The Role of Content Marketing In Business
We’ve written before about the importance of content marketing for the modern business. If you’re reading the signs of the times, communicating with your target audiences using lively, informative, entertaining content is likely to be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s explore the primary advantages of content marketing, and explain how each one can change your business for the better.
The 10 Benefits of a Content Marketing Strategy
1. Tell Your Company’s Story
You can use your content to tell your company’s story, in a voice that is authentic, consistent, persuasive and enjoyable. This helps people get to know you, and positions your company in their minds both as an authority in your domain and as an organization they can do business with while staying true to their values. This is one of the main advantages of content marketing.
You no doubt have heard how important brand awareness and brand association are when it comes to customers’ choice of a company to support. Use content marketing to give people a sense of who you are at the outset of their consumer journey, and they’re more likely to return to your content and make purchases later, even if it takes some time.
2. Build Better Relationships with Your Customers
Familiarity breeds contempt, goes the old saying. We’re inclined to disagree. In content marketing, familiarity breeds trust. The point of material you put out is ostensibly to explain a subject or entertain, but there is a deeper purpose underneath — every word you write, every second of video you release, has the potential to help draw the audience into your world and make them feel an emotional connection to your company. Once that is in place, whatever propositions you intend to make to them will land better and be considered more closely. Content marketing helps with overcoming the natural distrust people have to entities they have not gotten to know.
3. Diversify Your Campaigns
If you’re running traditional paid media marketing only, your eggs are in a single basket, and the success or failure of your marketing campaign hinges on a select few factors. If you branch out by getting into content marketing at the same time, sub-optimal performance in any one of your marketing prongs can be offset by the others. Making your campaigns more diverse, and thus more resilient to failure, is a key benefit of content marketing.
4. Turn Leads into Conversions
Almost half the leads you run into, whether B2B or B2C, want to read at least 3-5 pieces of content before making a purchase. Don’t let promising opportunities go to waste at the bottom of the funnel just because you weren’t aware of the benefits of content marketing.
5. Showcase Your Successes
Content like customer reviews and social media influencer testimonials carry a lot of weight today. One advantage of content marketing is it gives you the chance to be tactful while putting your accomplishments on display. A third party’s promotion of your business is likely to be seen as more trustworthy and less abrasive than if you yourself were to make big claims about how great your product or service is.
How does content marketing help with this? It provides plenty of material for others with audiences of their own to share and engage with, and meanwhile you can post positive reviews for social cachet without having to go into detail about how magnificent you are.
6. Improve Your SEO Ranking
No list of the benefits of content marketing would be complete without some mention of SEO. Your position in Google’s search rankings is 1000% more important for web traffic on your site than anything you can post on social media. Writing keyword-rich blog articles, releasing videos, and churning out other content can help convince search engines that your pages are thriving, helpful and worthy of users’ attention.
7. Earn Backlinks
Similarly, when you deliver high-quality content, you increase the chances of another site linking back to your page. This also looks good to Google, increasing your domain authority, raising your keyword ranking, and driving organic search traffic in a kind of virtuous cycle.
8. Grow Your Social Media Presence
As an added benefit of content marketing, you can build a following on social media. This won’t happen overnight, and you’ll have to create content that somehow stands out from the billions of other posts flying around the internet, but there are ways to improve your chances. Newsjacking lets you avail yourself of prominent news stories that people are excited about and likely to engage with — put out content centered on those stories at the right time and your social media accounts will benefit from a tidal wave of organic search traffic that may have disappeared 48 hours later. This technique can be applied in the rest of your content marketing strategy as well.
9. Make Your Website Better
If you’re a consumer or a B2B buyer, and you find a website for a product or service you need, but it’s desolate and obviously not well-maintained, how reassured are you going to feel that you’ve reached the end of your search?
Adding interesting and helpful content to your website makes it look professional, authoritative, and exciting. It will help entice your audience to linger, explore more pages, move farther down the funnel, and at the same time you get all the other benefits of content marketing. Win-win.
10. Acquire Experience for Future Campaigns
There’s no substitute for experience. Even with the best guidance in the world, each marketing campaign you launch will be different, and there will always be an element of uncertainty. The more times you’ve undertaken content marketing in real-world conditions, the more attuned you’ll be to signs of success or shortcoming as data roll in on future campaigns, and the more confident you’ll be adjusting things on the fly.
Develop a High ROI Content Marketing Strategy With Us
The benefits of content marketing are yours for the taking, and with advice from leaders in the field, your next campaign is set to go off without a hitch. Contact us today for help with designing, implementing and evaluating a robust content marketing strategy: wearecsg.com/contact.
