Q&A Session: Content Pillars, Short form vs. Long form, How to start a Podcast - Teacher: Juma Bannister

Hello and welcome Useful Content Creators. My name is Juma Bannister. I am your host and your useful content teacher. And today in the Useful Content Classroom we have our very first question and answer lesson. so I asked people who follow me on social media for questions and now I'm going to take the time to answer all of those questions. I ask for questions specifically surrounding content strategy and also video because that's what we do.  I've gotten back about 15 responses with some very very good questions and unfortunately I wouldn't be able to get to all of them today. Some of the questions were so good I had to reserve them for me to do a full episode on getting to those bigger questions in the future. I got questions on podcasting, I got questions on content pillars, and I even got questions asking what are the biggest mistakes digital entrepreneurs make. And so I think today is going to be a really good session. and keep your eyes and ears, peeled because someone may even even make a secret guest appearance. So let's get into those questions and answers right now. Here we go.  So the very first question I want to tackle from Rory Doon, now Rory I know your name, I'm seeing it in front of me. But I don't know how to properly pronounce it, so I'm not going to take that chance. So let's call you Rory HD. And Rory asks, which is more effective short form or long form content? And like any responsible content marketer, I'm going to have to answer the most boring answer ever and say, it depends. And it mostly depends on who you are talking to. And what stage of the customer journey they are at. And not so much who you're talking to from the perspective of the persona you should have developed for your marketing plans. But who you're talking to in this instance really kind of refers to how does your audience like to consume content? Do they prefer short or long form content? I'm also going to assume that you're referring to video here because of course we could have short or long form audio and short or long form text, but I'm going to assume video here  And so an important part of knowing which one is more effective is knowing your customer very, very well. And that should be a standard thing in anybody creating any content strategy or creating any marketing is talking to the customers to find out how they consume content, whether they prefer video or text or whatever it is. And then of course, you have a ton of questions you can ask about your products or services for the people who have bought it already. But the main thing is finding out how do your customers consume content? What are their habits like? And if you discover those things, then you'll know whether you should be using. long form or short form. In addition to that, depending on certain demographics of your audience and specifically their age, that will determine whether or not they're more likely to like short form or long form content. Studies have shown, it's been proven, that younger people tend to want to consume shorter form content and when you're slightly older you go for the longer form content. So which one is better? You have to do your customer research to find out. I personally like both. I think they're both effective depending on what you want to do. But in your case, it has to be very specific. For any client, it has to be very specific. And each person has a different reason or a different goal. And you have to know what those goals are and how you're going to navigate to those goals in order to know what type of content that you should make. So the boring answer is it. Depends. And while we're here, let me just talk a bit about the customer journey and the short form...