You just can’t ignore the benefits of content marketing any longer, can you? I mean, common, that’s probably why you’re here, isn’t it? In fact, it has changed the way most businesses advertise. It’s quickly become one of the most practical and effective marketing strategies available today and with good reasons.
Companies now use content to pull in consumers, instead of always relying on traditional advertising that plenty of people ignore. The old ‘let’s just put out a radio or TV ad and hope for the best’, doesn’t work as it used to before. Don’t get me wrong, there are still marketing benefits to using traditional channels. But we can’t use them in the same way that we did in the past.
Here’s the thing, consumer behaviour has changed. Most people no longer locate and digest information as they did before. Now, for the most part, there’s a smart device in everyone’s pockets! This is the biggest reason why so many businesses have switched to a content-first approach.
So if you want your business to be noticed online, you may need to craft an effective strategy for content marketing. While it may require extra work, the benefits offset the time, investment and effort that go into it. People want to make informed purchase decisions and content marketing helps them do that!
However, the way content is used to market a business often differs based on the given organization. For instance, a blog can be a great marketing platform but does your business really need one? Perhaps what you need is a very active social media presence, a book publishing or video strategy. Surely, you can see where I’m going with this.
Let’s take a look at some content marketing benefits you should consider.
1. More Content On Your Site is a Good Thing
More content allows you to take up more space on the web, which is excellent for aiding discovery. Engaging content encourages visitors to stay on your website longer, giving them more opportunities to become familiar with your brand. This fosters trust, which often leads to higher conversion rates.
2. Improved Search Engine Rankings
A steady stream of publications feeds the search engines with fresh content. Every new post that’s added to your website is another page that their bots (a form of artificial intelligence) will index.
Although this is by no means the most efficient way to rank a site because let’s be real, content creation is time-consuming, but having more quality web pages indexed is a good thing. Providing that you’ve included relevant keywords and keyword-rich internal links to help you rank for more search queries. The end results are higher visibility on search engines like Google or Bing and more customers!
3. More Website Traffic
Aside from search engines, you get more referral traffic in general when you’ve got a content strategy in place! For instance, when you contribute to other blogs or websites, you can generate buzz and may even get some links pointing back to your site.
While links are powerful due to their SEO value, a single guest post on a high traffic or authoritative site can also earn you thousands of new website visitors. This is because when people resonate with you, they’ll search or seek you out. Now all you have to do is convert them into paying customers.
4. More Social Traffic
You get increased exposure for your business on social media when you syndicate content to your channels. This attracts more people to engage with your content (shares, link clicks, likes etc.). As a result, you’ll earn more followers and website traffic from social media platforms.
5. Build Trust
We touched on this a little earlier but it’s so important that I had to drop it on the list. Yes, your customers are looking for information that helps them make smart buying decisions but more importantly, they want companies they can trust!
When you create content that focuses on how your organization can help solve their problems, you become a trusted source of info. And once people trust and like you, they’ll often buy from you!
6. More Leads & Sales
Content marketing aims to help customers move quickly through the buying process. It’s meant to attract consumers by becoming part of their online experience. Hence, creating high-quality and relevant content is a must for any business to be considered as a helpful resource. And people are more likely to purchase from and willing provide personal data to companies that are trusted.
7. Improves Brand Awareness, Recognition & Reputation
We sort of touched base on this earlier too, but more content translates to higher visibility/brand awareness for your company. Being highly visible on the web can give your business top-of-mind status. Content marketing can also associate a positive image with your brand, as long as you’re doing the right things.
8. Cut Marketing Cost
Content marketing is incredibly cost-effective because your investment is sensible. While you shouldn’t expect all of your content to ‘go viral’, good content gets reposted on blogs, shared on social media networks, tagged on social bookmarking sites for thousands or even millions of people to see etc.
Try to reach a similar audience through traditional marketing channels and it would cost much more than a lot of small businesses can afford!
Bottom line:
There are so many benefits to content marketing that business executives simply cannot ignore. A business that uses content strategically to highlight the benefits of its products or services will enjoy a considerable and lucrative online presence. The sooner you begin, the quicker you’ll start to see lasting results.
Finally, there’s a somewhat compounding effect to using content marketing because unlike traditional promotion, your content will continue to bring in leads for years to come. After all, it lives online and pretty much always accessible by prospects.
