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10 different ways content marketing benefits your business

10 different ways a business can benefit from content marketing.

It is always good to revisit our blessings. We all know the benefits of content marketing and I have written multiple times on my blog how you can gain from content marketing.

I came across this blog post – Top 10 business benefits of content marketing – on Search Engine Journal, and thought of sharing it here.

Some years ago, I published this YouTube video on 6 advantages of content marketing.

Content is everywhere on the Internet. You visit a website and you read its web page or blog post, it is content.

You visit a social media or social networking website, and you go through your timeline, it is content.

You watch a YouTube video, it is content.

Through content, you build your platform. When you regularly publish blog posts on your blog, people visit your blog regularly. They pay attention to what you have published. It becomes your broadcasting platform.

The beauty of content marketing is that people are drawn to your website or blog on their own. You do not need to tell them to visit your website.

Why is content marketing so effective?

Because instead of promoting your product or service, you are providing useful information to people. You help them solve problems. You make them feel informed and intelligent.

It is like TV channels. Only, TV channels do not usually sell products (some do). They entertain you. They inform you. They show your content you love to watch. While you are watching that content, they show you advertisements. They make money off those advertisements. They have built platforms. They have built audiences. They make use of those audiences. The same thing applies to content marketing.

When you provide them useful information, on an ongoing basis, they begin to respect you. They want to keep track of what you are publishing. They will go to extra lengths to subscribe to your email updates or follow you on social media, or make sure they visit your website or blog regularly.

I provide content writing services. When people visit my blog, even if they are reading blog posts on the various aspects of content writing, even when I am not asking them to hire me as their content writer, they know that I write professional content.

It is because my website and my blog are branded in such a manner that you cannot help but notice that I provide professional content writing services.

But I am not forcing anyone. I get repeat visitors because of my content marketing efforts and over a period, they begin to remember that I provide professional content writing services and I share lots of information on the subject.

The Search Engine Journal author has mentioned the following benefits of content marketing in the above-linked blog post…

Content marketing increases your organic search engine rankings because you publish authoritative content.
Consequently, you get more organic traffic from search engines.
Since your rankings improve, it becomes easier for influencers and blog publishers to find your content and link to it, therefore, sending more referral traffic your way.
More social engagement is facilitated through content marketing as, when you publish useful and relevant content, people talk about it on their social media timelines, or at least, interact with you on your own social media timelines.
You publish targeted content to make customer journey meaningful, engaging, and informative.
You begin to enjoy higher conversion rate because you get more targeted traffic from search engines, social media platforms, as well as other referral websites.
Content marketing inspires you to publish multiformat content. This does not just get your content found through multiple means, it also makes it easier for people to consume your content in their preferred formats.
The content that you publish for your content marketing campaigns is usually evergreen content. If it is relevant today, it is also going to be relevant after a couple of years.
Content marketing also prompts you to use original research data.
There is long-term cost saving. Content marketing costs you much less compared to traditional marketing and advertising.

I always tell my clients that content marketing (also content writing) is not a one-off affair. It is an ongoing effort. Why is it an ongoing effort?

Huge quantities of content are constantly being added and then being crawled by search engines and being displayed by social media platforms. If you think that you can publish content for a few weeks and then go on with what you are doing without publishing new content, your content is soon taken over by people who are publishing content more aggressively, and with a stringent routine.

Hence, content marketing certainly has its benefits, but just like any other marketing effort, it requires persistence and strategy.

Some well-known benefits of content marketing for your business

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Content marketing helps your business in multiple ways.

Content marketing benefits your business from multiple angles. In many cases content marketing doesn’t deliver because people are not consistent with it. They don’t understand content marketing.

It is equal to maintaining your visibility. In a crowded marketplace, how do you maintain your visibility? You cannot campaign one day, or for a few days and then get on with your regular business while other businesses are constantly promoting themselves or new businesses are entering the market.

People forget about your business fast. There are many things to make them forget your business, especially on the Internet.

Therefore, content marketing is an ongoing phenomenon. It is not a “campaign”. It is an activity that must go on as long as your business survives and as long as you need attention from your prospective customers and clients. The benefits of content marketing that you accrue from a few campaigns don’t last for long.

