Content Marketing has levelled the playing field in the world of marketing today. Before, it was the only company that had humongous marketing budgets that could reach consumers. Ads on television, the newspaper and the radio were the platforms to market their product on, but what about today? Today is life is quite different and there is one factor that changes everything? The internet.
The internet has given people the opportunity to reach consumers without the heavy costs involved in traditional media. This is all thanks to one thing, content. Content Marketing helps you reach people who are in need in a way never seen before.
Now, before we understand what Content Marketing is, here’s a short recap on what marketing is.
“Marketing refers to actions a company or individual takes in order to engage with its target audience in order to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.”
We broadly categorize marketing into two categories, which are Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing.
Outbound marketing or also known as interruption marketing, is where the company or individual proactively reaches out to the consumer to sell their product or consumer, via methods like using ads.
Inbound marketing is best described as creating and distributing content, which leads people to your business/ website, which is content marketing. Some ways to do content marketing are creating a blog, creating a YouTube channel, having your own podcast and many more.
Now that we know what content marketing is, let’s look at ways it would help your business.
Content Marketing Helps Establish Trust with the Consumer
Just think about this for a moment, it would be rare for you to find someone who enjoys watching Ads which is why many people don’t pay attention to them at all and while people are always thinking if they would buy the product, and depending on that their attention differs. But in content marketing, your business is on giving out valuable information which would help people for free.
Now, if you ask the consumer who would they trust more, the guy who tried to sell them something they knew nothing about or someone who helped them gain valuable insight on something they wanted to know about? I will that for you to answer.
Content Marketing Helps Your Businesses Gain Authority
The one who shares knowledge is the one who has knowledge. If you provide the consumers with valuable content that helps them, they will remember you as the go-to-place to learn something new and worth spending time on. With more people thinking like this, your business will gain an excellent reputation in that sector and you can leverage this while discussing project costs with future clients. Getting higher rates, budgets, it depends on how you make use of your reputation.
Creating Content Will Help You Get Some Sweet Search Traffic
As of June 2021, there have 86.9 Billion visits on Google.com and Google by far gets you most traffic than any other website.
A bit of an insight into how this works, creating content optimized for SEO allows your content to rank on search results, which leads to traffic. This is the power of Google alone; there are other search engines like Duck Duck go and Bing too in the mix.
Long story short, create content, optimize it for SEO, your audience is waiting.
Content Marketing Increases Visibility of your Brand
If you have done your business’s branding right, and continue to publish quality content consistently, then you will receive traffic and reach more people. This will help more people know about your brand, which will increase your brand’s visibility and spread your message.
If you want to learn more about branding, you can check out this article we did on how branding can help you stand out.
Content Marketing is More Cost Efficient and Leads to a Higher ROI
Here is an interesting fact, for every dollar spent on Email Marketing, $38 is earned.
Here is another fun fact. Regarding OptinMonster’s case study on Tiger Fitness, their video content marketing efforts got them a 60% customer returning rate.
Email Marketing and Video Content Marketing are both types of content marketing. There are a lot of instances like these which you could find on the internet.
Content Marketing gives you a Higher ROI while being more cost-efficient.
Helps act as a gateway for Your Marketing Funnels
The most common and profitable way to get a prospective customer into your marketing funnel is by getting their email and with the increase in privacy and spam concerns, people have restricted themselves from giving away their email easily.
I said it’s not as easy but anything worth is the same too. Studies show that a B2B decision maker is most likely to give away their email address for a webinar (79%), white paper (76%), an analytical report (66%), or an e-book (63%).
So it all comes down to what is the best value you can provide to the user, which will make them give you their email address.
Quality Content Engages Your Audience
People today are always ready for new content, the new YouTube video, the new Instagram post or the new article; they are always ready for it. The challenge for you as the business is to know the best way to present the information your targeted audience is interested to know.
If you can do that, you can engage your audience and make them feel attached to you brand more. They will stay on a lookout for new content from you; they will consume your already previously published content and so on. Here’s a fact worth looking at: The CMI’s digital content marketing stats show that 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement. In addition, 72% say it has increased the number of leads.
You Can Take Advantage of Social Media
Social Media is a gold mine for content; it doesn’t always have to long form content. Being on Social Media intending to publish high-quality content will allow you to take advantage of different trends, a more responsive base of users and more. On the other side, publishing content also opens the way for readers/consumers to share your content on their social media feeds.
Being in Social media will allow the consumers to feel closer to your brand or business, which can cause a higher trust.
Conclusion
Those are some ways content marketing can help your business grow and expand. Hope this helps you in your content marketing journey. Have fun creating!