Content marketing is far more than a buzzword, it’s an essential marketing tool that can help you boost audience engagement and establish your brand presence. How? To answer that question, let’s look at the top 10 benefits of content marketing.
To start with though, here’s what HubSpot says about the power of content marketing.
“Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique.”
Content marketing should be a top priority for your business going forward. So, let’s look at the top 10 benefits.
1 – Increases your digital footprint
A digital footprint is essentially the portrait you paint of yourself online. It’s essential that it’s accurate and reflects your business as you want others to see it.
Good quality content enables you to not only increase your digital footprint but also improve it. For example, your blog is a great place to develop useful content (posts) that position your brand positively and extends your reach.
2 – A cost-effective way of generating leads
When done correctly, content marketing is a highly effective way of collecting leads from your target market. And it’s cost-effective: Content marketing can generate a business up to three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, and costs 62% less. From a budgetary perspective, ROI is certainly one of the most attractive benefits of content marketing.
3 – Outperforms advertising
When it comes to ROI and driving value, content marketing almost always beats advertising. For starters, content marketing is a continuous strategy, whereas ad campaigns only work when they’re running. And many people actively block ads in any case (in the US in 2020, 26.4 percent of internet users blocked adverts).
It’s also far more difficult to attribute outbound advertising. With content marketing you can measure its effectiveness in any number of ways.
4 – Builds trust and awareness
Audience trust is becoming ever more important for brands. When you offer your audience free, high-quality information it demonstrates that you value them, and that you aren’t there simply to sell to them. Asking customers and prospects to contribute to your content can be an effective way to build trust, too, for example by asking readers to leave their comments.
5 – Lays the foundations for SEO
Content is vital to SEO because without it, search engines won’t have sufficient information to index your pages correctly, and help you rank.
In fact, content marketing and search engine optimisation rely on each other. While content lays the foundations for SEO, without SEO your content won’t be found or read. Even if you write the most engaging piece of content ever created, unless it’s optimised it won’t show up in the 5.6 billion searches that take place every day on the internet.
6 – Increases your social media following
To remain relevant in this modern era, it’s essential to use social media proactively and grow your presence on there. To make this happen, you need to be consistently sharing valuable content. Your content must be authentic and, rather than focusing on promoting your goods and services, you need to emphasise your personality and value.
By syndicating content across all your social platforms more people will read and share your content with their friends and followers. Over time this means more followers for your brand on social networks.
7 – Provides long-term visibility
Content marketing can help encourage consumers to return to your site over the long term. Keeping content fresh and up to date will help you consistently stay high in search rankings, increase traffic to your website, and improve brand awareness and recognition.
8 – Earns you more referral traffic
By contributing to external publications, for example by guest posting, you’ll have the opportunity to link back to your site. It’s important to post only on relevant, high-quality sites that have authority. If you do this, just one guest post could earn you thousands of new visitors to your website.
9 – Creates closer customer relationships
Great content can not only help you increase the size of your audience but also increase loyalty with your existing customers. If customers start to rely on you as a valuable source of information, they will stay loyal to your brand for at least as long as they continue to purchase your products.
10 – Benefits all industries
All types of industries, including less glamorous ones, can use content marketing to good effect. By providing insights on industry developments or using content to make your industry more approachable and relatable, content marketing can help you reach new audiences, and strengthen existing customer relationships.
For example, manufacturing is one such ‘less glamorous’ industry, but marketers in that sector are taking the above on board, with 64% expecting to increase their content marketing budget in 2022.
In summary, content marketing is an inexpensive, effective and safe way to elevate your brand, no matter what your industry. It’s easy to recognise the benefits of content marketing. There’s no mystery.
The sooner you start investing time and energy into content marketing, the sooner you’ll reap the rewards – whether you’re looking for increased traffic, higher conversion rates or simply better relationships with your customers.