It goes for every campaign on the Internet. Your search engine rankings don’t last if you’re not persistent with your SEO. Your social media presence does not last if you’re not constantly active and engaging your audience. People forget about your newsletter if you don’t broadcast regularly and on routine. Your traffic plummets if you don’t publish fresh content on your website or blog.

If you are persistent, content marketing certainly pays, and it pays better than conventional advertising.

So, what are some well-known benefits of content marketing for your business? Here they are:

Increases customer loyalty

Persistent content marketing helps you create brand awareness. People come across your content regularly. They begin to trust you. When it comes to choosing between doing business with an unknown business and a familiar business, they choose to work with a familiar business. This increases your customer loyalty.

Better SEO

Improved search engine rankings are a natural outcome of ongoing content marketing. You publish more content. You publish targeted content. Google regularly crawls and indexes your content. You cover more of your keywords and search queries. You write on your topics. You increase the knowledge wealth of your website and blog. This increases your search engine rankings.

Increased search engine visibility

When your rankings improve, you become more visible on search engines like Google. You get more traffic. These further fuel your rankings and after a while, it becomes a self-sustaining phenomenon.

Greater trust among your audience

Familiarity builds trust. When people regularly come across your content through your blog, through newsletter broadcasting, on search engines and on social media, there is a greater trust factor. With greater trust, people readily do business with you.

Marketing becomes less expensive

Content marketing is way less expensive than traditional marketing. You increase your visibility organically over a long period of time. Search visibility sustains. When you are persistently publishing content, your search engine rankings improve, and they remain high. Once you begin to engage your audience on social media websites, they feel more connected.

You don’t need to pay for your online visibility. You don’t need to pay for your search engine visibility. After a while, content marketing is practically free.

Higher conversion rate

When you publish and promote your content people have more reasons to visit your website multiple times. This increases your conversion rate. Rarely people buy from you when they visit your website or blog for the first time. On the other hand, if they visit your website or blog multiple times, they buy from you.

Even bigger companies with massive marketing budgets are switching over to content marketing not just because of the cost factor, but also because of effectiveness. Content marketing has a greater ROI. The audience reach out exercises are meaningful. There is greater trust. There is more engagement. It’s especially beneficial for small businesses.

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

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Is content marketing losing its sheen?

One of those phases.

During a particular period of the year, you start coming across articles and blog posts evincing the end, or at least a steep decline, in your profession. It also happens in content marketing.

Yesterday I came across an article on Forbes telling how content marketing has overstretched itself and consequently, is killing itself. It also insinuates that many renowned content marketing companies are borderline scams.

Today I received a newsletter update from someone that conducts writers’ workshops and he says blogging seems to be on the wane.

My personal experience is the opposite.

The number of content writing queries from my website has almost doubled. I’m getting more queries from India, Malaysia, China and The Philippines. I’m even getting more queries from Europe and America.

Yes, the quality of the queries has changed. It has improved. People now understand what they want.

The Indian clients, or rather, the Asian clients, are the same: they cringe at the thought of having to pay to a lowly content writer, and they assume that most of the writing, no matter how well it is done, should be either provided free of cost, or dirt cheap.

But there has been a marked, a welcome change.

Once they have received a few documents, once they have experienced the quality, they are more or less, even if reluctantly, ready to pay what I ask. This didn’t happen before.

Not just my personal experience, this Forbes article says that 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing to increase their leads and branding.

One of the biggest companies, Coca-Cola, as totally turned its corporate website into the content publishing platform.

American Express uses its OPEN Forum content publishing platform to use content marketing to drive traffic to its website.

77% of Internet users read blogs in one way or another.

Why do some people think content marketing in general and blogging in particular are dying

It’s all about where you stand. I will tell you a story.

In the early 2000s I used to design websites. For some time I did great. There was a dot com boom and everybody wanted a website.

People weren’t aware of the concept of the phrase “content marketing” but there were some entrepreneurs, including yours truly, who were using articles and tutorials to promote themselves.

Anyway, just as everybody wanted a website, everybody started designing websites after a while.

If you live in India you must have come across poor tailors sitting at the roadsides, under shady trees if lucky, working with their sewing machines.

