Benefits Of Content Marketing
Have you ever heard the phrase “content is king”? I’m sure you have. It’s a phrase used to tell people how important content is for business. But then, it doesn’t matter how good your content is; if you do not have a marketing strategy to get it distributed, it won’t have a significant effect on what it is intended for.
The primary purpose of content marketing is to appeal to visitors’ admiration and attraction of a blog or site, turning them into customers then, in the long run, retaining them as returning customers. As straightforward as this could be, many companies find it hard to properly market their business using content.
Some companies do not find content marketing necessary, while some just don’t understand how effective it is. It is one thing to get good content; it’s another to get the right marketing strategy that will get it to the right audience and make it attractive to visitors that can later become your customers.
In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of content marketing, why it is essential for the growth of your business, and how effective it is in building a customer base. But first, let’s build a foundation for our intended topic by looking at the concept of content and content marketing.
What Is Content?
Content is a form of information, whether written, visual, or audio, directed to an end-user or a particular audience, asking them to take action or answering a specific question they have always had in mind.
Content is a published piece that encompasses important information to whoever comes across it and gets the person interested in whatever the company has to offer. The different types of contents include;
- Blogging
- Video
- Podcast
- Infographic
- Long-form content
- White papers
- Case studies
- Template and checklist downloads
- Ebooks
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves creating and distributing different forms of materials like blog posts, videos, etc. that do not directly advertise a product or brand. Still, it creates an awareness in the reader or viewer’s mind, which attracts them to the brand and whatever it has to offer.
It is a strategic marketing style dedicated to creating and distributing consistent, meaningful, and valuable information to attract visitors that would become customers and retain them for the most part.
Benefits Of Content Marketing
Now that we’ve built a foundation on the concept of content and content marketing, we can now take a broad look into what benefits content marketing offers your business.
1. Creation Of Brand Awareness
The end result of content marketing is that it directs an individual, visitor, or audience to your brand. It informs the audience of a brand, either old or new. You do not want to have a brand that cannot boast of enough exposure.
Other forms of marketing can help advertise your brand, but content marketing leaves an impression on the audience’s mind, making them think about or remember your brand out of the blues. This is what content marketing will do for you.
When your brand starts creating and distributing excellent and informative content that could sort out an individual or audience’s problems and answer some of their questions, you should be confident that there will be a boost in your customer base.
2. For SEO And Traffic Boost
Now tell me, right from the start, how many searchers have stumbled on your business page? It is vital to have a business page or site but what is more important is to have a site or page that is frequently visited by searchers who, on a daily basis, find answers to unending questions about a topic.
For blog popularity, your site has to dish out consistently relevant and useful content. Those who know how SEO works understand the essence of content marketing on blog popularity and exposure. Addressing SEO’s technical aspect isn’t just enough to get your site on Google’s business map.
To drive traffic to your site, you have to provide contents that solve searchers’ problems consistently. Good content is so effective that even without SEO, when your site offers the right content, it ranks high even in organic search. Google has a way of rewarding websites that produce relevant content that answers searchers’ questions with good rankings on the search engine result pages (SERP).
3. It Establishes Expertise, Authority, Trust (E-A-T)
The E-A-T is the acronym which Google uses to summarize what is expected of a website. For your site to rank high above other sites, it has to fulfill these qualities that tell how professional, skilled, and trustworthy you are on a specific topic of discussion amongst searchers.
A way by which this is evident is how a company’s website will always come up on the first pages when searching for a particular topic. Making such contents user friendly and beginner related yet the solution provided is qualitative and of a professional standard helps the website to rank higher amongst other results on the page.
The expertise tells of the level of proficiency and professionalism of your website on a certain topic. You have to prove yourself as an authority on the subject discussed, and this can be done by only stating credible facts and linking your content to reputable sources. This will make the readers certain you are sure about what you say. Then the trust is determined by how much the searchers believe in your website.
4. Brand Personality
One important fact about your business is that your business is a separate entity from yourself. You might be a representative or an ambassador of your brand and the products it offers, but you are not your brand. The brand should have a personality of its own such that it can relate to its customers by itself, and how can this happen except through content marketing?
Content provides a brand with the best platform to tell of its values, beliefs, qualities, promises to customers, personality, drive, goals, and objectives. It allows the platform to relate directly to the customers. The tone of voice by which a brand speaks to the customers helps maintain a relationship with the customers.
5. Brand Advocates
There’s something about word-of-mouth in marketing that helps to spread the good news about your brand even without you knowing about it. If you can create useful content that speaks to readers or searchers’ souls and find that the piece of information speaks to their exact need, they tend to become loyal followers and customers of your brand.
Brand advocates can be gotten through different means such as advertisement, quality goods, affordable prices, and the likes. Still, one significant way to easily connect with a person in a way that the person becomes dedicated to you is by creating an insightful, touching, intelligent, and powerful piece of content.
When you win over a brand advocate, they become your volunteer salesman that will talk to friends and families, neighbors, and colleagues at work about your brand and its offerings. Content marketing will get you that brand advocate that will give more exposure to your brand and speak well of it to whoever cares to listen without you knowing about it.
Other benefits of content marketing include:
- It positions your business as an expert in its industry.
- It builds credibility
- It increases sales
- It helps a brand to call the shots
- It’s more effective than traditional marketing
- It boosts your social media fanbase
What Is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is simply the planning, development, and management of different forms of content. It is the process of translating your business goals and objectives into a plan that the various forms of content can be used to achieve. In achieving these objectives, it is important you ask these questions;
- Why exactly are we creating this content?
- What audiences do we intend to address?
- What type of content are we creating?
- What kind of responses do we aim to get?
- How are we to promote the contents when they are published?
- How will our intending audience find our content?
- On what platform do we publish the content?
- Whose job is it to create the content?
Steps To Create A Content Marketing Strategy
The following are steps to create a strategy for your content marketing;
- Step 1:Set your goal, mission, and objectives
- Step2: Set your key performance indicators (KPI)
- Step 3: Know and understand your audience
- Step 4: Assess your present position
- Step 5: Find the right channels to create and distribute your content
- Step 6: Decide on the type of content
- Step 7: Allocate resources to the right quarters
- Step 8: Create a calendar
- Step 9: Create your content
- Step 10: Distribute content
- Step 11: Monitor results
Conclusion
Content marketing has a lot to offer your brand and your products. The benefits are numerous, but you must be sure that the content created and distributed are relevant and high quality; if not, your content will have no effect on your brand.
