Content marketing has grown in popularity in recent years with more and more businesses realising that the quality of the content they produce has a direct correlation with their brand personality and can ultimately increase the bottom line by generating more leads.
The term ‘Content is king’ has never been truer, and if you are a business that doesn’t engage in content marketing you are missing a trick.
DEFINING CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing can be defined as a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on the creation and distribution of consistent and engaging marketing material likely to be of high interest to your target market.
Basically – your content is whatever you are putting out to your audience, from your website, your social posts and of course your blogs.
All the best brands in the world engage in content marketing to ensure their message resonates with members of their target market – so you should too!
Here’s a simple exercise – think of any brand or business you know, what is it that makes them memorable?
Simple; it’s the content. Nike, Apple, Tesla – they all tell a story through their marketing, not simply selling their products.
The following are some of the best reasons why you should invest in improving the quality of the content your business is producing.
IMPROVE BRAND REPUTATION
Providing high-quality content to your audience which helps them solve a particular pain point is likely to build trust among your consumer base as you are not overtly trying to sell them a product or service, but rather providing valuable information that will indirectly promote your brand.
You should be thinking of how you can help your customers overcome the difficulties or challenges they face and how your product or service offers solutions rather than the more traditional approach of “We’re great, here’s why you should buy from us!”.
Start to think about the type of content that helps, engages and educates your audience and you will never be short of content ideas!
GENERATE LEADS
While the purpose of content marketing may be to educate your audience about a product or service, – ultimately as a business, your goal is to sell.
Content can be tailored to people at each stage of the sales funnel in various forms such as video, blogging, social, email, chatbots and even ads! The successful use and implementation of these will enable your business to significantly increase brand awareness, loyalty and ultimately conversions.
HELP IMPROVE SEO
Search engines essentially work by aiming to provide users with the most relevant content to answer their particular search query, this means that businesses who invest time and energy into creating such content are going to get continual, ‘free’ visitors to their website as opposed to paying for clicks through paid ads or paid social.
As long as your content is high quality and engaging, while specifically answering users’ search queries, you will continually get a new stream of website visitors who, at the very least, will be somewhat interested in what you are offering.
BACKLINKS
Another important component of content marketing is that it will help you get more backlinks to your website. If you write content that appeals to a large number of people, it increases the chances of others referring back to your blog or article. This means that search engines will rank your website more favourably, which leads to more website visitors, which (you guessed it!) leads to better domain authority and more visitors!
EVERGREEN CONTENT
Another great benefit of content marketing is that your blog or article topics will tend to be become more evergreen, meaning it is not just useful at a single point in time and can be used and reused time after time.
This “evergreen content” should focus on providing answers & marketing materials to the most commonly asked user questions among your target market and therefore should continually bring in a stream of new and relevant users to your website.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Your content marketing strategy will greatly enhance your social media strategy! What a great way to show your followers that you’re an expert and to get them to visit your website to read more. Blogs and videos, in particular, make great content for sharing on social media and can be highly engaging and helpful for your users. As well as helping your users gives them a great excuse to visit your website.
