Time and time again, we hear someone say content is king. The phrase has been overused and beaten to the bush, but where digital marketing is concerned, it’s incredibly relevant.
At face value, content marketing seems like a piece of cake, doesn’t it? All you need to is write a couple of blog posts, add a few more pages to your website, and you’re good to go, right?
Wrong.
As a matter of fact, content marketing is much more comprehensive than it initially appears. It involves a multitude of factors, such as your keyword research, the buyer personas you’re targeting, an innovative and creative approach, and your ability to write.
The most significant factor, though? Ensuring your content trumps your competition’s. With brands now competing with each other on a global scale, it’s as tough as ever to break the clutter and establish a name for yourself.
However, despite all this, content creation is at an all-time high and that’s because more and more businesses realize the importance of an effective content marketing strategy. So, without further delay, here are five reasons content marketing is crucial to your marketing strategy:
Table Of Contents:
Increased Traffic and Organic Visibility (SEO)
Content marketing and SEO are two peas in a pod; one simply cannot work without the other. Your content helps build visibility on search engines in multiple ways, directly and indirectly. It does the former by appearing for long tail searches and the latter by boosting the primary category, and service and product level pages with information regarding niche topics.
More and more websites today are getting organic traffic from content-oriented pages instead of other pages like the homepage and category and service pages. This increase in organic traffic allows brands to make themselves available to a wide array of new customers and cater to their needs by providing information.
By answering their questions and acting as a knowledge base, even during the early stages of the buying process, you can attain higher traffic and a higher rate of conversions, too.
Build Brand Awareness
Creating a name for your brand isn’t an easy feat. It’s an ongoing task that requires a huge investment in terms of effort, time, and, especially, money. Compared to other methods though, content marketing has proven to be a cost-effective way of building brand awareness to new members of your target market. SEO expert Corey Batt from ClickBurst believes that content is the most important ranking factor, above even links and keywords.
For instance, let’s suppose you’ve developed a simple buying guide. Its creation doesn’t require a lot from your end, but it serves as the first potential touchpoint a potential customer has with your business. This content marketing piece answers questions for the customer and helps build a long-term relationship.
As another content marketing example, you could create an engaging video that creates ripples on various social media platforms. A viral video helps separate you from your competitors and adds personality to your brand.
Brand awareness isn’t something that can be expressed in quantitative terms, which makes it difficult to achieve. However, the main aspect of marketing involves exposing your brand to new people and an innovative content marketing strategy can help you do that.
Targets Users At Different Buying Stages
When you create a website, you think about the different pages that can be used to target customers at different stages of the buying process. However, unlike service, product, and category pages, content marketing can be used to target customers at all stages of the buying process, whether it’s the initial awareness stage or the conversion stage.
Content marketing can help to prevent your customers from leaving your site. If consumers decide to leave your site and to buy your products in a bricks and mortar store, this makes the job of measuring the ROI on your paid and organic marketing channels all the more difficult; even if you use a POS card reader.
When planned carefully, content marketing can serve multiple functions, including catering to different needs, conveying different messages, and assisting users to transition from one stage to the next.
For instance, a simple buying guide can serve as a powerful content tool for potential customers in the consideration phase and nurture them through to the conversion face by eliminating any informational questions they may have that prevent them from making a decision.
Establishes Trust
Online reviews have become extremely important today. 92 percent of customers read online reviews today, and 68 percent of customers say online reviews make them trust a business more.
So, why our reviews so important? Well, simply put, it reassures customers that they’re getting their money’s worth of products and services. User-generated content, such as online reviews, helps meet that need. Jane Wardle the chief editor and reviewer at financial comparison website Lendingexpert.co.uk comment that provider reviews have played a major part in their business strategy over the past 12 months. She goes on to comment that reviews allow our visitors to see comments and feedback from our customers, and as a business, we get real feedback which can help us to improve and see which areas we are going well.
Content is a great way to display a brand’s integrity and establish trust with your target audience. With such importance, it’s no surprise why content marketing helps drive sales. By reassuring customers that you’re reliable, you can set yourself apart from your competitors.
- You can incorporate this in your content marketing strategy in different ways:
- Invite a guest contributor to add their own content to your website or blog
- Ask satisfied customers to leave reviews on sites, such as Foursquare and Yelp
- Work with a blogger or influencer to endorse your product
- Create authority branded content
- Contribute your own guest column or post on an established vlog, magazine site, or website
Feeds Other Platforms
Great content is the heart of various memorable and successful social media campaigns. Without a constant stream of entertaining and compelling content, people don’t have any reason to follow your brand across multiple social media platforms.
Content acts as bait that helps people engage with your brand and deems it worthy of a follow. Engaging content also generates exposure for your brand through retweets, reposts, and shares. However, with infinite information available on social media platforms, brands need to do better with the quality of their content.
Content marketing also serves as the fuel that drives successful marketing automation and email campaigns. Content, again, serves as the bait that pushes users to sign-up and open your emails.
Content marketing is especially crucial for businesses utilizing various marketing automation tools to deliver targeted emails to users most likely to engage with your business.
Content marketing is here to say. Not just that, but with the increase in competition and quality, the only way it’s going is up. Content marketing, today, has become an integral part of the marketing strategy for online businesses and business not partaking will undoubtedly fall behind the competition. Quality should always be prioritized over quantity, and particular focus needs to be given to the distribution of content too.
So, why do you think content marketing is important? Are there any content marketing strategies that have proven successful for you? Let us know in the comments below!
Author’s Bio:
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
