Content marketing is not just about filling up web pages, it builds trust and engages your customers and prospect clients. It’s important for building brand awareness and interest in your products or services. Great content drives traffic to your website. Put bluntly content marketing is the main driving force of most successful digital marketing campaigns. Every great brand has one thing in common; a whole host of valuable and relevant content that their target audience wants to consistently engage with. You probably want a bit more to go off than that? We’ve identified 7 big reasons why content marketing is important for business. Check them out below:
1) Improves brand reputation and builds trust
Content marketing offers a platform for building your reputation. When customers and prospects read your content, they start to develop an opinion. If it is engaging, educational and valuable to your target audience then their impression of your business will be good. They are more likely to want to read and engage with future content and over time this builds trust. With trust comes action. If a prospect trusts your content and subsequently trusts your business, they are more likely to purchase from you. The more value you can provide by producing quality content, the easier it becomes to build trust with your customers.
Posting content consistently across social media platforms can further enhance your reputation in the eyes of your customers and prospects. This is because they may come to see your business as an industry leader. By sharing your content through third-party publications or with influencers it’ll enhance your reputation and trust with your target audience.
2) Content Marketing helps build links and website authority
By creating quality content, it will create opportunities for other websites to link their content to yours. What this means for your business will depend on the quality of the website that is linking back. It could result in driving a large amount of traffic to your website very quickly.
The benefit of backlinking isn’t just limited to driving more traffic to your website. When websites backlink to yours it is an important factor in helping your website rank in search results. Websites are ranked according to their domain authority. If you have a backlink from a website with high domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) score, then it can show search engines that your website is a reputable source. This results in your web page being ranked more favourably on search engine results.
If your business is not producing quality content then there are limited opportunities to build links. It also limits your ability to increase your authority and improve your search engine ranking.
3) Optimised content will help your SEO efforts
Search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a crucial role in increasing the visibility of your business online in search results. Creating quality content that is optimised for search engines plays an important role in building your business presence online. The key to improving your SEO is by creating optimised content. Put simply, the more content you have on your site, the more web pages search engines will have to index. This results in more pages appearing in search engine results and presented to users online.
More pages don’t equal higher website traffic. It does give your business opportunities to rank for more keywords though. But it’s important to only create content on topics that your target audience would want to read and engage with. This gives you more chance to rank for keywords that your target audience is searching for.
Having more content on your website will also help customers and prospects stay on your website for longer. A higher onsite time and lower bounce rate help improve your SEO. This is because Google identifies time spent on websites as an indicator that your site provides quality and valuable content.
4) Creating quality content is a cost-effective way of generating new leads
One of the most important aspects of any business is lead generation and sales. The good news is content marketing is an effective way of getting your business found in search engine results. Why? Because it puts your products or services in front of your target audience. The bonus with content marketing is that it’s also an affordable method.
Customers and prospects will generally refer to your website content for further information and research before they decide to purchase. Content marketing facilitates this behaviour. It provides informative, engaging content and increases website traffic. In this way, it generates more leads for your business. This can be further backed up by this Content Marketing institute stat which states that ‘small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.’
Another interesting stat from the Content Marketing Institute states that if you pit content marketing against paid search, content marketing offers three times the leads per dollar spent. Therefore, the importance of content marketing is easy to see when looking at ROI. If you want to maximise your content marketing ROI it’s important to create a content marketing strategy, to ensure you focus your content creation on your target market and in a timely manner.
5) Content Marketing enables your business to showcase your expertise
Content marketing allows your business to demonstrate its expertise within the marketplace. It provides valuable knowledge to help prospects to make educated purchasing decisions. Without content marketing potential customers are unable to research your business and products effectively. Your competitors are likely to be using content marketing and prospects are more likely to be reading their content and understanding your competitors’ qualities instead of yours. Prospects want to see that your business are experts that know all about the industry that you operate in.
By posting a blog, thought-leadership piece, infographic, white paper or other forms of content it demonstrates to your prospects and customers how much you know about your industry and any opportunities, successes or challenges that it may face. When customers can purchase, it puts the business forefront of their mind. They will remember that you provided great content for them and that it allowed them to better understand the product or service to solve their problems. Customers would prefer to buy from businesses that are regularly publishing quality content that educates and informs them. This is because they want to purchase from businesses that are knowledgeable and are experts in their industry.
6) Content Marketing helps differentiate yourself from the competition
Content marketing allows businesses to set themselves apart from the competition. By creating quality content it allows you to showcase what makes your business great.
Creating content your audience wants to engage with can make the difference between winning a prospect or losing them. For example, a prospect looking for a product or service may read content on how best to solve their problem. If your content can provide answers to what they are searching for, they’ll be more willing to purchase from you.
Also, think about how content marketing can help your business create a personality and voice. The way you speak online, your content’s language and the way you present your content can set you apart from others. It can help you set out your brand personality as being serious, fun, educational, professional, or maybe a blend. People buy from people and content marketing gives you a platform to personify your business to your customers and prospects. By identifying how you want your business to be seen, and the brand voice you wish to portray, it will help you to develop a brand voice and create content unique to you. This will help you to connect with your target audience more effectively.
7) Content Marketing helps support pretty much every other digital marketing strategy
Consistent and quality content helps support many other parts of digital marketing strategy. Businesses tend to have a few different elements of digital marketing that they use to promote their products or services. This could include social media, email marketing, SEO and PR for example. The important take away here is that all these aspects of digital marketing have one common factor; they all need content marketing and quality content to be produced.
Let’s look at this in more detail. With email marketing, you need email content that is engaging. It needs to be engaging so people want to read it and gives prospects instructions on how to act. To provide a more comprehensive email you can also include pieces of content that have already been created. This could include infographics, blogs, thought-leadership pieces, and whitepapers.
When it comes to social media, without content marketing you will not have anything to talk about. By creating content and uploading it onto your website you can then use social media to drive traffic to your website by posting snippets of information about your blog and then providing a link to click through to your website to read the full article.
Moving onto SEO, writing content in an SEO optimised way is crucial. Why? By updating your website with fresh content over time this will have a beneficial impact upon search results. It will allow your website to rank more highly on Google. If you don’t produce and update your website regularly with content, it can have a detrimental effect on SEO.
PR requires relevant and timely content creation to publicise your business to the right audience at the right time.
Content marketing is important for businesses, as it will integrate with many areas of your digital marketing strategy. It is effectively the backbone that holds your campaigns together. It provides the substance that makes all your other strategies effective.
Why content marketing is important for business: Final Thoughts…
If you didn’t understand why content marketing is important for businesses before reading this, we hope this blog has helped! It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up, small business, SME, or a larger more established organisation. Content marketing is important for businesses of all sizes. It builds your visibility, shows off your knowledge and expertise, and helps you build stronger relationships with prospects and customers.
Content marketing is effectively the glue that binds many other digital marketing strategies together. Without it, many other areas of digital marketing wouldn’t be able to work at their optimum.
Don’t know how to get started with content marketing? Contact us today, and we’d be more than happy to discuss your requirements.