Why Every Business Needs Content Marketing
Content marketing has become a staple in every successful digital marketing campaign. It’s rare to find any business that doesn’t use content marketing, even if only on a small scale. The reason for this is that content marketing serves two vital purposes: it gets your brand quality backlinks to rank higher in the search engines, and it serves as a way to generate leads.
It’s not hard to add content marketing to your toolbox. In fact, it’s actually quite easy, and you can do it without any prior experience if you outsource the writing to skilled content writers. All you need to do is define your audience clearly and decide what kind of content will reach them the best.
If you hire a professional marketing agency, they’ll handle everything for you, from content creation to distribution and promotion. Many businesses attribute their success to content marketing.
On the other hand, businesses that don’t employ content marketing are bound to fall behind at some point, and here’s why.
- Your competitors use content marketing
If your competitors are using an effective marketing method and you aren’t, chances are, they’ll come out on top, and you’ll be left behind. This applies to a variety of tactics, especially content marketing.
There’s no getting around the fact that you need high-quality content to rank your website in the search engines. Content marketing is a fundamental component of search engine optimization (SEO), and if you don’t utilize it, your competitors will outrank you.
If you know your competitors are generating backlinks from sites in their niche, it’s wise to consider following suit. If your goal is to reach a local market, you may not need to work as hard as a national chain with no local market. However, quality backlinks are always helpful.
- Content marketing establishes your authority
If you don’t publish regular content that makes your readers see you as an authority in your niche, there’s almost no other way to gain that reputation. Unless you’re running regular radio, television, and social media ads that everyone sees, content marketing is probably your only avenue for generating brand recognition and positioning yourself as a pro.
- Content marketing generates trust
To succeed, you need to be trusted. According to data sourced by Search Engine Land, around 65% of consumers feel instant trust and rapport with a brand after reading educational content.
That’s huge! That means all you need to do to start earning trust with your market is educate them. Start publishing content that is useful, actionable, insightful, or educational. If you know your niche, that’s pretty easy.
Approaching content marketing as a way to help people is an excellent way to show off your expertise without having to say outright, “Look at us; we’re experts!” That would be bragging, and people don’t usually respond well to that manner of communication. You can bury that brag in educational content, and your market will pick up on the underlying meaning you’re trying to convey.
- Content marketing has a high ROI
The ratio of cost to ROI is lower for content marketing than many other traditional marketing tools. Ads are effective, but they cost a lot of money compared to content marketing. Paying for every click can get expensive, and you have to pay every time for every click. With content marketing, once you have a written piece, it’s yours forever, and you can do whatever you want with it.
Businesses with blogs tend to generate 67% more leads than brands that skip running a blog. Having a blog with fantastic content will also earn you more natural inbound links from people who want to link to your content.
And best of all, the more content you have, the more pages you can get indexed in the search engine. Each page that gets indexed in the search engines is one more opportunity to generate traffic and, eventually, sales and/or leads.
- Content marketing can bring you quality leads
Using content marketing for lead generation is smart, and it’s pretty easy to do. Generally speaking, if you can write content that captures your market’s attention and offers them something useful or helpful in return for their email address, they’ll sign up. But it has to be good. You can’t just write a random e-book and expect to get signups. You have to give away immense value to hook the most people.
Content marketing is essential
No matter what industry you’re in or what type of business you run, content marketing should always remain a fundamental component of your digital marketing strategy.