If you’re unsure whether your business needs content marketing, it’s good to learn how beneficial this form of advertising can be.
Content marketing is the process of using content to market your business through its website, social media posts, emails, and similar online destinations.
While content marketing might sound like a simple process, it can have way more benefits than you might think. With that in mind, here’s a look at the benefits of content marketing.
Table of Contents
1. Building stronger customer relationships
These days, many potential customers understand when they’re being sold to. And it’s hard to foster customer relationships when these people feel like you’re only eyeing their wallet or purse.
Fortunately, creating content lets your brand stretch and get comfortable with the reader. Instead of going right for the sale, a content strategy takes time to build customer relationships.
Valuable content can teach your readers how to do something, fill them in on relevant news, or do anything else your audience would find beneficial. Everything you create leads to one of the most important benefits of content marketing: building strong relationships.
These relationships can be with more than just potential customers. Effective brand messaging can also appeal to potential business partners or job seekers.
2. Gaining more website traffic
Creating blog posts or content on social media can all create waves of traffic for your business. Sure, this increased organic traffic won’t be much at first.
However, continuing to post engaging material is where the real benefits of content marketing come into play. Continually posting content can give your business hundreds or thousands more customers. If you can continue providing engaging and targeted content, the sky’s the limit for your business.
Best of all, this traffic doesn’t have to only come from search engines. You can also share your content on social media or through an email list for even more traffic. I recommend sharing your content on popular distribution websites to build brand awareness even further.
Don’t make the same mistake I did during my first few years of content marketing, which was creating content and doing nothing else with it. Share your content often – it pays off.
3. Giving your brand some personality
Creating quality content also gives your company a chance to show its personality to potential customers. Another one of the benefits of content marketing is it humanizes a company, making it seem human.
Does your business operate in a formal industry? Create a deep dive into an interesting subject and distribute it as a white paper. If your audience is more playful, work with content marketers who know how to write fun content.
Great content is much more appealing than a blog or social media post with zero personality. Or, worse, not creating content at all.
4. Providing readers with more information
Another huge benefit of content marketing is that it provides information. Instead of the average customer seeing your company as a business trying to sell to them, you provide a helpful resource of content.
You can take a look at popular keywords in your industry or niche to get ideas of what kinds of information readers want.
Example: Let’s say that you own a website about movies. Besides listing movie reviews, you could also gain traffic by writing about movie release dates.
Having this type of content is also beneficial for those potential customers who can sniff out a marketing strategy right away. When a reader doesn’t think they’re being sold to, it builds trust. More often than not, this sense of trust often leads to a sale.
5. Becoming an authoritative brand
One of the best ways to turn members of your target audience into customers is by being an authoritative brand. Fortunately, you can build brand and domain authority through content marketing.
You can think of Apple as a company with a lot of brand authority. When people discuss smartphones and tablets, Apple is going to come up in this conversation because of this company’s authority.
Your company can also become an authority by creating and distributing quality content online.
Let’s say that potential customers want to research a product or service before buying it, as about 53% of customers do. When they conduct their online research, your company’s high-quality content might be what they read.
Every time you create content, you gain a chance for it to appear in front of your target audience. Keep this strategy up, and it can result in your company and its website gaining a ton of authority in the long run.
6. Content marketing benefits can improve your SEO results
Having a content marketing strategy is also incredibly beneficial from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. The foundation of any SEO plan requires content.
After all, without content, there’s nothing for Google to show in its search results. As you continue creating quality content, your business gains chances for search engine crawlers to find that your content is valuable.
When this happens, your company’s website can appear on the first page of search engines like Google. I’ll be honest – your website’s initial pieces of content probably won’t show up high in search engine results.
As you continue flexing those content creation muscles, your company builds more authority. When this happens, you should notice a lot more of your content showing up in search engines.
Plus, one of the main benefits of content marketing is that it’s incredibly SEO friendly. This means that you’re not going to find quality content falling out of favor with Google anytime soon.
7. Keeping visitors on your website
Research shows that the average visitor only spends 52 seconds on a website.
Some companies don’t understand that most visitors won’t read through an entire blog article.
In most cases, that’s because a lot of companies are producing content with an engaging beginning. But that’s another subject.
Creating valuable content can keep your website traffic staying far longer than 52 seconds. Plus, writing blog posts that keep people on your website can give you a little help from the SEO side of things.
One of many, many factors Google uses in determining where to rank a website is how long the average user stays on it. If Google’s AI sees everyone leaving a website after a few seconds, that doesn’t look good.
Instead, Google and other search engines want to list websites at the top of their results that people stick around on.
8. Increasing conversions
Another helpful benefit of this strategy is that content marketing generates conversions. For instance, did you know that it takes eight touchpoints before someone becomes a customer?
