How To Win At Long-Form Content Marketing

March 17, 2025

Long-form content marketing is your most valuable tool in growing brand authority, raising your SERPs and driving conversions. While short-form content serves an important role in attracting attention and getting engagement, in-depth articles and ‘how to’ guides deliver significantly better results. Especially for those looking to establish credibility and trust. Let’s dive straight in to how you can win at long form content marketing.

Long Form Content – The Essentials

77% of internet users read blogs
30% of consumers say content quality makes a blog more credible
The average length of a business blog post is over 1100 words

The question we’re often asked is ‘how long should long-form content be?’. The short answer is generally anything over 1,000 words. But it’s not just about the volume of words, it’s also the value and depth of the content. The content needs to be a deep dive into a topic and be useful to the reader, giving them information and insights.

In this article we’ll be looking at:

Why long-form content works
How to create long-form content
Tips on your long-form content marketing strategy
Best-practises and what to NOT do
Pro strategies when creating content
Some real-world examples of long-form content for inspiration.

Why Long-Form Content Marketing Works

Here are some compelling statistics why long-form content is the holy grail of your content marketing strategy.

Better Search Engine Rankings: The average length of pages in the first-page of Google is 1,447 words long.
Backlinking: Longer articles attract 5 times more backlinks.
Traffic: 3,000+ words get 3 times more traffic than articles under 1,000 words, and 4 times more social shares.
Lower bounce rates: Content of 2,000+ words significantly experience less bounce rate than shorter pieces.
Engagement: Users are more likely to stay longer on your site engaging with comprehensive and useful content.
Increased web traffic: 3,000 word content gets twice as many shares as articles under 2,000, and an average of 77.2% more referring domain links than 1,000 word articles.
Social media algorithms: Longer posts, especially on LinkedIn where depth is valued, are prioritised by the social networks’ algorithms.
Higher conversions: Conversion rate increases with long-form content as readers pay more attention and the intent for their visit.
Establishes authority & Increases trust: Clients trust brands that provide knowledgeable, detailed and helpful information.

Fun Fact: Crazy Egg, a web analytics service, A/B split tested their homepage. One option was 20x longer than the other page! The results? The longer page outperformed the shorter version by 30%. In their words “You cannot have a page that’s too long, only one that’s too boring.”

How to Create Winning Long-Form Content

So you’re convinced that there is a place for long-form content in your marketing strategy. The challenge is to create excellent, long-form articles, white papers or videos that resonate with your audience. If you don’t have an inhouse content team, or if they are overwhelmed, you can outsource to a content marketing agency like Contentworks.

Whether you’re doing it yourself, or working with a third-party agency, here’s what your content should be doing:

Value Driven Content

You need to understand what your target market cares about. What their challenges and concerns are. Your content needs to provide authentic insights with verified facts and stats, not just additional words to hit a target word-count. Make sure your research is thorough and offers a unique perspective.

Structured Content

Structure your content into clear sections with headlines and subheadings. Use bullets, lists and bold text to highlight information and help readers make sense of what you are communicating. Include a useful summary at the beginning with the publishing date. Ensure you provide meta data, snippets and keyword tags to help search engines rank it better.

Data, Examples and Case Studies

Use credible and recent examples and statistics to support the discussion of your article or video. Case studies are a great way to illustrate the point you are trying to get across to your reader, watcher or podcast listener. Real world examples are relatable and help get across best practices, or lessons in what to avoid.

SEO and Keywords

Long-form content gives you the ability to make use of long-tail keywords throughout. Include internal linking to other articles on your site. And as mentioned previously, use appropriate meta descriptions, alt tags and schema markup (the code on your webpages that helps search engines understand your content).

Images and Infographics

Make your content visually engaging with images and graphics to break up the text. Research shows that articles with visuals get 94% more views than those without. However, ensure your graphics add value to your text and aren’t just stock images that don’t convey any information.

Quick tips for using graphics in your long-form content:

Be visually appealing
Understand the beauty of white space
Create branded images
Credit those sourced from elsewhere
Be relevant to the content of the article, and meaningful to the reader.

Storytelling Videos

Videos are great companions to your long-form article. They add needed pauses for the reader. They deliver a lot of information in a short space of time, have greater engagement and are more likely to be shared. In fact, social video gets 1200% more shares than text and images.

Strong Call to Action (CTA)

Your content should serve a purpose. As well as informing, educating and delighting the reader, you want to take them to the next action. That might be to download your app, start trading or deposit funds. Ensure you pepper compelling CTAs throughout your content to help guide the customer journey.

Need expert help with your content marketing agency? Reach out to the team at Contentworks for a 15 minute zoom.

Create Killer Content

No one wants to read fluff or filler content. Avoid jargon or complex words. Unless you’re an academic paper, aim for simpler language. This doesn’t mean condescending to your reader. Just keep the language easy to read, sentences short and paragraphs brief. Remember to use subheadings and interactive elements to foster engagement.

Pro tip: Don’t try to overstuff an article with keywords. You should be targeting 1-3 keywords or phrases per article and let those keywords arise naturally out of the discussion in the article.

Optimise for Mobile

60% of searches are happening on mobile, so your content has be be mobile friendly. That includes text, images and videos. Also ensure your loading times are optimised.

Promote Your Long-Form Content

You’ve spent a lot of energy creating your long-form content, ensure it gets the maximum exposure.

