What are the Benefits of Content Marketing?

If you know anything about digital marketing, you will know that the phrase “content is key” is thrown around a lot. When you consider how much of your online experience is centred on content, it’s easy to see why it’s such a big focus for successful businesses. Content is everywhere; it’s how a business shares information about products, advertises events, informs customers and builds an online presence. Without content, it’s impossible to build a strong online presence. Below, we have taken a look at the ins and outs of content marketing, including its many benefits.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a key part of digital marketing, aimed at attracting and engaging your target audience. It’s a form of digital marketing that works for the majority of businesses, in the majority of industries, and it can be tailored to specific demographics. The main goal of content marketing is to boost brand awareness, establish yourself as an authority in a specific industry, build strong customer relationships, and encourage customers to take action. It focuses on creating, distributing and sharing a variety of content forms online. This can include everything from blog posts, articles and ebooks, to videos, infographics and podcasts. Even posting social media updates is a form of content marketing.

For content marketing to be effective and worthwhile, the content needs to provide valuable information to users, offer solutions to customer problems and address the target audience specifically. Otherwise, it’s likely to be skimmed and overlooked, whereas popular content is likely to be remembered and shared. All of the content shared by a business should be relevant, informative, researched and engaging.

What are the Benefits?

Though there are a variety of tools and techniques for digital marketing, content marketing stands out as being one of the most beneficial, which is why it’s something that a lot of businesses are already focusing on. Not only is it an effective way of sharing information about your business, but it can help to improve brand recognition and SEO. Here are some of the key benefits of content marketing:

Create Trust and Loyalty – By providing valuable and helpful content, you can build trust and loyalty. Your target audience are more likely to see you as a credible, reliable and trustworthy business if they see you putting out high quality content. It’s a lot easier to trust a brand if you see them offering valuable insights, information and solutions. Without content, there is nothing to show a potential customer what you have to offer.

Inform Prospects About Your Product and Industry – Content marketing is a fantastic way to inform your prospects about your product, services and industry. There are bound to be competitor businesses out there, but you can showcase what makes you different via content. With content marketing, you can tailor your content to your specific target audience, ensuring that the content is exactly what they’re looking for. It’s a way to market your business in a way that resonates with them, which can lead to higher engagement and interaction. It’s also a great way to establish thought leadership, highlighting how much you know about the industry.

Improve SEO Rankings – There is no denying the importance of search engine optimisation, especially if you want to attract a growing number of customers online. Content marketing is a huge part of improving SEO rankings, as search engines tend to favour fresh, relevant and high quality content. By regularly publishing quality content and optimising it for relevant keywords, you can improve your search engine rankings, which leads to increased traffic to your website.

Invite Customer Dialogue – Content marketing invites customer dialogue by creating valuable and engaging content, which then sparks interest and encourages your customers to interact. By addressing the unique needs, concerns and interests of your target audience, you can encourage them to leave comments and participate in discussions. There are also a lot of content formats – such as social media posts, blog comments and polls – that enable customers to share their thoughts and opinions. They can also provide feedback and ask questions. This two way conversation is a useful tool for building strong customer relationships.

Cost Effective Marketing – A lot of digital marketing can be costly, but content marketing is one of the most cost effective strategies. Though it does require an initial investment into content creation and distribution, it provides long term benefits, making it an investment that keeps on giving. Popular content continues to drive traffic to a website over a long period of time, so it’s by no means a short lived or one time success. Plus, as content marketing can generate lucrative leads by attracting potential customers to your website, it often pays for itself relatively quickly.

Do I Need Content Marketing?

To put it simply, yes, you do need content marketing. If you want your business to do well online – meaning, you want to continually attract new customers and solidify yourself as the ‘go to’ business in your industry – you need to invest in professional content marketing. Content marketing should form a part of almost all digital marketing strategies, and having some content is necessary if you want to do well in SEO. Otherwise, your website could struggle to rank well for relevant keywords and search terms.

At Profici, we provide a wide range of digital marketing services, and this includes content marketing. We understand that every business is different, which is why we tailor our content marketing to your industry, your business and your target market. Whether you want to inform and educate website visitors, or boost your SEO efforts, we are on hand to handle your content marketing needs. Contact us today to find out more.