Content marketing can reach out to potential customers and build awareness by giving what the audience needs. It also builds trust as it gives the impression that you care about what’s relevant to your audience instead of just trying to make sales.
In this article, I will explain several reasons why content marketing is necessary to easily build business success.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a way to introduce a brand or business with relevant and beneficial content for the audience. That way, marketers create leads to attract potential customers or even drive them to take action on the marketed product.
Content marketing is done through various media. Mainly, it is in the form of web pages, where marketers use articles to answer what the audience needs to know. Content marketers also use infographics, videos, and podcasts to reach potential customers.
8 Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Essential for Business Success
Now we know what content marketing is and what it does. However, how does it help with building business success?
Below are the different aspects of building business success that content marketing can contribute to.
1. Build Brand Awareness
Through making relevant content, you will have a chance to appear in potential customers’ searches. Not only that, you may get inbound links which will increase traffic and introduce your brand to plenty of potential customers.
This can be done by creating content that defines and explains a topic, like a glossary post, and correlating it to your product. Other sites that discuss similar topics may place an inbound link to your site depending on the quality. That way, people who visit their site may be exposed to your brand and your product.
2. Attract Ideal Buyers
What’s great about content marketing, you will attract readers who are truly interested in your niche. These are the ideal buyers, fine leads that are easier to convert.
Through content marketing, you’re capturing the readers’ attention by answering what they need to know. If intrigued, there is a chance they might click on the homepage, look up other content, then be exposed to what your brand is and the problems that your business solves.
I suggest placing an email subscription form below your content and ask them to fill it out for curated content sent directly to their inbox. That way, you can further approach the people who are already interested, which speeds up the process of gaining conversions.
3. Generate Cost-Effective Leads
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing strategies but generates three times more leads. This is a great way to cut costs on promotion and bring refined leads that are easier to convert, especially for smaller businesses that are affected by the pandemic.
According to Ahrefs, their optimized content ranks on Google for over 193,000 keywords, raking in 451,000 monthly search visits. It would cost an estimated $795,000 per month to achieve that with Google Ads, and the budget Ahrefs spends on content marketing is far less than that.
4. Establish Trust
Expertise is an important factor when gaining trust, and content marketing is a way to show that. The more content you create to solve the audiences’ curiosity, the more likely it emphasizes that you are a trustworthy source of information in your field.
To achieve this, it is crucial to post quality content regularly. That way, your content has a bigger chance to show up when the audience needs it. The more it happens, the easier it will be for the audience to take your advice and recommendations.
5. Gain Traffic Effortlessly
Creating content is a great investment. Most content is time-sensitive, but evergreen content can bring traffic year-round, rather than hoping for topical surges. Just with one optimized post, you can appear continuously on audiences’ search results and bring traffic.
Evergreen content answers the basic questions and provides basic knowledge about a topic that the audience needs to know, like a what-is and a how-to post. Try creating this type of content that barely needs updates to remain relevant for a long time.
6. Build Relationships With Audience
If you can constantly create helpful and beneficial content for the audience, you may become the audiences’ trusted source of information. It will create a positive impression on your brand, provide a good experience to the audience, and encourage them to return to your site.
Content marketing is also great to maintain relationships with repeat customers. 61% of small businesses stated that half of their revenue comes from repeat orders and customers. Providing valuable content for customers may increase brand loyalty, hence encouraging repeat sales.
This is achievable by knowing what the audience needs and immediately answering it in the content. Learning the latest issues and trends in the field will help create relevant and valuable content, strengthening the relationship with the audience.
7. Support All Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
There are 5 stages to the Buyer’s Journey – awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. The consumers will have different questions about your product through all of these stages that you need to answer quickly. This is where content marketing comes to play.
With content, it’s easy to address potential customers’ doubts. For instance, to support the awareness and consideration stage, content that highlights a product’s benefits and how it stands out from the competition can be very helpful.
Content marketing is also great to give ease to the loyalty and advocacy stage. In this stage, brands will try to encourage repeat sales and build brand loyalty.
Content that shows how to make the most out of your product and introduce your other products may help inspire loyalty to the customers. It’s also recommended to place in a Call-To-Action to encourage repeat sales further.
8. Perfect for SEO Efforts
Content marketing is an excellent solution to tackle marketing difficulties amid the pandemic. You can use content to push your site’s rank in the search results of your niche. This alone will allow more audience to notice your business.
Search engines will notice if certain content is valuable and solves the audiences’ problems. This may bring your site’s rank higher in search results, deliver more traffic and leads, then eventually help with conversion.
Content Marketing Trends for 2021
Video Content
Videos are a favorite among internet users, and it’s expected to stay that way in 2021. It’s preferable to the consumers as it’s easier to digest, more engaging, and more memorable. Hubspot research stated that 54% of consumers prefer to see video content from brands.
I recommend prioritizing video content when doing content marketing. Ensure that it conveys your brand’s voice and values while not forgetting to make it about what’s relevant to the target consumers.
Voice Search Optimization
A lot of people are starting to use voice search for how comfortable and practical the feature is.
31% of smartphone users worldwide stated that they use voice search at least once a week, supported by applications such as Siri and Google Assistant.
Knowing that fact, it’s important to start optimizing your content for the voice search feature by including conversational keywords. For instance, you would prefer “how to bake a vanilla cake” instead of “vanilla cake recipe” when optimizing for voice search.
Mobile Experience
Google indexes mobile versions of a site before anything else, making mobile compatibility a big ranking factor. That means it’s important to make sure that your content is compatible with mobile devices.
Use mobile-responsive themes and make sure that your content loads in 3 seconds or less. Aside from ranking, this guarantees a great mobile experience, which might make your brand more memorable to the audience.
Personalized Content
Personalization is considered a marketing trend this year. Research by Demand Gen found a 20% increase in leads for brands that use personalized lead nurturing. It will most likely continue to be an effective, fresh approach to the audience next year.
With personalized content, you’re speaking to the target audiences on an individual level. This gives a competitive advantage when approaching more critical, savvier customers. You’re spending the effort to cater to their needs and you make sure that what you have is something relevant to them.
While personalization is most effective with more data, it’s not impossible to do it with minimal information about your target audience. Start by placing a form on your posts, allowing the audience to fill in their name and email address.
From there, you will know which content topic interests them. You can find additional data through third party sources to create a better buyer’s persona and eventually create effective personalized content to approach potential customers.
Content Marketing Can Help Businesses Succeed in 2021
All in all, content marketing is crucial to many aspects of building business success. It is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, which is direly needed to tackle marketing difficulties during the pandemic.
Content marketing helps sites rank in search engines, which can easily bring new leads and help create brand awareness. It can also help new leads to move faster through the stages of the buyer’s journey, converting leads into sales with content catered to what they have to know.
Now that you know how content marketing can benefit your business, what’s left to do is to brainstorm valuable content that can grab the attention of your target audience. Good luck, for any questions, make sure to leave them in the comments section below.
Source: Clutch.co
