Over the last couple of decades, marketing techniques have significantly evolved. As people turn to digital products and services, businesses have also taken up new ways to brand themselves. And why not? Failure to adopt the latest technological trends seriously impedes a company’s chances of survival, let alone thriving. Content marketing has emerged as a proven way to increase a brand’s digital footprint, improve customer retention and loyalty, and more.
This article explains content marketing and why it is vital for your business.
What is Content Marketing?
Before we discuss how you can use content marketing to benefit your business, it is essential to explain what it is. Once you understand it better, you can use it effectively to build your brand reputation and eventually improve your bottom line through customer-driven actions.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique of digital marketing that seeks to create and distribute consistent, relevant, and high-quality content to win over and retain a clearly defined target audience. It involves creating and curating content for free to share with the target audience.
Content marketing helps you build an audience, improve website traffic, and turn leads into sales, thus enabling you to increase your profits. It helps marketers build a viable and trusting relationship with the audience by showcasing a brand and what it stands for.
The content you create and distribute via online channels should be engaging and relevant, i.e., it should address your audience’s pain points and add value for them. It should also drive them to take some action, like filling out a form or booking a free session with you.
The most crucial result of your content marketing strategy is to ensure that not only does your website traffic improve but that those who visit your website become loyal visitors and return to it time and again to consume fun and helpful content.
You can use various types of content, including texts, images, videos, podcasts, social media posts, emails, blogs, etc., as part of your content marketing strategy.
Let’s look at why a business must have a robust content marketing strategy.
7 Reasons Why You Should Do Content Marketing
Here are some of the leading reasons why you should consider investing your time, money, and efforts in content marketing strategy.
1. Enables Audience Retention
Content that moves your audience is an incredible asset for you. It helps you deliver great experiences to your audience and impels them to return for more. If you manage to create, curate and deliver highly engaging and relevant content to your audience, rest assured they’ll return for more. Thus, it’s an opportunity to retain your audience and increase your brand awareness.
2. Builds Trust
Content marketing really helps you build trust between your brand and your audience. When people know they can turn to your blog or YouTube channel to learn and get answers to their questions, they will begin to trust you. Besides, another critical factor that drives the trust-building process is the fact that you distribute your content for free, hence no strings attached.
As a result, when your content reaches your target audience at the right time and place, your brand reputation will soar. It will help them associate your brand with valuable content that resonates with them and helps them solve their issues.
3. Improves Social Media Presence
Have you heard of viral content? How does a meme or a short video go viral in a matter of a few hours and days? Such trendy content not only helps you grow your social media followers but also compels them to engage with it and, by extension, your brand. Marketing automation helps you create such content, thus helping you increase your social media traction and presence.
4. Generates More Qualified Leads
Content marketing is known for helping a company generate marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). These leads satisfy the criteria you set for your ICP (ideal customer profile). Your marketing team engages with MQLs to facilitate their buyer’s journey down the marketing funnel before handing them over to the sales team for eventual sales. However, you need access to certain user information, like name, company, position at the company, what they’re looking for, etc., before qualifying it as an MQL.
CTAs (calls-to-action) perform a critical role in lead generation. You can place these CTAs anywhere in your content, at the top or bottom of the page, in-line, or on the side panel. Great content drives your audience to click on the CTAs and move down the marketing funnel.
5. Improves Brand Awareness and Loyalty
You can build brand awareness and enhance customer loyalty using content marketing. You create a raving fan base by creating and delivering content that moves your audience and resonates with them on a deeper level.
Even if they haven’t purchased from you yet, these fans will most likely become your brand advocates. They will thus influence other people’s buying decisions, adding value to your brand.
6. Elevates your SERP Ranking
Quality content helps you rank better on various search engines, including Google and Bing. A robust SEO (search engine optimization) strategy will bolster your investment in developing fun, easy-to-read, high-quality content.
An SEO strategy only works well when it optimizes already good content. So, once you have good content and you pair it up with SEO, your digital presence and visibility will significantly increase. And in the digital realm, it’s all about besting your online competitors with better-quality content and SEO benefits.
7. Positions you as a Thought Leader
Content marketing is an incredibly effective way to gain authority for your brand in your specific niche. If you can place your brand as an established authority on a particular domain or niche, it will automatically improve your SERP ranking.
Besides making you a thought leader in your niche, it will help build trust between your brand and the audience. You can only achieve this much-sought-after mantle if you offer valuable content that answers your audience’s concerns and strikes a chord with their emotions and needs.
Conclusion
More and more companies are investing their resources in content marketing to develop a robust digital presence and reap the benefits of this fantastic marketing strategy. Although it takes time for content marketing to deliver results, it is totally worth going for it. Now is the best time to invest in your content marketing strategy to reap its benefits in the months and years ahead. Want enterprise web presence solutions, drop your query at [email protected].