Content marketing this day is undeniably taking precedence as the most preferred form of marketing.
90% of businesses are already using content marketing to generate inbound leads.
Many of your competitors would have shifted to content marketing and by now they might even be creating content on their success stories.
So, what is content marketing?
Content marketing is focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted set audience across the web.
The importance of content marketing is that it is widely used by businesses to garner attention, generate leads, expand the customer base, and generate online sales.
You might have wondered what good can come your way if you shift to Content Marketing for your business!
Below are 30 benefits of content marketing that will explain why you should use this powerful marketing form to transform your business.
1. Increases your brand’s visibility online
Gone are those days when people purchased a product or subscribed to a service just by word of mouth.
The markets are digitally upgraded and it is now demanding for a brand to have a digital presence.
Creating a website and accounts on all major social media platforms is now mandatory for any business.
This not only establishes an online presence but also makes reaching them and providing support easy.
Creating quality content consistently on your registered platforms will give your brand more reach than any offline activity you do.
Starting with Digital content is as simple as opening a savings account. The more the better!
2. Lets you start with a $0 budget
Traditional marketing activities like advertising in newspapers or organizing an event involve a budget.
The amount of effort from the marketing team is high and it’s hard to track the ROI. On the other hand, Content marketing only requires consistent efforts and good writing skills to succeed.
With so many platforms adapting to the advertising model, publishing quality content without advertising is working great as well.
To put it simply, content marketing saves your money.
Content marketing costs zilch. Here’s how you can start content marketing with a $0 budget.
3. Helps amplify the reach of your brand
Millions of users are surfing the internet worldwide on a daily basis. There is a large population that can possibly become your customers.
How do you make them turn towards your business? In other words, how do you grab their attention?
Content marketing not only creates awareness about your brand but also makes it reach a variety of people in various digital platforms. Create content that focuses on providing value to your customers.
Once your content starts creating a buzz among your target audience, the road to word of mouth gets closer.
4. Develops the trust factor among the audience
As a business professional, you already know how important it is to be a trustable figure in any industry.
There are a lot of factors that can influence a buyer. But when it comes to making the buying decision, trust is the only factor that moves the needle.
Trust of a generic audience can not be gained in a short span of time.
Just think of this!
The brands of spices you purchase on a monthly basis is now a part of your kitchen. A few may be irreplaceable. These are the brands you trust.
Making your content educational and providing real-life solutions to help your audience is the right way to go.
5. Brings perennial traffic to your blog with evergreen content
According to Ahrefs,
Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date. It revolves around a topic that’s always relevant to readers, regardless of the current news cycle or season.
There is no going back once your evergreen content article starts ranking for your content target keyword.
This is the best way for your audience to discover your brand. Since the content is designed to stay evergreen, so will be your blog traffic.
Thinking out of the box, content research, and providing the best value in your content helps you to gain the trust of your readers.
6. Builds a relationship with your audience
Creating evergreen content provides value to your readers.
This activity, when done consistently, will bring website traffic and also create trust among your readers.
In turn, you will be building an online relationship with your readers who invest their time to read your content.
Be active on Social media platforms. Building a community on a platform like Facebook can give a boost to your traffic and eventually to your business.
7. Lets you engage with your audience on a personal level
A buyer persona is the classification of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Once you have classified the personas of your customer, start creating content for all your personas.
This approach is similar to funnel marketing as the different buyer personas are in different stages of the customer journey.
Customer location, behaviour, their choice of content, and research are key factors when defining a customer persona.
8. Brings new visitors
Publishing content on a regular basis will bring in consistent traffic to your website over time.
It is ideal to publish one to three blog posts per week. You might very well create one article for one buyer persona.
If you have also adopted creating content based on the buyer persona, you might be getting a lot of insights from your Google Analytics data as well.
Pro Tip: Focus on the quality of your article.
9. Increases daily visits to your website
The more content you create for your blog, the more will be your traffic.
Since the content you have created is more relevant and helpful to a user, they would be curious to know about the details of your brand.
This makes them land on your website and checks out the information about your company.
The website UI/UX is very important as it takes only seconds for a visitor to judge the image of your brand.
10. Builds authority in your niche
Once you have started creating top quality articles helping different personas of your ideal customer, you will be trusted and accepted as an authority on your niche.
For example, let us consider you are a contact centre software company.
Authoring content about the challenges people face in the call centre industry and offering solutions clearly denotes that you understand your audience.
This will, in turn, make the visitor trust your product/service and establish yourself as an authority.
Pro Tip: The prime aim is to create content that will help the visitor.
