Deep vs. Wide Content: How to Make the Right Decision for Content Marketing

A fleshed out content marketing strategy is an important part of every campaign. Before you begin writing, filming, recording, or otherwise creating quality content, there’s a lot to consider. You probably ask yourself who your target audience is, what platforms are most appropriate, and what kind of content will be most effective.

When you consider the type of content you want, what do think of? If you think your choices are between blog posts, videos, infographics, and other forms of content, you are partially correct. There’s also something else to consider. Should your content be deep, wide, or both?

What is Deep vs. Wide Content?

In content marketing, deep content takes a single topic or very closely related topics, and digs in deep. When content creators choose deep content in their marketing campaigns what they produce is long, detailed, well-researched, and backed by plenty of data. Deep content is specialized.

Wide content covers a topic at a very high level, or explores multiple related topics. Wide content can be interesting, factual, and informative. However, it isn’t intended to be as detailed and specific as deep content.

deep vs wide content

Imagine your topic is budget vacation planning. If your plan was to write wide content, you might create a blog post titled, ‘10 Ways to Save Money on Your Next Family Vacation’. In the post you might include tips on traveling off-season, eating at local restaurants, and considering cheaper alternatives such as camping. You’d probably link to a couple of authoritative travel blogs or publications to provide more detail.

For deep content, you might focus on one specific aspect of vacation planning. For example, you might focus solely on teaching readers how to pay the least amount of money for accommodations while getting the best experience. In this content, you would provide detailed information on the steps to take. You would link to original source material that contained data, and very authoritative blogs. You would include statistics or case studies if they were available.

More Than Two Options

As you can imagine, deep vs. wide content is not a binary thing. A lot of content falls somewhere on a spectrum between the two. For example, a white paper analyzing trends in hotel rates and potential savings over time is an example of deep content. A quickly written blog post on the topic without any links or research is at the opposite end of the spectrum. A slightly more detailed post with some links falls somewhere in between.

Benefits of Developing Deep Content

If you focus on deep content, here are the benefits:

You Establish Thought Leadership

When you create deep content, you establish your expertise on the topic at hand. if your goal involved building trust, and showing that you are a reliable source of detailed information, deep content is an excellent tool for you to use.

You Will Optimize for Long Tail Keywords

Because deep content tends to be longer and more detailed it tends to use long tail keywords. it is significantly easier to optimize these for search and other purposes. For example, it’s easier to land on the front page of search engine results for long tail keywords because the intended audience is narrower.

It Appeals to Influencers and Low Funnel Customers

Influencers are people who have specialized knowledge of a particular niche along with a trusting and loyal following. Power users and brand ambassadors are also in a similar category. They understand your products and services, and they often have a deeper than average knowledge of your brand, your product, and your services.

deep vs wide content

Deep content appeals to these customers. It covers topics at a deeper level, which is what they crave. These are readers looking for industry insights, instructions, product reviews, tips and techniques, and analytical pieces such as whitepapers.

By providing deep content, you can also appeal to lower sales funnel customers. Deep content, especially stuff that goes into detail about specific products or appeals to certain interests is often just the information needed to create a lead.

Unsurprisingly, making an impact on low funnel customer and influencers is no easy feat. They expect a high level of accuracy, data, and detail. If this is your goal, you might consider outsourcing these tasks to the professionals. Here are a few reputable sources to consider:

  • Get Good Grade: This service is known as a real workhorse. If you need blog content, articles, and social media posts, they should be on your short list.
  • Hot Essay Service: Good editing and proofreading are a must for creating influential and authoritative content. If you want to create your own content, but need a bit of help polishing it, look into editing, proofreading, and rewriting services here.
  • Rewarded Essays: Some of the best long-form content that runs as deep as your customers demand are articles and whitepapers. This service employs a copywriting team that is more than capable of producing these authoritative documents for you.
  • Supreme Dissertations: This is the level at which customers want true insights into your products, and evidence that what you have to offer is superior to your competition. Detailed, data backed product reviews and descriptions are just what you need.
  • Flash Essay: How do you get the most out of your content? Blog posts, presentations, and other content can be polished and repurposed to make some great, in-depth content. To do this, check out rewriting services.

Benefits of Creating Wide Content

If you choose wide content for your campaign here are the benefits to developing successful content marketing programs.

Topic selection is easier

With wide content, you have many topics to choose from. If you have a general knowledge of a topic, and it’s interesting to your audience, that’s a viable topic. Wide content can include simple tips posts, summaries of trending topics, and ‘getting to know us’ content about your business.

Ideal for high funnel customers

High funnel customers want the basics. They want to know which products and services you offer. They want to know about your company’s values and policies. High funnel customers are often just beginning to explore your industry, so they seek out general information and understanding.

Great content for branding

If you want to use content to boost your branding efforts, wide content is most impactive. Branding focused content is often easy to read, and entertaining. Have you seen sponsored stories on Facebook that cover human interest topics or discuss that brands commitment to certain values? This is the kind of content that communicates a brand’s story, beliefs, values, and priorities. The idea is to create and curate content that reflects your brand’s personality. Examples of this content are:

  • Shared stories that are touching or humorous
  • Games and quizzes that reflect your brand
  • Stories about your company and team members
  • Curated posts and articles that communicate your values

Highly consumable

You want to be in front of your audience as often as possible. At the same time, you don’t want to exhaust them with a constant barrage of content that forces them to engage their deep thinking processes. This is where wide content comes into play. You can use it to remain on the minds of your followers with snackable content.

Conclusion: An Important Note on Deep and Wide Content

When it comes to content creation, you might assume developing a piece of content that’s deep is more difficult to produce than wide content. This isn’t the case at all. While deep content requires research, skilled writing, and the ability to analyze and interpret complex information, producing wide content that has an impact takes effort as well.

Wide content that is effective is often clever, highly visual, and engages elements such as humor and sensitivity. It’s also important that you pay close attention to high quality and production values. If you aren’t putting the same effort into your wide content as your deep content, you could be missing the mark.