Did you know that more than 90% of the searchers don’t bother to click on paid search results against any query? It means you can drive 90% of organic traffic to your business without spending a cent.
Paid ads are all about getting something from the users. On the other hand, content marketing strives to educate people, provide value, build trust, and develop a relationship with the audience. It converts prospects into clients when they are ready to convert.
Therefore, investing time and resources in content marketing can prove to be a game-changing tactic for businesses to grab their customers’ attention, build brand authority, and ultimately generate leads and conversions.
The benefits of content marketing are far-reaching and set your business up for long-term success. Let’s see how!
1. Create Loyal Following
Content marketing isn’t about shoving your business, product, or service in the face of your audience. Instead, it strives to put your brand in front of your potential customers when they’re looking for it.
Inbound marketing strives to educate people and promises more customer retention than an outbound marketing strategy. You need to create content that solves problems and provides information against the keywords people are searching for.
Write to solve, not to sell. If you provide value to your customers without asking anything in return, you will make your audience your loyal followers and genuine advocates of your brand.
2. Grow Email Lists
Growing an email list is tricky nowadays as people are skeptical about who they subscribe to and why. Emails offer an incredible 3800% ROI, but how do you get people to give up their email address?
Informative, high-quality content helps you grow your email list by building people’s trust in your brand. When they consistently consume epic content from your blog, they are more likely to download your content or subscribe to your blog in exchange for their email address.
3. Make Buyer’s Journey Quick and Easy
No matter how actionable your content is, it won’t benefit you unless it appeals to the right people at the right time. You need to create powerful and assertive content to match each stage of the buyers’ journey.
Typically people don’t buy products or services as soon as they need them. First, they search Google for relevant keywords or phrases. Then they scan the results, consume the content, and make an opinion.
Next, they verify that opinion and come to a decision. Thus, from the problem to the solution, a buyer passes through many stages called the buyer’s journey. Create useful content that answers your audience’s questions at each step, and you will help them convert quickly.
4. Establish Brand Affinity
iPhone users typically hesitate to accept Android, no matter how powerful gadgets they bring into the market. That’s because they have a strong brand affinity for Apple products despite their cost. Do you think that the reason behind brand affinity is performance?
No, it’s not! It’s the feeling you associate with a specific brand based on how it presents itself in front of its consumers. Engaging content can drive traffic to your site and make you a household name for your target audience.
5. Improve Domain Authority
If your website has a high domain authority, it has a better chance of ranking on SERP. Domain authority or DA is a website ranking algorithm introduced by MOZ. You can find similar ranking methods such as Domain Rank or DR used by Ahrefs.
Domain authority mostly mirrors the backlinks of your site plus many other factors. High-quality content full of actionable advice, expert quotes, stats, and other helpful content is a magnet for external links. When high-authority websites cite your resources, it acts as a vote for your authenticity and credibility. So, Google will rank your site higher against those keywords.
6. Build Brand Awareness
When asked to choose a drink, people typically pick Coke over Pepsi or other colas. That’s strong brand awareness. Consumers know who you are and what you do.
To build strong brand awareness, you have to give people something genuine and valuable that others are not providing.
For instance, Copyhackers’s Tuesday Tutorials, and MOZ’s Whiteboard Fridays are quite popular among their specific audience as they provide valuable instructions, free content strategies, latest niche-related updates free.
You can create guides and ebooks to build brand awareness. Case studies are another great way to get noticed and provide value to the customers. All this valuable content strengthens your brand image and widens your online presence.
7. Improve Organic Search Ranking
Valuable content is what brings eyeballs to your business, but it’s the best way to improve search ranking as well. Blogs, guides, case studies, they all allow you to include keywords and other relevant search terms into your content.
Though still very important, Google doesn’t care about keywords as much as it used to. Fulfilling the search intent is its primary focus now. That’s another reason to spend your resources on great content.
As more people find your content useful and spend time on your website, Google starts filing it as a credible source against the keywords involved. Moreover, if your content covers every aspect of the topic and presents all the answers to customer queries, you have a high chance of appearing in Google’s featured snippets.
8. Long-Term Marketing Strategy
Ads and outbound marketing tactics offer short-term benefits and don’t contribute much to your site’s organic traffic. But, evergreen content remains relevant for a long time and becomes a steady traffic source over the years.
