Why you should create long-form automotive content (and how to do it)

The desire to get content out there often means automotive brands focus on shorter pieces in order to keep publishing regularly, and while there’s a place in this world for short news articles and posts, your strategy needs to include long-form content too.

The thought of creating a 4000-word whitepaper, a 10,000-word ebook, or even a 2500-word guide can seem daunting. Is the effort really worth it?

In short, yes.

Have you ever read one of those articles that goes into great detail about everything you need to know on a certain topic? Maybe you’ve read a business guide, a detailed car maintenance how-to, or even a stat-backed ebook on the intricacies of social media. They’re helpful and you probably read through thinking what a great resource, which built a bit of trust between you and the people who created it. Maybe you ever shared it with your friends or colleagues.

This is the power of long-form content because it gets people thinking, engaging and sharing. If you want to learn more about why long-form automotive content is important, read on.

More words work harder

Longer pieces of content have more chance to be picked up by search engines, they’re more likely to get shared, and people love to link back to really comprehensive content.

You might need to put in more work but the results you get can be huge.

Nothing builds trust in a company more than seeing it publish content with authority, for example:

A fleet management company creating a large guide for fleet owners on everything they need to know and do to maintain their vehicles is immensely helpful to its audience.
An autonomous truck brand creating a whitepaper on the future of logistics is going to show the brand’s expertise in that arena.
A tyre company linking its products to customers’ ACE (autonomous, connected, electric) goals builds authority and trust.

These cornerstone pieces of content give you something to share across your socials and whether you broadly target consumers or have a small B2B niche, there’s value to be found in what you create.

A short blog post can probably be shared to social media once or twice, whereas long-form content can serve a wider purpose to help get your brand in front of new people. You might use ads to serve this content to people outside your network, or you might this content as part of a link-building campaign.

Long-form content is a conversation-starter

It doesn’t matter what kind of long-form automotive content you’re creating, it can be a powerful conversation-starter. You can use these new pieces of content as a great reason to get back in touch with old contacts. Whether they’re potential partners, customers, or investors, you can use a guide, whitepaper, or ebook to drop in and say hi.

Keep it simple, something like:

“Hey, I know we talked previously about the role hydrogen would play in the future of the industry. We’ve just created a whitepaper on how alternative fuels will evolve over the next decade and I’d love to know what you think.”

This is a great way to not only get feedback but deepen your relationship with a contact and promote the content at the same time.

Search-engine points

SEO might seem like a dark art at times but you can’t ignore the facts. SerpIQ did a study on the length of content appearing on the first page of search engines. It showed that the top ten posts in the results were usually more than 2000 words in length.

Longer content will get you noticed by the search engines, driving traffic to your site where your content can do the rest of the work to engage and convert.

Whitepapers and ebooks that are often delivered as PDFs can be broken down into individual pages and posts on your company website to make the most of this, too. You can always keep back a portion of the content so people are still encouraged to exchange their details for the full download.

Your long-form content might be a lot longer than 2000 words so experiment with breaking these larger pieces down into 2000-3000 word chunks as well as posting long-form pieces as a whole.

Not only will the search engines have more to crawl in terms of the words on a page but readers will also spend more time on your site. More time spent reading your content equals more time to build trust.

You can break long-form content down

The wonderful thing about a long piece of content is the ability to break it down into more digestible chunks for social media and blog posts.

In fact, you can get so much social content from one piece of writing that it can make it much easier to populate your social channels while still promoting your cornerstone content. Here are some ideas:

Thought leadership articles referencing your content — this works especially well if you have original research

A LinkedIn post sharing your thoughts on the main takeaway of your content with a link to the full piece
A press release citing your content and offering yourself as an expert available for comment
A series of Twitter posts, each with one valuable takeaway from the content
An Instagram graphic showing a key point — ask people to DM you for the full link
Send the content (ungated) to the contacts you think would be interested, this helps to build relationships

You can even take it a step further with charts and snippets from the content turned into visually-appealing graphics to further hook your social audience.

Creating something that totals many thousands of words might seem like a lot of effort but in the long run it will save you time. Chunking up this kind of content into bitesize pieces can help you when you’re struggling to find something to post to Twitter on a Monday afternoon.

In-depth content signals authority

By creating an in-depth guide or presenting a piece of research, you send a clear message to your audience and potential customers that you are the authority in your niche. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about tyre degradation in Formula One over the years, or releasing a whitepaper full of groundbreaking research on battery chemistry, the content will serve to establish you and your business as leaders in your space.