11. Brings in more qualified leads
Creating engaging content not only ensures regular visitors to your website but also qualifies the leads for your business.
Extensive Market research is an essential activity to ensure that you create quality content to attract your leads.
Any user that subscribes to your blog is one step closer to becoming your customer. The more subscribers, the more sales.
According to Neil Patel, Nurturing your email leads is an integral part of email marketing that can’t be ignored.
Pro Tip: Entertaining your audience with free and valuable content will help them make a buying decision.
12. Moves visitors ahead in the customer journey with ease
The customer’s journey is the process a customer goes through to become aware of, consider, and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.
There are 4 stages in the customer journey. Once a visitor to your blog gets acquainted with the valuable content you have created, they now fall under the awareness stage of the customer journey.
Subscribing and visiting your blog over a period of time can easily move them to the next stages of the customer journey.
Pro Tip: The content creation process should align with the path the customer takes while engaging with your brand.
13. Lets you effectively measure efforts
For any marketing activity, it is important to measure its effectiveness in the campaign. In fact, experimenting and measuring results is an integral part of Growth Marketing.
In the days of traditional marketing, there were no exact numbers plotted against the advertising budget.
With content marketing, you can track the number of parameters to measure your efforts using Google Analytics alone. A few parameters are
- Page visits
- Leads
- Traffic to the website
- Number of purchases/Sales
- Source/Medium
You can also track the reach of your article on all major social media platforms using Social Animal.
14. Helps make data-driven decisions
Data is ruling this information age and we are creating more information now than ever before.
For any smart marketer, there is no second thought that data gives a competitive advantage over others in their industry.
Consider that you are checking Google Analytics data for an article that has gained the most traffic.
With data points like gender information, most visits from a country, page duration, day of the most engagement, etc, you can narrow down the details of your user persona.
If you are to create content with the inputs from the above data, you can now promote the article to an audience who will find its best value.
With Social Animal content data insights, you can find data like best social media platform, best article length to write, the best day to post, best title length, etc.
15. Search Engines will have your back
Every brand is so much focussed on the term SEO(Search Engine Optimization) that it has become the soul of content marketing.
SEO is not just the usage of keywords alone. It is about creating well-researched articles that establish authority in your industry.
If you are able to transfer your knowledge into your content and make it irresistible to your audience, the search engines will definitely help you to rank better.
16. Rockets your guest posting opportunities
One of the major advantages of online marketing is establishing yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry.
Guest posts are an important part of a good content marketing strategy. In simple words, guest blogging is the process of publishing articles on other well-established blogs in any niche.
When you are a trustable website, many authors who are trying to build credibility will start reaching out to you.
Pro Tip: You have to qualify these guest authors in order to keep up the quality of your content.
17. Validates Social Proof
Social proof is the concept that proves people will follow the actions of the masses. The idea is that since so many other people behave in a certain way, it must be the correct behavior.
Social proof is crucial for all businesses. So, how does content marketing establish Social Proof?
Let me explain with an example!
If you are trying to buy a product from Amazon, you always tend to look at the ratings and review below the item.
Similarly, before buying any product people tend to read reviews or search the web to find more details about them.
Pro Tip: Along with creating quality content for your audience focus on getting testimonials, reviews, growing social media following, etc.
These are a few common steps that establish social proof.
18. Makes you an influencer in your business
With consistent efforts and strategic approach towards content marketing, any brand will be able to influence the buying decision of their audience.
For example, if you consider online streaming platforms Netflix is clearly the one that dominates this niche market.
The sole reason behind this is the variety of content they offer to their audience.
If you want to become an influencer within a period of time, here is what you need to do.
- Create valuable content that helps your audience
- Grow your audience in social media platforms
- Repurpose your content
19. Increases the possibility of going viral
There are more than 2 million articles published in one day. Expecting to go viral with our first piece of content is highly impossible.
Going viral is a ride every brand wants to grab. This apex requires continuous efforts of creating high-quality content targeting a broader audience.
The most important factors that affect the reach and virality of an article are
- Quality of the content
- Social media share velocity and
- Psychological response of the audience
Pro Tip: Start with determining what is that you want to accomplish with your content.
20. Helps to monetize marketing
Content marketing is one of the easiest ways to monetize our marketing efforts.
Create a perfect content marketing strategy and set your goals. This is a good start to monetizing your content marketing efforts.
Your aim should map to business milestones, like sales or increasing number of trial users, etc.
Make simple goals that are easy to track and document. Also, set up your Google Analytics account.
Once you understand how to set up your goals, work on measuring and improving your monetization methods.
21. Grows your social media following
Social media is no more the place where anyone registers their opinion. It now has room to connect and collaborate.
A lot of B2B brands have adapted to Social media marketing so beautifully that businesses are engaging with their audience on a personal level.
When a business professional finds your article interesting and more importantly helpful, they tend to share it on social media like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
This transfer of trust you have gained over time will help in growing your social media following as well as your business.
Pro Tip: Monitor your brand to find your social media mentions. This helps to curate an audience and also increases traffic.
22. Lets your content promote itself
Content promoting itself?
You are thinking that it sounds crazy. Just imagine the following scenario!
The very first thing every individual does after waking up is to check their email. For a few of us, it is the time we read the best content from our favourite blogs.
It might be a roundup post, a how-to article, or even a listicle containing top marketing blogs.
If you think for a moment, you will find something common among your favourite blogs. They are either from the publication you trust or the content had been extraordinarily crafted.
The above scenario gives you an understanding of how to create content that promotes itself. Does it?
It is simple!
Pro Tip: Think from your audience’s point of view and create a long-form content that will help them.
All the promotion you need for your content will fall in line.
23. Works for any business
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second, which is 5.6 billion searches a day. That’s the average figure of how many people use Google a day.
There are a lot of businesses that are shy towards content marketing. They presume that it doesn’t work for their business and it is not true at all!
Content marketing works for any business no matter what kind of industry they are in.
Pro Tip: You just have to find the right kind of queries your audience is looking for and create content that helps them.
24. Easy to share
In this digital era, sharing is caring!
Quality content gets shared easily and this chain continues as long as the value of the content is appreciable.
Be it forwarding an email or sharing your article on relevant social media(Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), the visibility of your brand will keep increasing.
Pro Tip: A simple method to increase your brand visibility online is to ask your current customers to share your content.
25. Gains backlinks without spending too much
Backlinks are the key for your website to gain traffic, rank for keywords, and also gain good Domain authority.
Undeniably, backlink campaigns are one of the toughest content marketing activities.
So is there a workaround? Yes!
Creating articles like case studies, expert roundups, or an extensive listicle that links out to the best brands in your niche.
This is also a touchpoint for you to get to know more about your industry as these articles get shared quickly.
26. Opens the door for Advertising opportunities
All websites like Cnn.com, Entrepreneur.com, and Techcrunch.com are well known and gain a lot of traffic in their respective industry.
Have you also noticed that they also have ad space allocated on their website?
The brands who advertise on these websites get good visibility and ROI.
It is simple and successful because the website that hosts their advertisement has the readership of their target audience.
Pro Tip: If your website has started gaining a significant amount of traffic, it is time you start accommodating advertisements in your UI.
27. Get interviewed
We all know the volume of content published is huge.
With new platforms coming up to support various other types of content like podcasts, videos, etc. there is recognition for valuable content now better than ever before.
There are dedicated podcast shows in every industry and the audience loves them as they are a healthy alternative to music or radio shows.
Pro Tip: To get interviewed by any of these podcasters, all you need to do is create quality content, register a name for your brand, and simply network with them.
28. Documents your brand story
It is hard to keep creating interesting content for your audience over a long period of time.
How do we get people to show interest in our business?
The famous entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk quotes, the biggest tip when it comes to content creation is: Document. Don’t create.
Pro Tip: The content a brand creates should transfer its company culture and its vision and mission into words.
Being transparent is not just in the trend. But, it displays a sign of honesty to our audience as well.
29. Records your development
Many of us might have also noticed case studies of growth and development topping the weekly roundups newsletters.
In communities like Growth Hackers, interesting case studies are shared not by the brands themselves but by the members of the community.
Case studies are also a source of inspiration for any brand out in the market. Interestingly, case studies also validate social proof.
Pro Tip: Involve your audience/customers in your case study and validate the information before publishing.
30. Provides Customer Support
Customer support these days is provided by brands wherever the customer tends to be.
So, you need to be able to assist your customer if they have any problem with your product or if they need any clarification using it properly.
For instance, if you are selling a SaaS product, you might create a knowledge base explaining the FAQs, and best use cases of your tool.
This might not be enough as people tend to search for assistance on the platform which they prefer the most. Be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even online chat.
Pro Tip: Try being active on as many channels as possible.
Conclusion:
Few brands might state that they have challenges in Content marketing. But let’s face it. How good is a win without a fight!
With the above list for the benefits of content marketing in 2020, we hope you are now ready to build your content marketing strategy.
The questions you need to be asking yourselves is when can you start with content marketing? Which departments should be involved in creating content?
Here is your guide on How To Become A Successful Content Creator In 2020.