What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the marketing process of creating, publishing, and promoting relevant content to a pre-defined online audience.
Content marketing aims to assist an online business in increasing brand awareness, achieving better SEO rankings, and engaging with its audience in various digital marketing channels.
You must have a content marketing strategy to take advantage of all the benefits of content marketing. Through a content strategy, you can specify what type of content to create and when to publish it, which audience to target, and how to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.
10 Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Important
- Content Marketing Is Cost-Effective
- Works Well With Other Marketing Tactics
- Boosts Brand Awareness
- Helps In Increasing Conversions
- It Can Improve SEO
- Improves Customer Engagement
- It Helps In Building Credibility
- Assists in Business Growth
- Helps In Establishing Trust With Your Audience
- Get To Know Your Target Audience
1. Content Marketing Is Cost-Effective
Content marketing is not low-cost but has a great return on investment (ROI). Creating high-quality content regularly is expensive as it requires a lot of time and money, but it’s the best investment you can make for your business.
Good content is considered an “asset” for an online business that can generate long-term benefits like increased organic traffic, brand mentions, backlinks, and social media engagement.
In terms of numbers, studies show that companies that run content marketing campaigns get more traffic and leads than companies that don’t have a formal content strategy.
- Increase in site visits by up to 55%
- 434% more pages indexed by search engines
- 97% more backlinks
- On average, they get 5X more leads because of content marketing
In addition, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and every dollar spent on content marketing generates 3X more leads.
2. Works Well With Other Marketing Tactics
Content marketing is part of digital marketing. Digital marketing is promoting your business using ALL available online marketing channels.
For all other digital marketing channels to work and generate good results, they need high-quality content relevant to their target audience.
For example:
For your SEO campaigns to work and help you rank high on Google, you need content that satisfies the intent of the users and, at the same time, is also SEO-friendly.
For your social media campaigns to generate engagement, followers, likes, and shares, you need content to entice your audience.
For your email marketing campaigns to generate sales, you need convincing content to encourage users to take the final step and purchase.
3. Boosts Brand Awareness
Content marketing is one of the best ways to increase awareness about your brand and how your products or services can help solve people’s problems.
This can be done using various channels, the most important being search engine optimization, paid advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Let’s see below some examples of how this is done in practice:
When users have a problem or need, they will probably use a search engine to search for information and solutions. They are still in the awareness face and want to find out how to solve a problem or get an answer to a question.
With content marketing, you can generate content that educates, informs, and suggests possible ways to solve or answer their problem.
If you do this successfully, people will most likely take note of your brand (or bookmark your website, share it with your followers, subscribe to your newsletter) and re-visit it to get more information and updates.
They will eventually become loyal followers and ambassadors of your brand, which positively influences other users (and search engines) to trust your brand.
This is exactly the same process we follow on our blog. We strategically provide content that helps users learn SEO and answer questions related to digital marketing.
Through content, we establish our brand as a trustworthy source for all their online marketing needs, and as a result, we get tens of email subscribers per day who join our community, more leads for digital marketing services, and sales of our online digital marketing courses.
4. Helps In Increasing Conversions
When you start an online business, the ultimate goal is to run a successful and profitable business that will generate money. To make money, you need to have conversions, and content marketing can help a lot in this process.
Consumers are ‘bombarded’ with ads in their Facebook feed, Google search results, Twitter, Instagram, and all online networks they use, and it’s getting harder and more expensive to get their attention.
The competition is high in all niches, and the number of ad placements is limited. A better way to utilize your resources, including time and money, is to create content assets to position your brand in all customer journey stages.
By providing them with valuable content at all stages of the journey, you’ll be able to get their attention and establish a long-term relationship between your customers and your brand.
This relationship will eventually lead to more conversions as it will be easier for users to buy products or services from brands they trust and have proved they can help.
5. It Can Improve SEO
Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. After SEO optimizing your website, the next step is to develop a content marketing plan to target specific keywords to make your website visible on Google and other search engines.
