If there is one thing that marketers know by heart, it’s that “content is king!” This statement has been a mantra in the marketing world for ages, but have you ever stopped to wonder why? A lot of marketers and business owners take on content marketing without any appropriate strategy, and while some succeed, others find failure.
Content marketing has a lot of potential and it is a great way to get your buyers to come back to your website. It is also exceptionally cheaper as compared to ads and adverts. According to Demand Metric, content marketing is 62% cheaper as compared to outbound marketing and generates three times as many leads.
Content marketing is a favorite for many marketers. But before we delve deeper into content marketing, let’s take a look at what it is.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing in its easiest definition is the ability to tell your viewers a story with the objective of providing them with information.
According to the official definition by The Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by providing them with high-quality content that is relevant to them on a daily basis. Based on that information, they should be able to make a decision regarding to either purchasing the product or not. Even if they don’t purchase the product, they should still leave with a little more understanding of your product than they knew before.
Content marketing shows that you care about your audience and that you give them attention.
Benefits of Content Marketing
1. Trust
The more content that you create and share in your niche, makes the author an authoritative figure in their field. More people would trust them and expect them to be experts. For example, a fitness trainer who shares content on eating right and effective exercises would help more people believe that the trainer is an expert in his field.
2. Brand Awareness
Content marketing can also be used to help raise awareness about your brand. If done correctly, content marketing can help significantly increase traffic to your website, as well help more people become aware of your product. For example, a company that makes a blender could publish different recipes that users can make using their blender, which can in turn help more people learn about the company’s product as well as get more information.
3. Great for Organic Search
Google rewards websites that offer information and relevant information. For websites that continue to offer relevant and expert content, instead of spammy ones, Google recognizes that the content is useful and offers information to the readers and it will push your website to a higher ranking.
Search engines are always changing, but if you ensure to keep your website up to date with new and more relevant information, your website should continue to rank higher and longer in the search engines.
4. Generates Leads
Content marketing is a great way to generate leads for your website. Content builds trust among readers and it is easier to convert someone who trusts the information instead of someone who doesn’t. Content marketing also allows strangers to find you through your useful and informative content. You get access to the users even before the competition even has a chance to enter the picture.
5. Attracts Ideal Buyers
While getting leads is great, converting them is much better. The best part about content marketing is that you get more relevant leads. This means you end up filtering out the leads that are never going to be interested in your product. A lead who visits your page through search results, will only click on your website if they are looking for what you are providing, and from these readers, only those who are interested in what you have to say will read your content and click on your landing page. From those, only people who are interested in your landing page will browse through your products and make a purchase or sign up for information. This entire process allows you to filter out the leads that were never going to convert to highly potential leads from those that are extremely interested in what you have to offer.
6. Better Converts
As mentioned in the ideal buyers section, users who proceed to come to your website, browse through your products and sign up for information are those that are genuinely interested in purchasing your product. Content allows you to weed out any leads and give you direct access to push more direct marketing measures at leads that have a much better chance at converting into sales.
7. Social Media Attraction
If you are an expert in your field and your content helps solve a problem in a unique way, then it is likely that people are going to share your content with others that they think should know. Consider all the different DIY videos that people share. It offers a unique way to solve a common problem, which is one of the reasons why they are so extremely popular. In order to become viral, you must offer content that is not only informative, but also catchy and unique. It should offer something that no other content offers online.
8. Brand Authority
If you show your ability to solve a problem with a unique solution or even offer information on a topic in your niche, you prove to your target audience that you are an authority in the field based on your content. This should help more readers to share your content with others as well as gravitate towards buying products suggested by you.
9. Reason to Come Back to Website
If you provide people with helpful and informative content, you give them a reason to come back to your website. Since you’ve become a trusted source for information, people will more naturally turn towards you to get information related to your niche.
10. Builds Backlinks
The higher rated and unique your content is, the more likely that other websites will use your content as a reference on their websites. This gives you more backlinks and helps boost your rankings with Google.
Content marketing is extremely powerful, cheap and effective. It gets done what in-your-face marketing cannot possibly accomplish. While people are already vary when they watch an advertisement, they are more relaxed when it comes to reading informative content and are more open to accepting suggestions. However, content marketing should be done right for it to be successful. It can end up becoming a tiring job if you don’t do it right.