You could see web designers just like that, those days, there were so many. I mean, they were not sitting under trees by the roadsides like tailors, but you get my point.

Microsoft had launched a tool called Front Page, if I’m not forgetting, that would allow you to make websites using a GUI. It was notorious for generating junk code, but neither the clients cared, nor the designers who would charge Rs. 2500 for a 10-page website.

I used to hand code my websites. When I designed and developed websites, there was not a single line of code extra.

Naturally I couldn’t make websites for Rs. 2500. When I insisted on hand coding my websites, clients thought I was crazy. All the assignments dried up. I switched to promoting web hosting plans.

One day I was sitting in the front room that I used as my office and a person dropped by. It was 10 a.m., early March, if I’m not forgetting. His white shirt was torn at the seams, and was dirty. He was unshaven, sweaty, and with hair that hadn’t been combed or washed for a few days.

I thought he was some construction worker, or a sweeper, or some poor person who had stopped by to get a glass of water.

He wanted to design a website for me. He had come across my ad in the local newspaper. He collected addresses from the classifieds and then did door to door marketing for his web design business. He told me that he visited 30-40 business establishments every month and got 3-4 projects every month. He used Front Page to design websites. He charged Rs. 2500. He didn’t have a computer (laptops were mostly unheard of during those days). He used to design the websites in an Internet café.

I don’t remember now why I hadn’t published my website URL in the ad because I would never go into a business without having a website, being a web designer myself and having had 3-4 websites even by the early 2000’s. Anyway, I turned him away.

With my own experience and after having seen that person, I had the same feeling that web designing as a profession was dead, or at least, it was not a good way of making money.

Still, since then, I have come across, and I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of websites promoting web design services, doing great. They charge thousands of dollars and clients gladly pay them.

In fact, that was a time when most of the businesses didn’t even have websites, and now every business has a website and still, web design and web development companies charge a premium.

The problem was not with web design as a profession, the problem was the way I was promoting my service and the way I was targeting my clients. I wasn’t targeting the right clients. I was targeting clients who were okay with having Front Page websites. I wasn’t targeting clients who appreciated hand-coded websites. There were many, and they were ready to pay for the effort. I just didn’t look for them. Somehow I wasn’t able to reach out to clients who would gladly pay for quality.

Why am I telling this story?

It happens in every business.

Take for example the restaurant business. Does every restaurant owner get to start a franchisee? I’m pretty sure if 100 entrepreneurs start a restaurant business every year, 98 don’t succeed. It doesn’t mean the restaurant business is a dead business. Some people succeed, most don’t, and that’s fine. It happens in every business.

The same holds true for content marketing.

As it was bound to happen, when people started claiming great success with content marketing, everybody wanted a piece of the pie. And as it was bound to happen, there was a no holds barred rush to create and publish content.

So, why do some people believe that content marketing doesn’t work?

Because they don’t know how it works.

People to content marketing all wrong

You see, you have to understand what content is. Most think that content is a way to improve your search engine rankings.

Although there is nothing wrong in wanting to publish content to improve one’s search engine rankings – I get lots of business due to this approach – eventually, it is an improved level of engagement that does the trick. And this is why, some businesses are doing great with content marketing, but most don’t. Maybe the problem is with the “marketing” part. I don’t know.

Publishing content on your website or blog is all about helping people make a decision, and provide them timely help when they need it.

Even if you are able to generate lots of traffic from search engines by publishing “optimized” content, if people don’t feel motivated once they come to your website, they are not going to buy from you.

Do I mean to say you shouldn’t publish content for traffic? I don’t mean that. Every business needs traffic and content marketing is the best way of generating targeted traffic to your website.

In fact, a big reason why people use content marketing is because they don’t want to solely depend on search engine traffic. Search engines can be whimsical. If you are a serious business, you cannot afford to completely depend on search engines for qualified traffic. You need to create your own sources, and content marketing is the best way. You become known for your quality content and authoritative insights.

The problem is not with wanting to generate targeted traffic. The problem is using content marketing just for generating targeted traffic.

This sort of content marketing doesn’t work, it has never worked and it is never going to work.

Sure, you need to publish content to draw targeted traffic to your website. But the primary purpose of your content must be to provide quality information to your visitors so that they can make up their mind regarding doing business with you.

