Let's imagine we have a client and a firmly established idea for a project or campaign which has already passed the necessary filters and hence been approved. Now a crucial decision awaits, should we produce long-form or short-form content? Does the context call for deep analytical content or for a number of smaller pieces which will end up being more useful for our marketing efforts? Do we have severe time constraints? In the case of more ambitious campaigns, undoubtedly, we will choose both. Long and short-form content is equally valuable for our purposes from a theoretical perspective. The choice depends on the context. Context is everything as we know, on our target audience and of course, on our budget. In the general design of your marketing policy, you will have already selected a number of platforms where you publish content directly to different customers in different stages of the customer journey. Now the question is what content type will push your potential customer further in that journey in any given moment? What phase of the consumer decision journey are you targeting? Different content formats produce different engagement rates. Who are you addressing? For instance, primarily mobile viewers were probably miss content initiatives such as white papers, quizzes, interactive content, or complex infographics. Google Analytics and plenty of other software services give you all the information you need about your audience and your potential customers. If you're lucky enough data to outline a content proposal for a specific target group, there are many sites to give you the latest information on marketing trends. For the simpler decisions, the superiority of audio-visual content over any other format in social media publishing will be enough criteria. Don't forget another rule of thumb. There is a very strong correlation between young generations and short formats and vice versa. What content formats are your possible clients engaging with? What do they share? Where are they spending their time online and what social networks? Obviously, a content strategy for an audience that's mainly on Instagram will look very different to one for an audience who's mainly on LinkedIn. First of all, we search your audience to get a good snapshot of the content types they engage with. In the context of an overall multi-year strategy, you must observe different formats. So not only blog posts and articles, for instance, or not only short videos. To maximize your reach, it will be always useful to repurpose and edit longer pieces into shortest snippets, easily shareable on networks. Or also convert all these individual smaller messages into some form of content repository that your audience can access in order to take informed and better decisions. The variety of content formats at this position is striking. Blog posts, newspaper or magazine articles, podcasts, videos, webinars, case studies, newsletters, interviews, social media posts, games. For your content to be effective, it is essential not only to choose topics that will resonate with your audience and reinforce your brand as we have said already in previous modules of this course, but also to publish content in a format that has good chances of being consumed and shared by your potential customers. Once these considerations have been made, the general purpose of your strategy should give you the final answer. What is the goal of each content piece? Is it, for example, promoting awareness in social media? In that case, blog posts or videos would be very good choices. Is it the lead generation? A case where a podcast or contests seem a very good alternative. Is it thought leadership? Where presenting a white paper or a documentary are probably unbeatable options. Is it making conversions? A case where the content, as I'm sure you know, will be very different from the typically successful and instantaneous pieces which are endlessly shared on social media. Remember, please be always realistic about your possibilities with the resources at hand, your schedule, and your flexibility for quick reaction. I will give you an extremely simple and obvious example. We all know that the video is king in terms of popularity, but it is also quite more difficult and expensive to produce in text content, and the competition is rather daunting. Another one, podcasts, which we know are an emerging trend worldwide, which will definitely mark this decade in terms of content creation and loyalty. However, the entry barrier is higher, regularity is mandatory and the measurement of your return of investment still needs to be perfected. As you're planning out or reviewing pieces of content for marketing, look for a balance between your design ideals and format necessities because your content's format must be aligned with its function. It is much less stable than the tone and the personality of your brand, for example, which must necessarily dictate or inspire the content itself. Wooden handicraft shop can have a wonderful YouTube channel and a cutting edge B2B tech company might choose to print materials for certain events. The choice is always subordinated to your purpose and it can change frequently or better still combined with others into a general strategy. If the tone aligns with your brand values, the content will work regardless of the format. A final note. Please test ideas and measure results and follow your own path. Remember that communication and marketing are never science, and you might very well discover that things never tried before work wonderfully for a certain audience, for reasons which may vary greatly, even hypes or content saturation, for instance. If your position in your industry is strong enough, you may have the influence to create a new standard for content consumption. But don't improvise. The bolder the challenge, the stronger your strategy and consistency of your plan should be. While you should be evidently guided by your initial research, it is very productive to experiment and test. The stats might say, for instance, that Gen Z prefers short-form video. But what if the ones in your target audience engage better with podcasts or with comics? My recommendation is to use a mix of long and short-form content to generate brand loyalty.