That means the average person needs to interact with your business in one way or another before they buy anything from you. If a business doesn’t have a decent amount of relevant content, it might never hit those eight vital touchpoints.
That’s not to say it’s a law that every person must read eight pieces of content before they can become a customer. However, content marketing does help ensure your business is visible to the people who need to interact with a company and come back to it before buying anything.
With the right content, you should notice an uptick in your company’s conversions.
9. Creating amazing customer journeys
Otherwise known as a customer journey, a buyer’s journey is something every consumer experiences before they purchase a product or service.
For instance, you go on these journeys almost every day. Or at least every time you need to buy something.
In the heyday of traditional marketing, people would go on this journey by seeing television advertisements, ads in newspapers, or radio commercials.
That’s not to say these methods don’t still work. However, the internet helped usher in the era of digital marketing. When done well, content marketing guides readers or viewers down a path that builds trust. So, let your brand voice shine and bring in tons of new leads.
Another benefit of content marketing is that it lets your company take a lead or group of leads down digital paths. For instance, you can have a sort of introductory page that explains your company’s main features. Then, you can link out from this page to great content covering more in-depth topics.
The best part about a marketing funnel is that your company is in total control. For extra help, check out my guide on how to create and manage marketing funnels.
10. Encouraging readers to share high-quality content
Another one of the benefits of content marketing is that it’s shareable. A quickly created advertisement that says “buy now” isn’t going to encourage a lot of shares.
But what about a retail company creating a buyer’s guide and sharing it before the holidays? That’s a great example of content marketing that encourages shares.
You can also increase the reach of your content marketing campaign by asking for shares on social media and in website posts.
As people share content with others online, it drastically increases the potential reach of this content. This simple strategy sometimes even leads companies to go viral. I’m not saying that’s a guarantee, but it’s nearly impossible for a company to go viral without some type of content.
11. Generating more followers
If you’re having trouble building up an online following, content marketing produces a ton of followers. Sharing content on social media helps generate a ton of organic traffic.
At first, you’ll be sharing content with a small group of followers. As you continue with your company’s online marketing efforts, a bigger potential group of people see your content.
Chances are, certain customers will search for your company on social media before deciding whether or not to purchase something from it. When they do, you want them to see a big follower count showing that your brand has a lot of love from social media.
To help ensure your follower count continues increasing, create content regularly and share it on social media.
12. Choosing a cost-effective way to promote your business
Most companies can only spend so much money on their marketing campaigns. Fortunately, content marketing benefits companies of any size.
Research from Demand Metric shows that content marketing, on average, costs 62% less than other forms of marketing. While this form of marketing is helpful for companies of all sizes, content marketing benefits businesses on tight budgets.
If you’re comfortable enough with getting in front of the keyboard, it costs next to nothing to create a blog post on a self-hosted website. Plus, the only ongoing content marketing costs associated with a blog are registration and hosting costs.
As you continue your blogging efforts, your company could wind up with an extremely valuable website that generates a ton of leads for a fraction of what other marketing methods would cost.
13. Generating leads on autopilot
For most companies to stay in business, they need to generate leads. Fortunately, one of the benefits of content marketing is that it can bring a company leads around the clock. Companies without blogs or social content might depend on leads during business hours.
Fortunately, a lot of content marketing involves evergreen content (pieces that are popular year-round). With a library of blog content, your company has the potential to generate as many leads as it can handle. Best of all, these leads can come in at any time.
It gets even better. After you or your marketing team really get a content strategy underway, your business might not have to spend any time going after leads. Instead, you and your team can focus on other matters while the leads come to your company.
14. Giving you lots of warm leads
This point ties in with the last point I made about content marketing generating leads. As you probably know, there are different kinds of leads. Hot leads might not be new customers yet, but they’re very interested in your company.
There are also warm leads who have a slightly lesser degree of familiarity with your company. And there are also cold leads. Cold leads can become customers, but at this stage, they’re unfamiliar with your company.
One of the top benefits of content marketing is that it works to warm up leads to your business. As interested readers continue learning from your business (and about your business), it warms them up to the thought of becoming customers.
As you can see, there are many benefits of content marketing. It’s true that a marketing strategy involving content can take time and effort to create. But content marketing is also a popular and cost-effective way to guide readers through the buying process. With enough patience and work, content marketing can lead to a lot of brand recognition.
Alex Eagleton is a copywriter and digital marketer passionate about helping companies connect with customers. Throughout the past decade, he’s worked with companies including Referral Rock, Connecteam, and Ramsey Solutions. He’s a versatile writer who understands how to align with companies, truly matching their voices and tones.
When he’s not writing, he enjoys spending time with his dogs, reading, and playing guitar.
You can reach him by emailing alex@contentmarketinglife.com.