Content creation is one of the most important components of modern marketing. Quality content benefits everyone – users want to learn from experts and industry thought leaders, while brands get to promote their products or services.
Content marketing comes in many different forms, with blogs and videos making a couple of fundamental features. But the real question is: which one performs better?
Some marketers firmly believe in the power of the written word, while others claim that video marketing has taken over the main scene. Deciding which way to go is not easy, but we want to help you out here by presenting the pros and cons of video and written content.
Benefits and Disadvantages of Textual Content
Blogging is the oldest content creation tactic, but it is by no means obsolete. We will explain to you the pros of publishing articles on your website:
- Simplicity: Writing a blog is relatively simple, so you can keep the highest level of consistency in the long run. It doesn’t mean that crafting high-quality posts is easy, but it’s definitely much easier to do it on a regular basis than shooting videos. A report shows that bloggers who post daily get five times more traffic compared to those who don’t, which is another reason why simplicity really matters here.
- SEO: Do you know that websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages than sites without written content? Google appreciates quality articles and tends to rank blog-focused websites higher than their less agile competitors.
- Longer formats rule: Gone are the days when successful blogs published 400-word articles. Today, posts are much longer, highly analytical, and educational. According to the study, longer blog posts generate nine times more leads than short ones. Serious readers, particularly the ones who go deeper down the sales funnel, enjoy reading in-depth articles. The reason is simple: longer formats allow authors to cover topics from all angles and give solutions to practical problems in a step-by-step manner.
- Show your style: A laptop is everything content writers need to prove professional skills. They don’t have to be pretty, act, smile, and pretend to be enthusiastic. You can be yourself and write in a style that suits your personality and your target audience.
- Writing tools: The Internet offers content creators tons of incredibly useful writing tools. Platforms such as Superior Dissertations, Grammarly, Custom Essay, or Hemingway make the writing process much faster, which is a huge advantage compared to video production.
The benefits of blogging are evident, but the process has a few downsides as well. Without further ado, let’s check them out:
- Competition: It’s hard to find a business or website without a blog. It’s extremely difficult to get your foot in the door and find your place in the blogging sun with hundreds of competitors in almost every niche. If you want to make it to the first page of Google’s search results, you have to be a patient and very skilled writer.
- Frequency: This con goes hand in hand with the previous one. James Marshal, a blogger at Assignment Masters, says writing content is easier than video production, but it is also why users expect you to do it more frequently: “If you want to keep pace with the biggest rivals, you will have to publish new posts at least four to five times a week.”
- Content looks too plain: Although textual content brings quality into the marketing game, the truth is that most people consider it to be plain and less attractive than visual content. For this reason, more and more marketers keep adding multimedia files to their posts to make articles more compelling and visually appealing.
- Users don’t read too much: We live in the digital age and need to face the fact that users spend less time reading and more time watching content. A lot of people skim through posts without even bothering to go beyond headlines and subheadings.
Benefits and Disadvantages of Video Content
We’ve seen that blogging is a bipolar content format, but so is video marketing. Therefore, we need to analyze the pros and cons of video content, too. Let’s start with the benefits:
- Attractiveness: People are visual beings who prefer videos and imagery over plain textual content. It makes video marketing much more attractive and able to grab the audience’s attention. At the same time, this gives almost all videos the potential to go viral and reach millions of viewers.
- Multimedia: Videos have the privilege of using multiple media formats. They consist of motion pictures, audio content, and plain text (if necessary). As such, they encourage full immersion and satisfy the needs of all users. That being said, it’s not surprising to learn that almost half of the people watch an hour or more of video every day.
- Engagement and ROI: The sheer attractiveness helps video creators to inspire users and make them truly engaged. This is why marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.
- Smartphone usage: The number of smartphone users keeps growing at a steady pace. Blog writers at EasyEssay claim that it benefits video marketers because it’s more convenient to watch videos than to read articles on mobile phones.
The cons of video marketing are the only thing left to see here. Let’s go through this aspect of the story:
- Cost: Video production cannot be cheap if you demand top-level quality. Live streaming and do-it-yourself videos are a good way to go from time to time, but you need professionally-looking videos consistently. If you don’t have a substantial budget, we don’t recommend you rely on video marketing exclusively.
- Time-consuming process: You can’t shoot videos on a daily basis. It requires a lot of time and hard work, so you’ll have to fill the void with other types of content.
- Retention: As many as 60% of viewers will stop watching videos after two minutes. Retention is a big problem for video marketers, especially if you can’t compress your thoughts and present all you have in less than three or four minutes.
- Hard to update: Unlike blog posts, video content is extremely difficult to update. Keep in mind that things change quickly in the digital universe, which is why your videos may lose credibility after a while.
The Bottom Line
After everything we’ve stated here, can you reach a conclusion and decide which type of content marketing prevails? It’s an extremely difficult question, but here is our advice: video and text generate the best results only when paired.
While video content may be more attractive and visually appealing, nothing can replace good old articles when it comes to complex topics and step-by-step guidelines. For this reason, it is critical to analyze the target audience and prepare a content strategy that depends on the preferences of your average consumer. Younger audiences will probably demand more videos, while older and serious customers may require additional blog posts.
It also depends on the overall style and strategic orientation of your brand. If possible, it would be perfect to join forces and combine both marketing tactics. But if it’s not doable – let the audience tell you what to do.
