7 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Content Marketing
As marketers, we’ve all heard it said a million times by now, “content is king.” Even though we may be tired of the saying, we can’t deny the truth behind it. No matter your business type, strategic content that is well thought out and relevant to your audience is vital to maintaining a strong relationship with your customers. According to ProfitWell, 47% of buyers still view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative, companies with blogs tend to get 67% more leads than those who don’t have a blog, and Inbound marketing close rates are still 8 to 10 times higher compared to those of outbound efforts. Still not convinced that your business needs content marketing? Check out these seven reasons:
1. Build Trust and Improve Your Brand Reputation
A key goal of content marketing is to build trust among potential customers by clearly demonstrating your knowledge within your industry. By providing consistent, engaging, and valuable content that helps solve their problems, your audience will start to see you as an expert in your field. By creating value for them through your content and not requiring anything in return, your audience is more likely to trust the recommendations you are giving.
2. Nurture and Convert Leads
We all know that the journey that leads go on does not start with them wanting to immediately buy your product or service. Lead nurturing is a long game. That’s where content marketing comes in. Not only can you build trust with consistent and valuable content, but you can also encourage conversions by providing content in the form of information your lead needs to make an educated buying decision. Just don’t forget the importance of a clear call-to-action (CTA) that will guide them to the next step in their conversion journey. Make it clear to your audience what you’d like them to do next. When done right, your content marketing will make an impact on your leads. For example, seventy-four percent of companies surveyed by Curata indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity. That’s not a number to scoff at.
3. Improve Your SEO
Business sites that post consistent blog content are shown to have on average 434% more pages indexed by search engines than those that don’t have a blog. Guess what a blog is, a form of content! Creating blog posts on different topics that are relevant to your audience gives you more chances to rank for the keywords they are searching for. The key is to make sure you have a deep understanding of what your customer will be looking for.
4. Attract Your Ideal Buyer
We already touched on how content marketing can help nurture your leads to conversions, but another important factor is that your content can help you gain more qualified leads. Only those that are really interested in what you have to say are the ones that will be viewing your content. Only those that are interested in your expertise are going to conduct that initial search to find your content, then it will only be those that are truly interested in what you have to offer that will click further through your marketing funnel. These are your ideal buyers.
5. Build Backlinks
If you create a great piece of content other companies will want to link to it, which can potentially dramatically increase your audience. More backlinks will also help your brand appear as the authority in your field. Not to mention that backlinking is one of the criteria search engines use to rank your website.
6. Better Understand Your Customer
With content comes data. How are people engaging with a piece of content on social? Which blog posts are being shared the most? Which of your videos have more views? By tracking your content you are learning more and more about what your audience wants with each piece. Use this information to help you adjust your content marketing strategy to better suit your audience.
7. It’s Scalable and Long-Term
If you make it a priority to create evergreen content that will continue to be relevant and that people will search for over an over, you can benefit from consistent search traffic growth. A great example of this can be seen in videos, if the content is useful you can expect your number of views to continue to grow. Create it and let the traffic keep flowing in! And don’t forget, if a piece of the content does become outdated, you can always refresh your content, republish it, and promote it further.
By now, you should be convinced that content marketing is vital for your business. But with all of the many types of content out there, the numerous options for distribution channels, and the ever-growing competition, content marketing can be intimidating. If you aren’t sure how to get started with content marketing, consider working with a consultant that can help with the strategy and execution. Creating content can be time-consuming, and without a clear plan, you will likely waste your precious time.
