Insight: The Basic Unit of Good Content

Content marketing has taken the internet by storm. While most contents was limited to publications only before the internet era, we have everyone being a publisher now.

Digital Marketing and the widespread use of the internet have opened the flood gates of the publishing industry. Earlier companies used to advertise only in publications because the publications were the only ones that had an audience. And they had an audience because they published some good content. Mostly entertainment.

Traditional publications include TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. And whole industries have been built on that because it was not as simple as writing a blog post like this and hitting publish on it.

However, opportunities also bring challenges. And one of the biggest challenges facing content marketers nowadays is the overload of content and information.

People learned how to do "content marketing" and they did not look into it deeply. They thought it was just about increasing the quantity and forgot about its quality of it. And the line between entertainment, cringe, and true information has been blurred.

People's attention spans are also going down because of information overload. People don't have the patience to watch a 15-second reel nowadays. YouTube which was popular for long-form videos once upon a time has also yielded to the pressure and started YouTube shorts.

So where are we going from here? What kind of content will actually work for content marketing in the future?

Your content is not going to fly unless your content has valuable insights.

This is what insights do:

• It changes your worldview about a particular topic
• It gives you actionable next steps
• It breaks old patterns of thinking and changes beliefs

An insight can be delivered via video, blog post, email, or a 1on1 training session with a mentor.

In most cases, insights cannot be delivered on a 30-second video. Most short-form content has to have the same shallow content repeated over and over again because there is nothing else new in the world.

To deliver a good insight, one has to have the attention span of the audience, like the one you have right now.

For that, the audience needs to trust you first, and have an idea about who you are. You are reading this content until now because you know me as Digital Deepak and want to learn digital marketing from me.

To give you the insight that content is made of good insights, I had to give you a little bit of background about the state of the content marketing industry first, the problem in the industry, and then give you a solution.

Such insights can be delivered in a 1000-word article or at least a 10-minute video. Without having long-form content it is difficult to deliver insights.

Insights are important because sophisticated audiences who learn from in-depth articles and videos are not looking for entertainment. Attention is currency and we all have a limited supply of it. When we are reading an article we are "investing" our time into it expecting some return: insights.

If you have read this article until now and if you understand that short-form content such as reels and shorts are useless, you have got an insight. It kind of proves itself because you have "spent" more than 10 minutes reading this article until now and you are getting a "return on investment" of your time spent reading the article. And that return is an insight into content marketing.

Once you get an insight through reading, you are not feeling bad about the time invested in reading. You got a positive ROI and the next time around it is easier for me to convince you to read my next piece of article because you would be expecting a positive ROI out of it.

That's how you build a personal brand and that's how you build an audience. Convincing one reader at a time. With time, you will be able to gather a critical mass of readers who will sustain your journey as a creator.

When there is an option to get a million views on a 30-second video, versus 10,000 views on a 30-minute in-depth content or video, I would always choose the deep content format because that creates more value and attracts the right kind of audience.

Hope this article gave you an idea about what's good content and how to make them. Thanks for reading this article and I will see you in the next one.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju