What Content Format Do People Like Best?

Written by: Gary Horsman

What Content Marketing Format Do People Like Best?

This Is a NOT a Trick Question

If you are a content marketer then you may often think about what content format will work best for your audience. Should you blog or create podcasts? You may not be any good at making videos but you think your audience will like them. You may be a specialist at white papers but your audience may not enjoy them as much as the same topic and information in a different format.

Here are some data and some insights for you.

Garrett Hollander is all-around marketer and he specializes in lead generation and inbound Internet marketing. On LinkedIn he conducted a poll with a single and simple question . . .

What is your favorite type of marketing content to consume? Whitepapers? Blog entries? Videos?

Thirty-six people responded to the poll and cast 39 votes (you could vote for more than one format).

I decided to make a chart showing the results after reading through all the comments. The chart below shows how people voted.

The clear format winner was blogging but there is other relevant and important information that we can gain from studying the poll results.

For example:

Info graphics comes in 2^nd place (a distant 2^nd but 2^nd none-the-less)

Video is well down on the list and if one reads through the comments in detail there is even a negative comment about video. Any negative comments are worth reflecting upon. In this case, the negative comment was related to how a video can sometimes be too long and sometimes the description of the video does not exists or is not accurate. These two “negatives” can be overcome easily and we must take on the advice of the negative comment.

It is clear that people are very familiar with blogging and many people depend on blogs for informational content. A blog can be a very important addition to your center of content.  A blog is important not only because of the voting results but also because a blog is very flexible and can have many other types of content formats. A blog can have an info graphic or a video or slideshow for example.

Another point is that we can repurpose our content marketing materials. Consider whether your white paper could be a blog post or series of blog posts. Imagine a video version of your blog post. Can you combine a worthy and connected series of blog posts into an interesting, valuable and entertaining eBook which could also contain info graphics?

If you are a content marketer then it’s your job to create delightful content which attracts and engages your audience(s).

You also have the ability to study the popularity and engagement level of the content you create. To study this via your Google Analytics account or some other software will further help to enable you to attract and engage your audience.

For example:

Is the bounce rate high for a particular page on your site or blog post? If yes then try to determine why.

Is the time-on-page exceptionally low (or high) for a specific page or post? Then you need to understand why?

The more you can determine the reasons why something is more popular and engaging the more you can produce content that is popular and engaging.

The question posed by Garrett is an important one and the number of voters was enough to get me to think more about this and to share the results with you.

I hope you found this valuable.