express their interest by sharing the content with their contacts.

By structuring a Digital Marketing strategy that includes social media that is most aligned with the interests of the target audience, we can promote long-form content to generate an increase in engagement and thus boost traffic to the business blog.

In addition to stimulating audience engagement, it is important to emphasize that long-form content has a greater organic reach on Facebook — whether in the form of links, articles or posts of up to 20 words — and provides excellent results on LinkedIn through LinkedIn Pulse , as well as in external links. On Twitter , long-form content makes it possible to obtain more clicks and increase reading times.

Increases user browsing time on the site
Long-form content attracts the attention of users looking to deepen their knowledge on a particular topic by offering more detailed explanations.

Since they are longer, they require the reader to invest more time to finish reading them. Consequently, they spend more time browsing the page and tend to access other content.

Powerful return on investment
Long-form content has a high level of acceptance, so investing not only in the development of complete, well-structured and attractive articles, but also in paid advertising (SEM and on social networks) can be a highly efficient measure to make more and more people find and enjoy this content.

When you produce and distribute content aimed at meeting the information demand of your audience, over time, you tend to position yourself as an authority in your field . As a result, you improve the reputation and image of your business in the eyes of your target audience, encouraging their interest in the solutions you market. And the result? More traffic to your website/e-commerce and, therefore, more sales!

Learn more about virtual business by reading the following content:

Ecommerce Marketing: The Complete Guide to Boosting Virtual Stores
How to combine web design and SEO to create more efficient pages and delight your users
Thinking about buying web traffic? Here's how to do it right
The perfect guide to creating the best long-form content
Now that you know the most notable benefits of incorporating longform into your strategy, it's time to present you with some useful tips for creating a perfect longform blog post :

1. Audit already published content
Keep in mind the need to review the website URLs and consider restructuring the articles in case they are not optimized according to the new demands of the Google algorithm.

2. Consider technical aspects
Before planning content, it is important to consider whether the technical demands are met. For example, it is worth considering whether the website's CMS requires any customization and/or defining an adoption plan for metadata leveraging tags such as description and title.

3. Plan the content
First of all, we must be clear that long-form content can become a burden for the blog if it is not structured with priority to its scannability. So, to be attractive, we need to include restful elements such as graphics, photographs, images, videos, audios and other formats that are pleasant for the reader.

4. Structure your writing team
It's time to select who will be responsible for producing and optimizing long-form content. Remember to put together a team focused on quality and results, that meets the predetermined objectives and is committed to delivering articles that convert.

5. Spread the content
The dissemination of content is essential to verify whether the techniques applied in structuring the posts have generated the expected results and met the strategic challenges.

A good way to promote this content is to share it with users of corporate networks and through email marketing .

It is also interesting to consider disseminating them through paid advertisements.

This is as far as we go!

As you can see, long-form content is here to stay, so investing in this content not only promotes more traffic to websites but also increases the conversion potential of the site or blog.

If you want to delve deeper into topics related to digital marketing, we invite you to download our kit with fabulous materials to optimize your content production.