Content creation is a huge market – a multi-billion-dollar industry – and for good reason: it’s how you communicate with your customers. There are many types of content out there, including blogging, video, podcast and infographic. Content consumers, however, have limited time and short attention spans, so which type of content is best?
Back in 2020, the digital written content market was worth roughly $12.4 billion. In contrast, the digital video content market was estimated at a whopping $151.4 billion! Seems obvious that people are consuming more and more video, you might assume. But in actuality, effective marketing campaigns combine different types of content to appeal to the broadest number of consumers. All content can pull in potential customers; the key is getting the right type of content in front of the right people.
Which is more popular: written or video content?
While content can be broken down among multiple categories, the scope of this article will delve into two popular types: video and written.
Ten years ago, written content in the form of blogs were everywhere. Youtube was in its infancy and the wide web was glittering with potential. Nowadays, some of the highest-ranking websites are those with hundreds of blog posts – and many of them were started a number of years ago. It took time for their sites to gain domain authority, ranking high on search, and before Facebook seemed to bury everyone in ads, the social media platform did a decent job of getting interesting content in front of the right parties.
But today, video is everywhere. It has literally exploded in popularity. Science affirms that watching a video takes less concentration and brain power than reading an article, since the watcher is primed for passive consumption, so it’s literally easier on a consumer to press play than try to understand words upon words explaining the same concept.
So can you still launch a successful blog when everyone seems to be abandoning the written word for video? Absolutely, yes! The key is to approach your content strategy from a business standpoint.
Each type of content has its own type of audience, and certain types of content are better suited to specific purposes. Consider the following:
- What are your audience’s needs and interests?
- What is the goal of the content you’re producing?
- Do you have the resources available to produce a given type of content?
Connect needs and interests with the correct medium
Just like when launching a business, the first step in approaching a content enterprise is to understand your audience. Learn about their needs, pain points, concerns, likes and dislikes. Tailor your content to address this, since relevant, valuable content is how you’ll connect with your consumers. After all, you don’t want to spend precious effort pushing out content when no one views it, right?
A 2018 report by digital education company Pearson indicated that younger consumers preferentially consume video content for learning and interest. Since they grew up in a digital age, the researchers hypothesized that familiarity plays a role in determining their comfort with a specific type of content. Consumers aged 26 to 40 were split evenly between written and video media, with the ratio leaning more toward written as age increased.
Just as different social media platforms appeal more to certain age groups, different content types appeal to different consumers.
Determine the goal of the content you produce
At the end of the day, producing content has a purpose. It may be to educate with no thought for profit, but usually content production is part of a marketing strategy.
Sometimes, like in the case of Youtube, the platform itself pays content producers through ad revenue shares. Other times, like in the case of Buzzfeed, content is used to simultaneously share interesting products with consumers and drive affiliate revenue.
What is the purpose of your content?
Determine what medium (written vs video) your customers prefer and make sure to get your information in the right format in front of the right audience. The best content marketing strategies include a mix of content types, and many blogs actually embed video to increase traffic.
Video content helps to introduce customers to your brand when they aren’t necessarily looking to purchase products just yet. It reels them in, so to speak, helping to funnel potential customers into your sales pipeline. Written content can help convert them and help them decide on their final purchase behavior.
Video content also helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Search algorithms have begun prioritizing videos given their increasing popularity, so including some video content can help your search rank, increase conversion rates, generate backlinks and reduce page bounce rates. Just because you focus on written information doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of both types of content.
Assess your available resources to create content
Nevertheless, it’s important to assess your ability to create different content before going all in. Do you have the skills and knowledge to write engaging, informative articles and blog posts? Or are you great at visuals and video compiling?
Evaluate if you need to hire someone else to produce content and how that might impact your bottom line. If you can’t afford to pay a contractor to make it for you, focus mostly on the type of content you’re good at while slowly expanding into other content areas.
The core of effective marketing and content production is to tweak your interaction as you go.
Is it worth launching a blog?
After all this, you might think that it’s actually not worth launching a blog. If everyone is jumping headfirst into video content production, it might seem that written content is not as lucrative. But you need to think of a blog as part of a content whole.
Written content, video content, social media outreach, all of that is part of a content creation mix that can help promote your brand or message. Traffic conversion leader OptinMonster notes that 409 million people read over 20 billion pages a month, giving you ample opportunity to reach out to the right audience if you’re producing informative, engaging content.
In fact, many Youtubers end up directing subscribers to their own websites to purchase merchandise or subscribe to private, exclusive content. By utilizing video content to build their brand, they are then able to funnel supporters into a sales pipeline. Websites aren’t just floating videos in a void, either, so these savvy content producers utilize written content even if the site is primarily based on video. Both content types are important.
Bottom line
The video content industry is huge and growing rapidly, but digital written content is a large and booming market, too. Blogs can incorporate multiple types of content, serving different parts of the customer pipeline, so tailoring the right type of content to your audience is vital to a growing content enterprise. Nearly 60% of Gen Z consumers prefer video to reading, but that also means that 40% still prefer the written word. Older age groups prefer it even more. Communicating with your customers to build your brand and offering your audience a chance to interact with you no matter the format will always be a win.