When you’re brainstorming this kind of content, think about what you’d like to be known for, as it’s a great starting point for big ideas to blossom.

It takes time for people to recognise your authority in this area but playing the long game with your content will pay off.

It’s a great way to nod to existing content

Long-form pieces can be a good chance to link out to other resources, especially if you’re creating a comprehensive guide.

Not only does this build more trust among your readers but it sends them deeper into your website, gets you more clicks and get them even closer to making a buying decision.

This is an article we wrote for Racing Mentor that acts as a guide to sponsorship for racing drivers and links out to a wide range of free and paid resources from the brand.

How to create long-form automotive content

Set some goals

Are you looking to create top-of-funnel content to introduce new people to your brand, or are you looking to build authority with existing customers? It’s worth taking time to really define what you want to get out of each piece of content before you go any further into idea generation.

You need to know:

Who the content is for
What you want to get out of it
How to measure if it's successful

You may also want to consider what problem your piece of content solves for your audience as this is a great way to really engage a reader and provide useful information.

Do you need to collect reader info?

Some content is hidden behind a gate, requiring the reader to put in their email address and other info in order to download what you’ve created. This is an important step if your newsletter has some powerful automations set up and converts highly.

But there’s an argument to be made for ungated content that’s freely available on the internet. This will help you to build more authority with a wider range of people.

Come up with the idea

If you understand the goal of the piece, it should be relatively easy to come up with the angle of your content.

You can also find great content ideas by looking at the questions your audience is asking directly or the discussions they’re having across social media.

Digging into industry keywords and the search queries that bring people to your website are also great ways to find ideas. What keywords are currently bringing people to your website? Could you create a piece of content to better serve these visitors? Maybe you have a keyword you rank for that doesn’t get you many clicks. Think about what you could create to encourage those people to clickthrough.

Think about your audience, too, because it’s better to be specific rather than generic. Targeting electric taxi fleets? Don’t create generic content for all fleet managers because you won’t reach your target market.

Consider your format

A long-form blog post works well as a guide, or you might choose to create a page on your website that acts as a static reference point for one big frequently asked question.

Whitepapers are great for presenting a lot of complex information in a graphical way. This mix of written content, graphs and tables makes everything much easier to digest. These work well for original research and stat-driven stories.

Ebooks tend to be a collection of information but vary hugely in content and length. They are usually wordier than whitepapers with fewer graphics but that’s not to say an ebook shouldn’t have these elements.

Typically, what goes into an ebook might work well as a blog post but the advantage of an ebook is the ability to present the information in a different way. Ebooks also work nicely for very long pieces of content that readers might want to save to come back to later.

Ebooks and whitepapers work best as gated content but there’s no reason you can’t make these freely available too — it all depends on your goals and audience.

Consider what you want the reader to do

Looking back at your goals, what do you want the reader to do as they read your piece of content? Do you want them to discover other articles or resources you’ve created that might help them? Are you trying to encourage an email sign up? Do you want them to share the piece?

Make sure you include clear calls-to-action and relevant buttons or links throughout your long-form content. This will help keep the reader within your eco-system and progressing through your funnel.

Find the right writer

If you’re the expert and have the time to craft a piece of long-form content, you can absolutely do this yourself. If you’re a little stretched for time, though, the right writer can do all the heavy lifting based on your initial thoughts and observations, alongside their own expertise and research.

If you’re working on graphics-heavy whitepaper or ebook, it’s important to bring an experienced designer on board to help you present your information in the most effective way possible.

Even if your concept is strong, without the right execution, your content will bomb.

You need a promotion strategy

Great content doesn’t just spread far and wide on its own. How you promote the piece depends on your audience and your goals:

Think about the contacts that could help you get the content in front of new people
Consider where your audience hangs out
Look at a budget for paid ads
Create snippets to tease the full piece on social media

There’s no point in spending all that time and effort on a long-form guide only to let it fade away into the background with no one ever hearing about it.

If you’re including long-form guides, ebooks and whitepapers in your automotive content strategy, you need to consider promotion for everything you publish too. Create your promotion strategy before you hit publish on the content, this will ensure it works hard for you from day one.

Do the thing

Now you understand the importance of long-form content for automotive brands, as well as how to create it, take some time to brainstorm your goals alongside some content ideas.

If you’d like to run some ideas by us, or want to learn how we can help you with creating these long-form pieces, you can book in for a free chat with me here.