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Some well-known benefits of content marketing for your business

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.

6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing

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

1 Reply

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.

3 Most Important Objectives of Content Marketing

Content marketing for lead generation

Every business needs to generate leads because these leads eventually turn into sales. So, if your content marketing efforts are generating leads, then it is a successful campaign. It is meeting one of its biggest objectives.

The statistics in this Slideshare presentation say that businesses that blog regularly generate 88% more leads compared to those who don’t publish a blog post regularly.

It’s obvious. The more content you have all over the Internet, the better are the chances of your links being found by your prospects, provided you are focusing on the right kind of content.

If I want to attract an audience who would like to hire my content writing and content marketing services, then obviously I should be writing content around these topics, whether I publish it on my own website or somewhere else (on Medium, for example).

Why your content gets you more leads?

Remember that everything depends on how effectively you publish and market your content.

Assuming that you are targeting the right market, with more content in circulation, you get more targeted traffic.

People associate you with high-quality content. Due to your consistency and adherence to high-quality, your prospective customers and clients begin to respect you.

They either directly do business with you or they recommend your business to people they know.

Content marketing for brand awareness

One of the greatest content marketing objectives is brand awareness.

You may also like to read How to build your brand with content marketing.

Brand awareness, as the term speaks for itself, means, more people know about your brand and are aware of what it stands for. This sort of content marketing may not get you business directly (but indirectly, it certainly does) it makes your brand visible.

Despite being one of the greatest content marketing objectives, tracking business growth via brand awareness can be a tricky business because your brand can grow in many ways and most of these ways are not easily trackable.

People repeatedly come across interesting content by you and they become familiar to your presence.

The best way of creating brand awareness through content marketing that comes to my mind is guest blogging and publishing informative articles on other websites.

By publishing guest blog posts on other blogs and websites you immediately put your brand in front of a completely new audience. If I want to put Credible Content in front of my prospects, I can submit blog posts to various websites like LinkedIn, Entrepreneur, web design blogs (to encourage them to hire my content writing services) and other business niche websites where people would be looking for a content writer.

You can also publish lots of educational material and simply let it be known that it’s your brand that’s publishing the material.

Content marketing for thought leadership

This is to establish your authority as an expert, or as a niche product or service provider. For thought leadership you need to publish lots of insightful content that helps people in real-world situations. You are considered a thought leader when your wisdom solves actual problems rather than dabbling with vague topics

Anyway, the objective of this blog post is not to talk about how to develop a strong thought leadership. It is to talk about the most important objectives of content marketing: lead generation, brand awareness and thought leadership. These are the basic, fundamental content marketing objectives and then they spread into various branches and sub-branches.