Content marketing has become one of the most important aspects of any business. It is a way to attract and retain customers by creating compelling, informative content that's relevant to your target audience. This post will explore the benefits of content marketing and why it should be at the top of your priority list when it comes to online strategies.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing can work in a number of different ways. Content marketers usually create blogs, infographics, videos and social media posts that provide answers to questions or show people how to use products and services.
It is focused on providing customers with value so they’ll be inclined to share it with their friends and followers on social media. By creating content that your customers and potential customers find useful, you will be able to increase your brand awareness and develop a relationship of trust with consumers as they move through the sales funnel.
Additionally, content marketing is considered a less costly strategy than some other digital marketing strategies, such as PPC advertising. It can have a bit of a slower start while your content library grows and reaches a larger audience, but it can be worth its weight in gold once your content catalogue grows.
It is important for marketers to think about who they want to target with their content, what questions the content answers, what type of medium will work best, how they want to speak to the end-users, and what is the best method of posting the content. When considering what content you should be focusing on, a great tip is producing 'evergreen' content, which retains its value long after it is first published.
Facts & Figures
The statistics below go a long way to highlighting the importance of a well-planned content marketing strategy!
- Blog posts get shared about two times as often on social media than links or text posts.
- Content marketing has a 97% higher conversion rate for marketers using it in their campaigns than those who don’t.
- 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing
- Content marketing provides 68% more trust to customers than traditional ads.
- 91% of consumers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads
Sources:
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
https://socialmediaweek.org/
https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic
The Benefits
As evidenced by the stats, there are a number of benefits that your business can see as a result of content marketing. Here is just a snapshot of some of these benefits.
1. Increase your brand awareness
We touched on it earlier in the blog post, but creating high-quality content is a great way to increase your brand awareness. If your content has been designed to answer a particular question or offers free insights that will help the reader, you position yourselves as an industry leader and will help attract new customers as well as retain existing ones as loyal fans.
2. Improve your SEO
Developing good quality content is an essential part of making sure your business appears and ranks well in the SERP's. Content creation is the foundation of SEO, and constantly coming up with content that answers searchers questions will lead to Google showing your results higher up on search results.
3. Support your sales
In today's world, consumers are constantly bombarded with adverts and it can be difficult to get your business in front of your potential customer. Creating content that showcases why your product/service is better than anybody else's will help you to move people through the funnel and convert them into loyal customers!
4. Drives traffic
Through content marketing, you can use keyword research to create valuable pieces of content that drive users to key pages on your website. What's great about this increase is that this will be active, organic traffic that you don't have to pay for.
Keyword-rich content will also help with your SEO as it will indicate that your content is useful and relevant to the pages it links to.
5. It's a cost-effective strategy
We mentioned it in the facts & figures section, but content marketing really is a cost-effective strategy! It costs 62% less than traditional marketing but still generates three times as many leads.
Whilst it may take more time to develop than some other quick win strategies, the long term results definitely deliver value for money.
Here to help
Content marketing is a vital part of any modern digital marketing strategy. It can help you build your brand, generate leads for your business and improve ROI by converting more people into customers. If content marketing sounds like the right fit for your company but you’re not sure where to start, contact us today.