This is exactly why the newspaper industry is failing. There was a time when content – journalism – used to be the primary content. Now it is advertising. Journalism is almost dead. Mostly it is either propaganda or traffic-oriented content to earn advertising revenue.

The primary purpose of content marketing should be to become a valuable part of your customers’ and clients’ lives.

You need to become an information hub, and believe me, even if you are a very small business, you can become an information hub within your niche. Don’t think that only big businesses can become information hubs.

All the businesses who have understood this are doing great with content marketing. The ones who are just greedy for targeted traffic aren’t succeeding.

Why do people get trapped in the traffic trap? Because it’s easier to generate traffic than generate business. Content that gets you search engine traffic is very cheap. It is very easy to create such content. Hire a jobless writer or someone who simply wants to make a few extra bucks and isn’t bothered whether your business benefits or not, and you can get scores of blog posts and articles without even realizing you are spending money.

And when you are able to publish 50 articles or blog posts every month, the quantity reassures you. The traffic DOES begin to manifest and you begin to feel that eventually, this is going to lead to more business.

It doesn’t.

What gives you more business is the quality of your content, the meaningfulness, and the level of engagement it can generate.

Search engine traffic should be a byproduct. When people begin to understand this, content marketing will work wonders for them.

6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing

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Benefits of Content Marketing

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Although in the history of advertising, marketing and business promotion, you can find innumerable examples of entrepreneurs using content marketing to its utmost advantage, people are still sceptical about it.

And this is when, everything that exists on the web is content. According to this description of content marketing on Moz:

Every email, every tweet, every landing page, and every product description—they’re all examples of content, and one of the best ways of describing what they all have in common was summed up brilliantly by Ian Lurie, of Portent, Inc.:

Content isn’t ‘stuff we write to rank higher’ or ‘infographics’ or ‘long-form articles.’
Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.
— Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent, Inc.

Also read What is Content Marketing? Explained in detail

One of the major reasons why people cannot make sense of content marketing is that its benefits are not immediate.

For example, if you get a website designed, after a couple of months, you will have an online presence and you will be able to see the various parts of your website. Whether you like it or not, the website will be there right in front of you. You will be able to look at it yourself, and you will be able to show it to whomever you feel like.

Beyond the basic content – the text and the images and the videos that you have on your website – the benefit of content marketing is not visible. You can either predict it or imagine it.

Content marketing benefits seem very far away

To an average businessperson, concepts like building an audience, providing good quality content and expanding presence on the web, seem like “big business”-talk and consequently, intimidating. But they are not.

Just like these concepts work at the macro level, they also work at the micro level.

Also, most of the content marketers cannot guarantee success, primarily because the clients are reluctant to invest enough money (within appropriate budget, content marketing success can be guaranteed).

Unless all the parties involved are on the same plain and totally understand what they are trying to achieve, it is very difficult to experience success in content marketing.

Fortunately, there are various organizations, evangelists and interest groups that are constantly endeavoring to educate business managers and decision makers about the power of content marketing.

Doing research on the same topic, I came across an interesting graphic. I didn’t want to use the graphic so I reproduced it by slightly altering it. The graphic below summarizes the 6 indisputable benefits of content marketing.

Benefits of Content Marketing

When we talk of the benefits, we assume that everything necessary to carry out a well-defined content strategy is being done.

Below I’m going to describe these individual content marketing benefits and will also tell you how you can derive these benefits for your own business no matter what size your business is.

Benefits of content marketing

1. Increased website traffic

Website traffic

90% of Credible Content clients hire us because they want to improve their search engine rankings, which means, they need more website traffic from search engines.

This is the most sure shot advantage of using high-quality content to create your presence on the web.

To rank your website or individual links, Google needs to access, crawl, index and rank your content. Without content, Google has got nothing to process.

How the strategic content marketing increase your website traffic from search engines and other sources?

Improving your search engine rankings has multipronged benefits. You begin to get more search engine traffic. More people are able to find your content.

When they find your content on search engines, they don’t necessarily do business with you. They may simply link to your content, which sends you direct traffic and also improves your SEO.

If it is interesting and useful, they may also share your content on their social media and social networking profiles, giving you a social presence.

