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…

1. Content marketing increases your organic search engine rankings because you publish authoritative content.
2. Consequently, you get more organic traffic from search engines.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. You publish targeted content to make customer journey meaningful, engaging, and informative.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Content marketing also prompts you to use original research data.
10. 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.