The popularity of content marketing among B2C and B2B marketers alike is unarguable.
Every day, consumers are inundated with text, image, audio, and video content via email, social media, and text from virtually every organization we interact with online or offline.
Content everywhere!
However, you may still be wondering whether or not content marketing is an appropriate strategy for your own business.
When content is marketed properly, it requires a significant initial expenditure of time and resources from strategy and ideation to formulation, publication, distribution and measurement.
It takes time to define your audience and give them the content they want. Some marketers still question content’s ability to generate a return on investment or don’t understand how its value can be measured.
Here, you’ll find 10 serious benefits organizations like yours can realize from developing and implementing a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
1. Organic Research Authority and Vision
One of the main reasons to adopt a content marketing strategy and produce content that consumers want to read, like and share is to develop domain authority on the keywords and phrases that your organization wants to find in search engines like Google.
Maintaining authoritative content is a key principle behind how Google determines search engine ranking.
In some categories, content must show expertise, reliability, trustworthiness, or dining in order to be considered at the top of search engine sites.
Consistent, high-quality, relevant content can land you in organic search results, which in turn builds brand awareness (among the beneficial marketing byproducts detailed below).
Of course, establishing yourself as an authority on any subject is not a simple or quick task. However, it is worth doing it right, as the long-term benefits can be enormous.
2. Increase organic traffic
Simply put, content that ranks higher in search engines attract more clicks than those who are looking for the best answers to their queries.
Moreover, since this traffic is based on consumers looking for specific answers, highly targeted and properly designed content with strong calls to action can lead to leads quickly.
3. Increase referral traffic
Relevant, high-quality, high-ranking content is also more likely to attract the attention of other website owners looking to better inform their audience or build their own authority through linking.
As such, high-quality content will attract valuable inbound links from relevant third-party websites, which in turn will add more to your growing authority.
These links from relevant sources have the dual effect of driving traffic and authority for your business, which in turn can have a positive impact on your ranking.
All of these components, starting with the content you create, are effectively intertwined.
4. More social sharing
As stated, all content should be created with the intention of being read, liked, and shared.
The latter are references to social authority and membership or social proof. To this end, content creators should be careful to include calls to action in their content and provide easy ways for readers to share content either via social media or otherwise.
Additionally, creating and distributing quality content opens up two increasingly important channels – user-generated content and influencer marketing.
Today’s consumers, especially those in a younger demographic, often take to social media (especially Instragam and now TikTok) to support the brands, products, and services they love and trust. Likewise, their followers are also more likely to trust and buy from brands that have been validated by their peers.
The same principle applies to influencers and their loyal followers.
Influencers have their personal reputations to back it up. As such, they will only work with those brands that reflect their values and produce high quality, engaging content.
5. Targeted content during the customer journey
A well-defined content marketing strategy involves providing content to support consumers throughout their buying journey.
Content created for each stage of this journey from awareness and reflection to conversion, retention and endorsement enables the consumer to complete each stage with confidence.
At the same time, it builds long-term trust in your business and your brand.
Content marketing is very much a growth strategy. Here are some of the different ways content moves the needle:
- Awareness content It is primarily designed to educate your users and is the first step in directing them to your website or other online presence points. (eg blogs, social posts, white papers, infographics).
- consideration content It enables your users to gain a deeper understanding of your specific offers compared to other offers available to them. (eg case studies, webinars, reviews).
- conversion content It helps your potential customers validate their decision to actually choose your solution over others. (eg demos, free trials).
- retention content Supports and supports your offer by continuously adding value and helps your customers ensure they have made the right choice (eg help documentation, customer newsletters).
- invitation content Shared with now established clients and enable them to share your offerings with other potential clients from a position of trust (eg referral requests, testimonials, webinars).
6. High conversion rates
When all of the above benefits are taken into account, high-quality content marketing campaigns tend to convert at a higher rate than most other marketing techniques.
Targeted and trusted consumers are more likely to buy than those temporarily swayed by an engaging three-line ad or clickbait headline.
To reiterate, people generally choose to buy from brands they trust, and trust is built over time via relevant and authoritative content.
As mentioned, strong and clear calls to action in blog posts, articles, videos, and other content will help advance your prospects through conversion.
7. Multiform content
The beauty of most content is that it can be forwarded and reproduced in multiple formats to be shared across multiple platforms and channels which increases your potential reach and brand awareness.
For example, a single case study can be created initially as a traditional mix of text, tables, and images, but then repackaged and shared in video, infographic, blog post, social post, social ad, podcast, or print formats.
By creating a defined process for reallocating content, you can introduce time and resource saving efficiencies to positively impact your bottom line.
8. Evergreen content
While creating fresh and new content is generally challenging and labor intensive, there is also the opportunity to save significant time by leveraging evergreen content.
While the core concepts may remain static, environmental changes often require updates to the characteristics of product and service offerings.
As time passes and situations change, there is always the potential to take existing high value content and update it to reflect the ‘new normal’.
Brands have had to be particularly flexible over the past 24 months in order to respond to changing social and societal norms.
Those who do this successfully benefit from saving time, as well as boosting customer confidence and loyalty based on their willingness to be sympathetic and flexible.
9. Original research data
Access to each company’s main content source is access to its unique source of product, service, and/or customer data.
The benefit of leveraging this type of data is that it can be used to create useful, actionable, insight-driven content such as research reports, case studies, and white papers for consumers, partners, and other key stakeholders.
Because this data is specific to the organization, it can become a differentiator and is less likely to have competition from an organic search perspective.
10. Long term cost savings
While the short-term cost of producing content may be relatively high, the long-term cost is relatively low compared to other strategies such as paid advertising.
Content creation and distribution is usually a one-time effort, though we’ve already mentioned the multiple format and reuse options. On the other hand, paid search and social advertising have continuous cumulative costs each time someone clicks.
Furthermore, any paid advertising strategy requires at least a multi-week commitment and a relatively large budget for testing and optimization; Especially depending on the level of competition.
Get strategic about your content
The majority of organizations do create a great deal of content, but they may be doing so in an ad hoc or haphazard manner.
By developing a content strategy around what content to create, to whom and where to distribute it effectively, you can ensure that your efforts will be rewarded with the benefits offered above.
After all, it’s safe to assume that we all believe we really are the authority on the topics we want our clients to learn about.
In most cases, we just need proper attention and rigor to attract more eyeballs, qualified leads and businesses.
More resources:
- 5 Ws (& 1 H) for content marketing
- 100 Types of Content: The Ultimate Guide for Marketers
- Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
Featured image: Sammy/Shutterstock
