According to research, 80% of people prefer a series of articles versus an advertisement. Furthermore, 70% of people agree that content marketing makes them feel closer to a product or business, while 60% credit content for helping them make better product decisions.
If you don’t already have an effective content marketing strategy in place, you are likely missing out on a lot and losing a lot of business in the process. In today’s digital economy, content marketing is perhaps the most effective method your business can employ to reach out to both established customers and prospects. However, if you are yet to be convinced about whether to adopt a content strategy or not, here are reasons why your business needs content marketing.
Build trust
One of the biggest benefits you can derive from creating and publishing quality content relevant to your field of business is the resulting trust it builds in your audience. The greater the amount of cohesive, quality content that you feed the public, the more you appear an expert in your designated professional field. Remember, people are always ready to hire experts to solve their problems.
Brand identity
It is impossible to overestimate the power of an established brand in influencing the business decisions of the buying public. But if you are just starting out, and are yet to establish a strong presence, your business will still benefit from a content marketing strategy that highlights its unique identity.
Your strategy could use viral content like videos, blog posts, or audio. Whatever medium you choose, a unique voice for your business is likely to resonate with the members of the public it aims to serve. Just make sure that whatever content you are choosing to share connects with the kind of brand identity you want to portray. If your brand messages are all over the place, your brand identity will be just as lost.
Organic searches
Search engines have changed the business landscape forever. Consumers use popular search engines to perform local searches for goods and services before making a purchase. Moreover, some consumers perform product research via search engines before deciding on making a purchase. Hence, it is important that your marketing strategy does weigh heavily towards your business showing up during those searches.
Analyse your performance
Content marketing is never a once-off process. It requires constant tweaking and adjustment. Most digital platforms like social media have easy-to-acquire metrics which means it is possible to quickly figure out what is working and what is not. By constantly adjusting your strategy over time, your business online marketing strategy could easily become a smooth well-oiled operation, highly efficient at gathering leads and converting them to customers.
Generate leads
The end goal of any marketing strategy is to attract new people to your business that you can sell to. Content marketing allows you to attract people who may not have even decided to buy yet. They discover your business through all your useful content and they get interested. Once they arrive at your website, you offer them more information that converts them over time. The best thing about this stage of the marketing process is the complete absence of your competitors.
Beyond merely attracting leads, a good content marketing strategy will make your business readily available for those actively searching for it. These are ideal leads as these people have already made up their minds that they need you. Content marketing is useful in this sense as it will allow people and leads to find you.
ROI
Content marketing on average costs 62% less than traditional advertising and is three times more effective in generating leads. A well-thought out content marketing campaign could ultimately improve your ROI as it will be cheaper to produce and maintain on a month-to-month basis, and you will be able to build better relationships with your customers.
Take advantage of social shares
People share things they like. Your content marketing strategy and by extension, your business, could benefit from this by producing great content that will inevitably spread like wildfire through the social space, reaching customers you might previously have never reached by any other means. Therefore, make sure that you do research into who your target audience is and what content they would like to see and read. In doing so, you will be able to reach the right people, with the right kind of message.
Bring people to your website
By adopting a cohesive, effective content marketing campaign or strategy, your status as an expert in your field of business inevitably rises. Before long, your target audience will start looking to you as a source of solutions to all their worries, and your business will benefit as a result. Online marketing strategies like email marketing, building online communities, etc. have been shown to be very successful in this respect.
Media overload
We live in a digital society that runs 24/7. People are constantly bombarded with information from emails, social media feeds, and YouTube channels, along with a pileup of more than 1200 marketing messages each day. As a result, consumers have become much more savvy about marketing and are unwilling to read or hear marketing messages that they do not find useful or relevant. They are able to tune out marketing messages easily, especially when it comes to traditional marketing. However, if you really take the time to get to know your target audience, you can stand out from the crowd and produce content that will both catch and retain their eye. Your content should always be:
- Entertaining
- Educational
- Informative
- Useful
- Engaging
Create an experience
The brand experience encompasses all touchpoints between your target audience and the brand including your website and social media channels. Visitors to your site who have found you either through search, a personal recommendation, or social media link need to be convinced that your product or service meets their needs.
Content marketing helps achieve this goal by demonstrating your authority and building trust. Well-written, insightful content can overcome objections to purchase and smooth the way to a sale. This includes all types of content such as blog posts, videos, white papers with in-depth information, or eBooks.
Improved SEO
The number of ways in which content benefits SEO is never ending. Great content attracts editorial links, which tell Google you’re important and authoritative. Google can also crawl your content, getting a far better idea of what your company is about, allowing it to return your site for more relevant queries (including a great many long-tail queries). At the end of the day, as long as you are keeping your website fresh and up to date with relevant content, Google will reward you in the search results.
Make your content king
One thing you’ll need to know right from the get-go is that none of these benefits are going to show up immediately. Content marketing can take quite a bit of effort just to get the wheel turning. Over time, the momentum lessens the effort required of you to see the results you are looking for.
If you are interested in discussing your content strategy with Cognite, feel free to contact us so that we can assist you in making your content king.
Further reading
