WhAT IS short-foRM CONTENT?

Why EVERY sMALL BUSINESS SHOULD CREATE SHORT-FORM content?

Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and YouTube shorts are one of the best ways to reach and serve new customers. With four 20-second videos, you can provide value and start building relationships with thousands of people. This is because short-form videos force you to follow the golden rules of content marketing. 

Experts agree that the best marketing accomplishes three goals: 

• It immediately establishes the value of your product or service.

• It is compact, so customers can easily remember the message and share it with others.

• It provides value that customers will associate with your brand when it is time to make a purchase. 

Creating Value with Short-form Content

You can’t cover a topic in-depth with short-form content. You have to know the problems your ideal customer is facing and provide a solution. If you don’t immediately provide value or address an issue, the customer will swipe away. Unlike long-form content, you can’t optimize for SEO and use a cloud of words to hide the fact that you haven’t identified a message of value yet.

This doesn’t mean that long-form content is useless, far from it. If you want to understand something in-depth, long-form content is the way to go. But too often I have gotten 20 minutes into a video only to realize that it contains zero real information.

To be effective, short-form content must provide value in seconds. If it doesn’t teach, make you laugh, or tell a good story it is a failure. This demand for immediate value forces you to understand your customers and start catering to their needs.

Short-form Content is Memorable

When we read or watch a movie, we don’t retain every word. We remember the one sentence or line of dialogue that was significant to us, that made us better. 

Good short-form content is about creating as many of those moments of change as possible. Your goal is to help your customer navigate life with a little more clarity. For example, if you own a hardware store you can make a video with one useful tip on how to build a shed. 

Your customer walks away a little bit better than before. Who do you think they will come back to when they have another building question? 

Short-form Content Associates Your Brand with Value

This leads us to the final benefit of short-form content. Short-form content allows you to build trust with customers. If you consistently provide bite-sized value they are much more likely to come to you when they have bigger questions.

For example, I have been following a bodybuilder for years. He doesn’t just give exercise tips. He makes jokes. He talks about his steroid use. He gives advice about overcoming body dysmorphia. He helps with multiple problems his customers are going through even when it won’t lead to a sale. 

Now I haven’t bought the products he recommends. (The store that sells them is too far away.) But I follow him on every platform and share his content often. There is no guarantee that short-form content will lead to a sale. But if you provide value, it will definitely lead to goodwill. The more goodwill you produce the more likely that someone will buy what you are selling. 

For these three reasons, every small business should be creating short-form content. Think about what your customer is struggling with. Then make a 20-second video that fixes that problem. Do this even if it has nothing to do with the product you sell.

Create value enough times and you will have a fan base of people who associate your brand with that value. This means that your product will be their first choice.

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