Google takes your social presence into account when writing your content.

The marketing part means that you distribute your content through as many channels as possible.

Once you have published a blog post, for example, you share your link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also republish it on Medium and LinkedIn.

You may also encourage other influencers in your industry to share your content.

This way, Google has multiple opportunities to come across your content. If somehow its crawlers are not crawling your website, they will be able to find and index your links from other sources, mostly from social media and social networking websites.

Google+ is Google’s own social networking platform so even if it doesn’t look for your content on other social networking websites, it is definitely going to find it on its own network.

2. Brand awareness

Brand awareness with content marketing

Again, branding isn’t just for big businesses.

If you come across some reference of Credible Content on another website or a blog or a social networking platform and immediately you know that it is an agency that provides quality content, it’s branding.

Read Statistically most B2B enterprises use content marketing for brand awareness

Whether you realize it or not, whether you admit it or not, an average customer or client has multiple choices these days. Your competitor’s website is just a click away, or a new Google search away.

Unless you give them a reason to remember you or recognize you, they’re going to forget about you. Persistent content marketing creates an awareness of your brand and people always remember what you stand for.

If you regularly publish a newsletter, say, one broadcast every week, when people recognize your newsletter, when they know and remember who has sent the newsletter and what the newsletter contains, that’s brand awareness.

3. Customer engagement

Content marketing for customer engagement

Why should people do business with you? Especially for the first time?

Why should they choose you over another business?

Through content marketing you can keep your customers engaged in conversations.

If you offer a solution, if you offer a suggestion, if you offer some sort of help, people are going to respond, in whatsoever manner. This is engagement.

Read 10 ways to write highly engaging content

You need to engage your prospective customers and clients positively. This way, the more you engage them in meaningful conversations, the more eager they are to do business with you.

How do you engage your customers with quality content?

I will cite the LongtailPro example.

A few days ago I purchased a LongtailPro subscription. Before I had purchased the subscription, I had used their trial version.

After using their trial version, I didn’t purchase the subscription for more than two years. But, to be able to use their trial version, I had given them their email ID and once in a while they used to send me some data about my website and also, how I can use LongtailPro, if I start my subscription, to improve my search engine rankings.

These were not just promotional messages. Their messages were constantly helping me.

After I purchased a subscription I still get tutorials on how to make the full use of their app. They have uploaded numerous YouTube videos and they keep prompting me to have a look at them to properly understand how to use the app.

I can also give you my own example. If you have been an old subscriber of my Credible Content updates, you may have noticed that I have started broadcasting my newsletter regularly after quite a while.

Ever since I started again, I have received 5 queries from my subscribers (it has just been two weeks or even less) and one among these 5 queries has turned into a paid assignment (Hello Francis!).

This way, content marketing helps you keep your audience engaged.

4. Leads and conversion

More leads and better conversion

This is quite simple. As your website traffic increases, as your brand becomes known, as you engage with your target audience, you naturally get more leads and these leads naturally convert more.

5. Your own broadcasting channel

Develop your own broadcasting channel

When you publish a blog regularly, when you send out your email newsletter regularly, you build an audience. People start paying attention to you.

Whenever you publish a blog post, you draw people from the search engines. If you post your updates on social media and social networking websites, people either respond to you on their own timelines, or they visit your blog. They become a part of your audience.

Since you are constantly posting quality content on your social networking profiles and people are constantly engaging with your content and interacting with you, your friends and followers go on increasing.

Since more people land on your blog, more people subscribe to your updates and hence, you grow your mailing list, and when you grow your mailing list, you grow your email newsletter audience.

These are all your broadcasting channels.

You can use these channels whenever you launch a new product or a new service or you launch an update or you add a new feature to your product or your service.

Since you have got an audience that pays attention to you, whenever you need to broadcast the message, you will be able to do so.

This brings to my mind an incident that one of my clients had with one of his customers. The customer left a very bad review on Yelp, despite it being her own fault.

My client used his blog and his newsletter to explain his point of view and a lot of his visitors and subscribers took a personal initiative and left positive responses on Yelp.

You can use content marketing to build such a broadcasting channel for yourself.

6. Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage

Although many of your competitors might already be using content marketing, there might be many who are not. If you pursue strategic content marketing, you will not just have a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content to promote their businesses, you will also have competitive advantage over those competitors who are.

Content marketing sort of, democratises marketing. It’s all about innovation, ingenuity and initiative. If you use these three traits with sincerity, you can compete with IBM despite being a small IT firm (that is, if you want to).

A good thing about content marketing is, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality and uniqueness. Okay, sometimes quantity does triumph over quality, but in most of the cases it does not.

Joe Pulizzi’s book, Epic Content cites a nice example. There is a River Pools and Spas company that installs fiberglass swimming pools in the Virginia and Maryland areas. In 2009 they were in deep trouble. Some sort of recession was going on and people were requesting their deposits back. The company was over drawing its checking account. the closure of the business seemed imminent.

When the CEO, Marcus Sheridan decided to use content marketing to promote his fiberglass swimming pools business, they were drawing approximately $4 million in annual revenues and spending $250,000 on marketing.

With two years of content marketing, they brought down their marketing cost to $40,000 per year, and by the end of 2011, they were selling more fibreglass pools than any other fibreglass pools installer in North America.

Marcus Sheridian’s content marketing was so successful that he started traveling the world lecturing other business owners on how to use content marketing.

You can read the Marcus Sheridian content marketing case study.

This is just one example. There are many.

Does content marketing just mean publishing a blog post?

Although blog publishing is a big part of content marketing, many small business owners confuse blogging with content marketing. The entire ecosystem of content marketing includes and involves

Understanding what type of content your target audience is looking for
Creating/writing high-quality content that informs, engages and if possible, entertains – on an ongoing basis
Analysing incoming website traffic to find out what sort of content is attracting people to your website
Making changes to creating/writing high-quality content according to your findings
Using the right content dissemination channels to distribute your content
Search engine optimizing your content so that it is easier to find it on search engines
Updating and repurposing existing content on an ongoing basis
Publishing a regular newsletter or email mailing list

So, basically, content marketing consists of continuously publishing valuable content and then making an all-out effort to make it easy for people to find it. Sometimes, you have to deliver the content where your audience is. For example, if your audience is on Facebook, then you have to post links to your content on Facebook. Similarly, on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Content marketing at the outset may seem like very hard work and this may undermine whatever notion of benefits you have in mind, but actually when you get down to implementing your content marketing strategy, to your pleasant surprise, you will find that it is not that difficult.

Besides, the benefits are so great, as you have seen in the case of Marcus Sheridan and his fibreglass swimming pools, that after a while, the effort and investment tend to move towards practically zero.

Want to know how content marketing is better than advertising

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Do you know that 89% B2B businesses are using content marketing to promote themselves (source)? 73% among these say that they plan to continue with content marketing, not as just a campaign, but an ongoing process of promotion.

Companies like IBM, American Express and Coca-Cola have completely switched over to content marketing from conventional advertising.

According to this Hubspot study, companies that publish more than 16 blog posts every month get 4.5 times more leads than companies that publish 0-4 blog posts every month.

Content marketing is one of the fastest growing industries in the high-tech area reaching $32.3 billion in 2018, says this Forbes article.

Why is content marketing performing better than advertising?

The biggest feature of conventional advertising is that it is interruptive. There you are, watching your favorite program on TV, or watching the football final, or browsing an interesting web page, and bam! Suddenly, an advertisement pops up. Whether you want to watch it or not.

There used to be a time when we used to see advertisements between programs. These days we watch programs between advertisements.

On the web, web pages are splattered with totally unrelated advertisements.

Consequently, people have found ways to sidestep these intrusive advertisements. You get ad blockers on the Internet. The set-top boxes allow you to fast forward ads on your TV programs. People prefer streaming services like Netflix over conventional TVs precisely for this reason.

This is one reason why content marketing works better than advertising.

Another reason is, advertising can be expensive. PPC campaigns, since you are paying for every click, can be prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses. Putting up banners can be expensive. Advertising on TV and print media can be expensive.

As you can see in the above graphic, digital ad spend has overtaken TV advertising.