When you create a blog post highlighting your target audience’s pain points, and it starts to top the SERP, you start getting your first potential readers, followers, and clients. Now, if your content helps them solve their problem and provides them the guidance they’re expecting, you will win yourself a returning audience.
Grateful readers are more likely to remember your brand, and whenever they require your service or need to make a recommendation, they will search for your site right away. This way, compelling content can keep paying you back on your investment as long as it’s relevant.
9. Enhance Your Visibility
Optimized content can present your brand in front of millions of people who are searching for relevant information. Powerful content is hard to ignore, and when readers find something useful, they are more likely to share it with their contacts and followers.
Use interactive content to engage your readers and make your brand memorable. Use interactive content such as quizzes, contests, and polls to get more social media shares, comments, and tags and broaden your visibility.
10. Cost-effective Approach
The best thing about content marketing is its natural appeal. Consumers hardly trust the ads anymore. Instead, they prefer the sites that provide them complete insights like how-to guides and expert and customer opinions.
Spending your resources on creating in-depth content that explains how your business can help solve customer problems can sell your products and services more quickly with a high number of satisfied customers. That’s because they understand what to expect before they buy from you.
Over time, as more and more people find your content and buy from you, your ROI increases, and cost per conversion decreases, making content marketing more cost-effective than traditional marketing channels.
11. Skyrocket Your Sales
It doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if it’s not converting into sales. The first stage to increase your sales is to reach people who should be using your products and services, the ideal targets. But once you have their attention, you need to give them reasons to take action.
The first step is to check whether you’re creating content for those in the transactional phase of search intent. Is that content compelling enough? Answer all the questions your readers might have about your product. Add testimonials from happy customers and experts’ opinions about your products.
Help them compare your offerings with the competitors without leaving your website. Add video offerings because 64% of users purchase a product after watching a brand video, and 51% of marketers believe video content secures the highest ROI.
12. Magnify Social Media Followers
You cannot gain a productive social media presence unless your social media strategy is run by SMART goals, i.e., specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Content marketing can help populate your social media posts with content that matters to your audience.
For instance, if you run a jewelry business, you can create posts about style guides and the latest trends. Such posts are more likely to be shared on social media. Many people share good content on social media, even if they have no intention of buying. But, they increase your reach and followers. More followers mean more buyers will trust your brand.
13. Lead to More Conversions
Did you know that the average attention span of a typical person is 8 seconds nowadays? When a customer lands on your site, that’s the time you have to impress them. Therefore, focus on how your product addresses their pain points and how your brand solves it.
Remember… don’t be salesy!
Educational content without a sales pitch can produce 131% more conversions. So, your priority should be to engage, help, inform, and provide value to the customers without pressing them to convert.
14. Position Yourself as Industry Expert
Perhaps the best benefit of a sound content strategy is that it positions you as an expert in your industry. If you Google ‘learning SEO’ or a related term, you will notice that MOZ is topping the search results, followed closely by Ahrefs. Change the modifier, but you will find MOZ in the top three results if not at the top!
Unlike their competitors, MOZ doesn’t need adverts to come up at the top. It’s their quality content that has made them a go-to resource for anything SEO-related. You will find their prime content free of cost, such as SEO beginner guide, SEO advanced guide, etc. You name the topic, and they have an in-depth guide on it.
So, when it’s time to buy a course on SEO, the reader is more likely to choose MOZ Academy because of the value they received from free content. Similarly, when it’s time to invest in an SEO tool, they’ll prefer MOZ again because of the trust and familiarity with the tool.
15. Reach Your Niche Audience
Whether you operate on a local or a global level, you don’t want everyone’s attention. There’s only a niche audience that needs your offerings, and they’re the only ones that matter.
Content marketing makes sure your message reaches the right audience, the audience looking for your products and services. Make sure your content talks to your ideal customers. Create personas to define them and make sure whatever you write is attractive and engaging to them.
Content marketing works, but only if your content is original and useful. Build authoritative content following a SMART content marketing strategy, and you will see your reach, engagement, and conversions increase. In an avalanche of content and adverts, customers are looking for genuine connection, a brand that understands their problems and willing to go the extra mile to help them with a solution. Authentic content is the extra mile that wins customers’ hearts.
