PART 1 – Packaging the Story

Why You Need to Embrace Multimedia Long Form Content

Welcome to part 1 in our three part series on how to succeed in today’s digital marketplace. While content creation and distribution is always important; finding ways to get content seen will be more important than ever in 2015. This is about even more than placing content above the ‘noise’ — it’s ensuring that you create the type of content that your audience wants to interact with. Increasingly today that means providing users with evocative images and video. It’s really a two prong strategy: You need state-of-the-art content ideas combined with effective content presentation to succeed in today’s digital marketing world.

Big Reason to Create Your Own Long Form, Engaging Content

Prediction #1 in Forbes’ 6 Predictions About the State of Digital Marketing in 2015 discusses how Google increasingly answers questions right on its search results pages; which provides people with less incentive to click through to your website. This can be a serious problem; and you need a well-thought out strategy to rise above it. The answer is to create rich, long form content that both search engines and your audience will love. This form of content will outrank many other sources for your relevant keywords, and provide the meat that some users want, versus the quick answer block that search engines provide today for many questions.

If you wish to understand Google’s use of Rich Answers more thoroughly, Stone Temple Consulting’s article, Google Provides Rich Answer Results to 19% of Queries Used in Our Test, provides the most complete discussion we have found. It states that about 75% of the time, when Google provides its ‘Knowledge Box’ answer, it provides an attribution link to the authoritative source from which it derives the answer. Wouldn’t you want your content to be one of those sources Google features, and links to? Or wouldn’t you want to provide the best chance for your content to rank on page 1 for a query? Of course you would, and today it’s important to find the best way to not only rise above the clutter online, but to become the go-to source for the best information about your subject.

Do People Really Want to Engage with Long Form Content?

Yes! If it is Unique and High Quality

Many marketers believe that busy people’s short attention spans will only tolerate 1-2 minute videos. With long form video (video content over 20 minutes long) marketers can tell a brand story. This is an opportunity to create original video content that can have the best chance of being seen, engaged with and remembered.

Key Takeaway #1: People want to interact with and share content that teaches, entertains and makes them feel like they have found something unique and relevant to them.

Key Takeaway #2: People want to feel like they are part of a special group that your content was created for.

Now these may seem like bold statements, but the long form content trend is really starting to bubble up, and if you have been thinking about experimenting with long form, now is a great time to see where you can go with it.

Ahava Leibtag’s February 2, 2015 article in CMSWire, Multimedia Long-Form: The Next Big Thing for Content Marketing defines multimedia long form content as the creation of “distinctive and memorable presentations” that mix video, images, text, quotes, etc. The goal is to avoid flat content and build stories that immerse your audience in the subject matter. One creative example discussed is The Verge’s Holiday 2014 gift guide, which offers a lot more than the standard catalogue experience, because it allows users to jump anywhere in the guide and explore in their own way. The guide is also easily shared via Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and shareable links. One of its most attractive features is that it offers multiple navigation methods so moving through the guide is intuitive, yet most assuredly different for everyone.

Key Takeaway: Create a content mix that puts readers inside your story.

Now that we’ve defined what long form content is and that people actually want to interact with it, let’s look at a few tools that can help you create it.

Creativist is an easy to use tool that gets you up and running in less than a minute with a free account (you can upgrade to use more features). Weave together narrative, geography elements, PDFs, sound, images and video to create a unique brand story.

Newhive looks really interesting. Their multimedia story creation and publishing tool inspires with its inviting canvas that lets you command a mix of media elements, from text to video. The content manipulation tools are extensive; we tried Newhive in Chrome and Firefox; it seemed much more responsive in Firefox, but that was on our machine. Your experiences may vary.

What About Creating an Online Magazine?

If you’d rather go the online magazine route for creating your immersive content, there are a number of tools that can help you make your story jump off the page; one that we like is Issuu. You can sign up and create your first publication in minutes, if you have it already designed in a publishing program like InDesign. Or you can opt for a more informal creation, which you can easily put together in a word processor. Issuu is home to millions of publications, and your audience can read your content via web browser or Issuu’s iOS or Android apps.

Your content can be embedded anywhere and Issuu offers several plans; including a free one to get you started, plus additional plans that allow you to offer a standalone reader link, an ad free reader and more. A tool like Issuu coordinates very well with social sharing; you can provide a link to your Twitter followers, for example, and point them to the newest issue of your magazine. The possibilities for this kind of digital publishing are vast. Product catalogs, new product or service rollouts and rich presentations of product features can be readily published to this platform that offers a smooth, rich reading experience. Here’s a quick look at a test publication we made with just a few .jpg images embedded into a Word document, the colors come out very rich looking, and if you created your magazine in a design program, your results should be quite exceptional:

Here you can explore Issuu magazines so you can see the quality of the presentation and review them for ideas.

Now It’s Your Turn to Tell a Compelling Brand Story

Sometimes you may have an idea about the content you want to create, but not know how to bring it to life. Let Organically Interactive introduce you to innovative content concepts and story strategies that will put your brand into your customers’ hands.