Not just expensive, the advertising cost is recurring. People remember you only when they see your ads. Not because they might be having shorter memories. There are so many similar ads. If you are a web design agency, there are scores of other web design agencies promoting their own services. If you are promoting a health supplement, there are scores of other health supplements being promoted.

This is true for almost every business. People remember you as long as you advertise. You stop advertising, you are out of people’s minds.

Content marketing comes to your rescue.

Although, regularity is also needed in content marketing, it is less expensive and more effective than advertising.

Listed below are few benefits of content marketing:

Educate your customers
Differentiate yourself from your competitors
Tell success stories
Encourage your customers to engage with your brand
Create brand awareness
Establish an emotional connection
Generate repeat business from existing customers
Build brand loyalty
Improve search engine rankings
Bring down your advertising costs

Why would some people prefer advertising over content marketing?

Advertising is still alive and thriving. Even YouTube sometimes insist that you watch an advertisement completely before proceeding to the video you want to watch.

So, as long as media consumption is there, some form of advertising is always going to be there.

A big reason businesses prefer advertising over content marketing is a perception or misperception that the returns are faster. You pay for the ad and the ad immediately begins to show. Those who are interested will get attracted to it.

Besides, content can’t be everywhere.

Facebook, for example, is a social network and the success of your content depends on the number of people liking it or sharing it. Still, its platform allows you to “boost” your posts, which is a form of advertising. The platform also makes money through direct advertising.

Every content-based platform sustains itself through advertising. Google’s entire existence depends on advertising as of now. Even your mobile apps show ads to earn revenue.

Content marketing depends on your ability to carry out a sustained content publishing and content distribution exercise. The results come when you have created a considerable amount of content. The results are great, but you have to be patient.

Advertising, no matter how inefficient and unreliable it is, gives you the results immediately. It depends on numbers and your ability to spend money. The more money you can spend, the more success you can expect.

The benefits of advertising are

Quicker brand awareness and recognition
Better for promoting limited time offers
It can generate instant traffic to your website
Quicker targeting of a specific audience segment

Advertising can be compared with spamming. Why do you think spamming still is a big business? There was a time when 90% of the emails on the Internet were spam. These days (by March 2017) the figure has come down to 56.87% (source Statista) not because a lesser number of people want to use spam but because email services are becoming more efficient at identifying and isolating spam emails. Still, it is a thriving business because if you can send out millions of emails and even if the success rate is 0.01%, you get your ROI. The same is the case with advertising.

Let’s briefly talk about the benefits of content marketing over conventional advertising.

Educate your customers

Educated customers are in a better position to take decisions in your favor. Educate them about the benefits of doing business with you.

Educate them about the benefits of your product or service. Educate them how you can help them solve their nagging problems. Through constantly publishing informative content you can keep your prospective customers and clients well-informed.

Differentiate yourself from your competitors

Advertising is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. Every business uses it. If you have money, you can advertise. The problem is, your competitors too have the money to advertise.

When everybody advertises, there is nothing to distinguish one business from another.

With content marketing you can have a unique presence for yourself and your brand. A well-formulated content marketing strategy automatically makes you great content for your business in such a manner that your business name or your brand name stands out among the crowd.

People know your brand and your business on the strength of the content that you publish.

Tell success stories

Once people start using your product or services, you will begin to have success stories – of how people implement your solution and solve their business or personal problems.

Through regular advertising it is not possible to cover every success story. Through content marketing it is.

Reading success stories is very reassuring especially when you need to make an investment.

When you are about to purchase something, you want to get reassurance from other people who have already bought your product or service. This is why it is very important to publish and share success stories of people who have benefited from your product or service.

Encourage your customers to engage with your brand

When people engage with your brand they tend to remember you more. This is why it is very important that you engage your prospective customers and clients regularly and repeatedly, in a fruitful manner.

Content marketing allows you to do that. It gives your customers and clients a reason to interact with you, visit your website or blog repeatedly, or leave comments on your social media updates.

This way eventually when they need to do business with you they remember what sort of business you provide.

Create brand awareness

Through content marketing you can create brand awareness by publishing useful content on your website as well as on your social media profiles. Your content comes to be known for its usefulness and relevance.

You should also make sure that your content ranks well on search engines. This way people can easily find it. This creates brand awareness.