Content marketing is vital in SEO because:
- Through content, you can target specific search terms that you want your website to appear in search.
- High-quality content can attract backlinks from other websites, increasing your domain authority and leading to higher rankings.
So, instead of relying on other techniques to trick Google algorithms, the best way to improve your SEO is by regularly publishing high-quality content that satisfies user intent.
6. Improves Customer Engagement
Everything mentioned so far works towards a common goal: to use the content as the medium of communication between your company and your customers.
In content marketing, this is known as inbound marketing and is the way for companies to build bi-directional communication channels with their customers.
Bi-directional means potential customers can communicate with you through post comments, social post comments, feedback forms, messages, etc.
With content marketing, this process is clearly defined with metrics, tools, and ways to optimize customer engagement.
7. It Helps In Building Credibility
Content marketing can help you establish credibility and differentiate your business from competitors.
Consumers using Google or Facebook can easily spot brands that care for their customers by providing valuable content.
Statistics show that:
- 84% of people expect brands to produce content that entertains, provides solutions, and produces excellent experiences and events.
- 91% of consumers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity.
- 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a company’s products and services through content instead of ads.
If your competitors are not active with content, this is your chance to stand out and differentiate your brand.
If they are already active with content, you can analyze their campaigns to find their strengths and weaknesses and offer your audience better and more valuable content.
The Internet may be flooded with millions of new pages per day, but not all content is helpful. There is still room for improvement and content gaps in almost any niche you can think of.
8. Assists in Business Growth
One of the best ways to grow a business online is to have a library of evergreen content assets.
Evergreen content is the type of content that is always relevant and not associated with a specific period.
Content can be in any form, like blogs, videos, podcasts, images, infographics, or any combination.
By creating, publishing, and promoting evergreen content on the different channels, you’ll eventually:
- Achieve higher rankings and get more traffic from search engines.
- Rank higher on YouTube and get more views and subscribers.
- Get more followers on Facebook and Twitter.
- Get more engagement on Pinterest.
- Grow your list of email subscribers.
This combination will generate more leads and conversions and allow you to steadily grow your business by providing more content.
Companies with a solid content marketing plan in place with ways to measure the effectiveness of their content can predict with high accuracy what the effect on their traffic and sales would be by publishing more content.
9. Helps In Establishing Trust With Your Audience
Content marketing is important for another reason. You can establish trust with your audience and position your business as an authoritative resource in your niche through content.
Authoritative resources are websites considered experts in their field, which helps tremendously in establishing trust between the website and users and between the website and Google.
When this is achieved, it translates to more sales, higher rankings, and an increase in brand trust and reputation.
The way to do this is by:
- Publishing high-quality content that is unbiased, informative, and based on facts.
- Having the content written by recognized experts in the field.
- Seeking brand mentions and links to prove to Google that others perceive your website as an authoritative resource.
For example, what is the first website that comes to mind regarding health-related content? Maybe it's WebMD or Healthline.
Why? Through their content, they managed to be considered by others as the experts on medical-related queries.
All their content is written and verified by doctors, increasing trust and making users and Google feel that the information provided by those sites is accurate and correct.
10. Get To Know Your Target Audience
Before running a content marketing campaign, you should learn as many details as possible about your customers.
You need to do your research to identify your target audience and create buyer personas to target them with the right content.
This process is extremely valuable for all your digital marketing campaigns. Your findings can be used to create customer profiles, segment your audience on all channels, and get better results.
Also, when measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns, you’ll learn a lot about your customers' needs, likes, and dislikes, which will help you optimize your campaigns even more.
Key Learnings
Content marketing is essential for the success of any online business. A content marketing plan will help you create and publish highly relevant content to your audience.
Relevant content will keep your users happy and help increase awareness about your brand and products, raise brand reputation, and build trust with your users.
The content generation process should not be considered an expense but one of the best investments you can make for your business.
Having a library of evergreen content assets will eventually help your website appear for more searches on Google, which means more targeted traffic coming to your site.
