8 Reasons Why Every Business Should Utilize Content Marketing?
Businesses are constantly clamoring to lure the attention of their potential customers. Most of them are wrestling with the convergence of changes that are upending the traditional marketing tactics. As you grapple with how to market your business more effectively and communicate with your customers in the way they will listen, content marketing comes into play.
Content is the king of all digital marketing campaigns. The capabilities of content marketing are endless. Content marketing has gone from a marketing concept to an essential marketing tactic for every business in every industry. More and more businesses are relying on content marketing due to its ability to grow your business and deliver results. It might be hard to believe, but the below statistics will interest you the most and make you believe it.
The Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) B2B content marketing statistics of 2018 show that 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers. Furthermore, CMI’s digital content marketing statistics reveal that 72% of digital marketers say content marketing helps them to increase engagement and the number of leads.
This statistic conveys that if you do not have an effective content marketing strategy in place, you are going to miss out on your business opportunities.
What is Content Marketing?
Before we dive into why a business needs content marketing, in the first place, let us look at what is content marketing.
Content marketing refers to the process of creating and sharing content for your target market in the form of blog posts, web copy, email marketing, infographics, and much more. Such type of content is informative and offers some value to the audience, but is not promotional.
In brief, content marketing is mainly about the audience and not solely you and your business. The higher the quality of the content, the more engagement, and conversion.
Now, let’s dive in and have a close look at the top 8 benefits of content marketing to your business.
1. Build Trust
The first advantage of content marketing is trust. A great way to lure your audience is through posting relevant, valuable, and reliable content. When people read your content, they start to develop an opinion of your brand or company and begin to trust your business. The more value you provide to your audience through your content, the more people will start to trust your brand.
2. Great for SEO
You have a problem and you want to find a solution. What is the first thing that you will do? Google it. Right?
When you produce quality, keyword-optimized content, your website will likely rank higher in search engines like Google. This in turn brings organic traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization. Search engine algorithms keep changing. But as long as you create unique, original, informative, and relevant content, you can rank higher in search engines.
3. Supports All Stages of Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel consists of three main stages – awareness, consideration, and decision. During the first stage, the content can help in educating the audience, and informing them about the solution that might help. At the second stage, the content educates the leads on their different options and helps them narrow down their choices. At the final stage, the content helps to give a final nudge of encouragement to the leads in making their purchase decision.
4. Escalates Brand Awareness
Content marketing for small businesses is a firm alternative to bring consistency, quality traffic, and inbound links to your site. Engaging and shareable content is another key point here. They can expose your brand to your target audience who never knew you existed.
5. Generate Leads and Attracts Ideal Buyers
Generating leads is the ultimate goal of any business to do any marketing. The beauty of content marketing is that it allows you to present your content in front of the right audiences. It can obviously make the audience engage with you and be left informed and inspired. If you have a good content marketing strategy in place, it can generate over three times as many leads as outbound marketing.
6. Supports Other Digital Marketing Strategies
To bolster other digital marketing channels, and to generate good results, you need high-quality and engaging content that is relevant to your target audience. For example, for your social media campaigns to get more likes, comments, and engagement, you need to have content that entices your target audience.
7. Higher Return on Investment
Creating high-quality content on a consistent basis requires a lot of time and money. However, it is the best investment you can make for your business. Content is a valuable resource for any business. It can bring about profit through higher rankings in search engines, more traffic, improved brand awareness, and enhanced engagement. All these, in turn, help you in getting more leads and conversions for your business.
8. Build Authority
Your content is what differentiates you from your others. Your content exhibits what you can do better than others. By providing informative content and valuable answers to your audience’s questions, you can show that you are the expert in your niche. Follow the below-mentioned ways to build brand authority
· Publish high-quality content
· Ensure that the content is relevant, informative, and based on facts
· Get content from the experts in the field
· Provide brand mentions and links in your content to improve the site authority
Key Learnings
It is not as much the question if your business needs content marketing. Because content marketing is the glue that binds all your other marketing efforts together and makes them more successful. The advantages of content marketing for your small businesses are much more than the above-listed ones.