Share parts of it on your social media channels
Repurpose it into infographics
Make short and long video content around it
Consider paid ads to boost reach
Offer shorter versions of it to 3rd-party publications

Pro Strategies for Long-Form Content Success

One of the mistakes we see marketing departments make is not having a content plan in place. This often leads to inefficiencies in content creation. Last minute ‘urgent’ requests and overburdened writers open the door to mistakes and burnout. This is also true for the long-form content you create. Planning out your content 3-6 months in advance allows you to manage your time, coordinate with other marketing campaigns and activities, and collaborate with product and other departments.

You can strategically repurpose the research and content you’ve worked hard on into different formats to widen its reach.

Here are some examples:

Blog series: You can break up your long-form content into shorter, more digestible, articles for continued engagement.
Whitepaper / eBooks: Excellent for lead generation of your valuable content.
Webinars: Turn your research and long-form content into a webinar. Great for communicating complex ideas, or for ‘how to’s’.
Videos: Present your findings in short form videos for social media, or longer-form pieces on your YouTube channel.
Infographics: Summarise data-heavy concepts into shareable visuals.
Social media: Pull out key ideas and share them across your channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Or make a TikTok if it fits into your strategy.

Tell a Great Story

Keeping people engaged with your long-form content takes skill. Here are some pro tips on leveraging storytelling techniques into your content:

Understand who is your audience, what are their interests and/or challenges, what do they care about
What format will your long-form content take, is it an article, video or podcast?
Create a clear narrative structure so your audience can make sense of the discussion
Do meaningful and up-to-date research on your topic so that you deliver valuable content
Make it relatable with case studies and personal anecdotes
Don’t just tell people what they should be doing, show them how with examples
Address the readers pain points and offer solutions
Keep the reader invested in the content with fun facts, pro tips, top takeaways.

Refresh Content

You spent a lot of effort in creating your long-form content, don’t let it die as time goes by. Make a habit of checking your content and updating old posts with recent statistics, links and relevance. Search engines love fresh content and your SEO manager is going to love you in turn. Consider adding new visuals or case studies to keep the content relevant and improve your rankings.

Make it Interactive

Encourage community interaction by enabling comments. Monitor responses and foster engagement through discussion. Interactive posts on social media get wider reach, stand out, generate more leads, increase retention rates, and drive traffic to your site.

Here are some ideas:

Create quizzes or polls
360 videos
Product tags on photos
‘Tag a friend’ posts
‘This’ or ‘That’ posts
AMAs – ask for their questions.

Data Insights to Improve Performance

You’ve spent a lot of time creating your long-form content, you’ve promoted it and repurposed it. Now what? Analyse it! Get an understanding of how successful your content was, what worked, what didn’t and take learnings for your future content creation. Pull out your Google Analytics, Ahrefs or SEMrush and gather in your data.

Metrics to analyse:

Time on page: More time, more valuable the content was to the user
Bounce rates: High bounce rate might mean that your promotion of the content didn’t reflect its substance
Social shares: More shares means more relevance to the reader.

Pro tip: A/B test your headlines, CTAs, and content length to find out what works best for your audience.

Who’s Winning at Long-Form Content

Let’s take a look at four excellent examples of long-form content from companies that are rocking this space. Here are some ideas to steal!

#1. HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Blog

HubSpot prioritise publishing long-form content in the form of articles, in-depth guides and videos on topics around email marketing, content marketing and SEO.

Here’s an example of long-form content published by HubSpot:

What they’re getting right here:

Ungated 5,500 word blog comprehensively covering their topic
Offering additional value with a downloadable PDF in return for your email
Well structured, information-rich content, mixed up with sub-headings, bullet points, infographics
Inserted call to actions to ‘download’ throughout the page
Sourced and credited research for credibility
Interlinking with the other articles on their site.

#2. Moz’s Whiteboard Friday (WBF)

A B2B marketing initiative, Moz’s Whiteboard Friday has a clear goal and target audience. As a provider of SEO tools, it aims to gather beginner and intermediate SEO managers into their community. They do this by offering the most comprehensive SEO education on video for free. The videos tend to be 8-12 minutes long and can run up to 20 minutes. They are simple and have the presenter in front of a pre-drawn whiteboard. Usually shot as a one -take, they have an air of authenticity with all the umms and errs you’d expect. Each WBF covers one topic in depth. It presents solid, best-practice advice, backed by data. The averageWhiteboard Fridaypost gets between 15-20,000 unique views.

Key to their success: Consistency. Every Friday for years, this has become the water-cooler, go-to place for SEO workers. And they didn’t have immediate success, they committed to this series and it took 2-3 years to start seeing the impressive results they are seeing today.

#3. American Express Long-Form Articles

American Express uses long-form content to help their business clients grow and expand their business. With their Trends & Insights section, they provide articles, explainer videos and case studies around managing money, getting customers and building their business.

What they are doing well:

Understanding their target audience of business entrepreneurs
Writing useful long-form articles on topics of interest to SMEs
Structuring the articles well with dates of publishing, subheadings and summaries, and highlighting key points
Making them easily shareable
Interlinking to their other articles and directing reader to what to read next with trending content.

#4. X Open Hub – Downloadables

B2B liquidity Provider, X Open Hub (XOH), target forex and stock brokers with long-form articles and eBooks. Well researched white papers and eBooks on industry-specific topics are a great way to get potential clients on their database.

What XOH do very well is promote the eBook as a pop up on their homepage which allows the user to quickly enter their email and download it immediately. They promote it on their social and will eventually use it on 3rd-party industry sites to expand exposure.