People constantly come across your content – useful and informative content. When they appreciate the usefulness of your content they have a positive association with your brand.

Establish an emotional connection

With strategic content writing you can establish an emotional connection with your prospective and current customers and clients.

What is an emotional connection?

An emotional connection is when people feel good when they come across something from you – an update from you on their timeline, something that reminds them of you, a blog post that you have published to inform them or educate them, or something amusing that you have shared with them. They form positive associations with any symbol that reminds them of you.

An emotional connection can only be established through content marketing. Although it can also be achieved through advertising, it rarely happens. The worst thing about advertising is, people already have a negative notion about it. For them, conventional advertising is, constant pestering.

Generate repeat business from existing customers

A lot of business comes from your existing customers. Tragically, according to this Forbes article, 60-80% of the customers who were extremely satisfied with a particular business never do business again with that particular business.

It is not that they no longer need to do the business, it’s just that, the business that satisfies them never follows up, never keeps in touch.

This LinkedIn Pulse article quotes a Gartner study that says that for the company used in the study, 65% business comes from existing customers and it costs five times more to attract new customers than to keep existing customers coming back.

Content marketing allows you to keep in touch with your existing customers whereas advertising is always aiming at getting new customers.

Of course, getting new customers for your business is very important, but keeping your existing customers (people who have done business with you and are satisfied and happy with you) coming back to you is even more important.

When was it the last time you saw an advertisement thanking existing customers?

Through content marketing it’s very easy to maintain a constant contact with people who have already purchased from you. You have their contact information. They may have also subscribed to your mailing list. They might already be following you on Facebook and Twitter.

Keep in touch with them. Keep them educated. Keep them informed.

Build brand loyalty

You can learn a good example of brand loyalty from Apple. The company has diehard fans. So does Tesla.

Through content marketing you can build a loyal customer base. People often like to keep in touch with companies and businesses they have bought products and services from.

It’s easier to provide engaging content to people who have already contacted you. Constantly provide useful content. Provide content in their preferred format and medium. Be useful to them. Always update them when you have a great offer.

The best way of building brand loyalty is by providing stellar support through your content.

Publish helpful articles and blog posts regularly. Publish a comprehensive FAQs section covering all possible questions, problems and their solutions.

The more valuable content you publish and distribute, the stronger and more widespread will be your brand loyalty.

Improve search engine rankings

One of the greatest benefits of content marketing is a better SEO. Every business wants to improve its search engine rankings. But what do the search engines want? What does Google want?

Google wants quality content? How does Google know that you are publishing quality content?

Although search engines like Google have very complicated algorithms to evaluate the quality of your content, no amount of AI can be as smart as human beings. So, Google also observes how people behave towards your content.

People are going to react positively to your content only if you publish high-quality content. You cannot make people like your content. They are going to like it, react to it, engage with it, share it on their social media timelines and link to it from their websites and blogs, only when they find your content useful and relevant.

A well-executed content marketing strategy ensures quality content on your website and positive social sharing. This in turn improves your search engine rankings for your important keywords. When you are constantly publishing content relevant to your business you cover all your primary and secondary keywords and search terms, automatically.

Bring down your advertising cost

Better search engine rankings. Greater level of engagement. Better conversion rate. More social sharing. More incoming links.

As your organic presence on the web increases, your advertising cost begins to come down.

Until your content has significant presence on the Internet, you may have to rely on conventional advertising, but as you begin to consolidate your presence on search engines, on your own website and on social media and social networking websites, you need to advertise less and less.

Because your organic rankings improve, you no longer have to spend money on AdWords. Since your content creates more buzz on social media websites, you don’t have to buy advertisements over there. You don’t have to buy links because people link to your website on their own.

Why more businesses are ditching conventional advertising and embracing content marketing?

Frankly, content marketing is more effective, but more than that, it is more meaningful. It helps you nurture relationships with your present and prospective customers and clients instead of constantly bombarding them with impersonal messages. People relate better to the quality content that you broadcast regularly.

Nobody cares about advertisements these days. People find them annoying. They are constantly employing ways to skip advertisements or completely ignore them.

Content, on the other hand, they embrace. Make it amusing. Make it useful. Become a part of the lives of your customers and clients through your content. You don’t need to advertise then.