As prospective buyers are increasingly inundated by more marketing messages than ever, they’ve become discerning.

People now tend to engage only with branded content that’s relevant to their specific interests and valuable in terms of helping them achieve their aspirations.

This branded content can take many forms. It might be, for example, a blog post, a video, an infographic, a webinar, a wiki, a podcast, an email, a fact sheet or a newsletter.

Content marketing benefits

The specific benefits of content marketing include:

• Increased brand awareness.As target audience members, referrers and influencers consume useful content, they become increasingly aware of the business that produces it.
  
  
• Increased engagement.The dissemination of useful, relevant content encourages audiences to engage with and trust your brand.
  
  
• Higher search engine visibility.Each new web page or blog post is another page that Google indexes. This creates more opportunities to rank for more search queries.
  
  
• More inbound traffic to your website. Higher search engine visibility leads to a greater volume of inbound traffic.
  
  
• Improved brand reputation and authority. People think highly of your brand when they find the content you produce is helpful, informative and relevant to their needs.
  
  
• More social traffic.Syndicating content on social media increases exposure. More people read and share your content, thereby increasing engagement with your business.
  
  
• Increased domain authority.More quality content published increases the perceived authority and relevance of your brand’s website. As your content earns more inbound links from external sources, your website’s authority increases even further.
  
  
• Cost-effective promotion. The main cost of content marketing is time (in contrast to other marketing activities such as advertising, events and public relations). It also offers compounding returns – the longer the program, the greater the benefit.
  
  
• Increased conversion/sales.Content marketing that engages, helps and provides value to readers (without turning into advertising) can include specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that, in turn, can increase conversions.
  
  

Effective content marketers are educational publishers

To succeed at content marketing, businesses need to think of themselves as publishers or media companies rather than as advertisers.

This helps to build trust. When the members of an audience consume content that’s useful, informative and relevant to their needs, and feel that the source of that content isn’t trying to immediately sell them something, they learn to trust that source.

Trust is the greatest sales aid. It’s the foundation of long-term engagement. Without trust, buyers are likely to be less enthusiastic about a business, and less loyal.

It pays for businesses to invest in ongoing content marketing programs (not just short-term campaigns) that provide entertaining, informative, relevant, educational content that buyers may otherwise be willing to pay for.

The content in any content marketing program should, therefore, always help first and sell second.

If your business delivers such content, on a regular basis over an extended time, it helps your audiences and will help you build strong relationships with them.

Consequently, these audiences will naturally want to buy from your business.

Do you want to find out more about content marketing for your business? Contact Momentum Connect to see how we can help.

Why content marketing is essential for your business

Peter-John Lewis

Last Updated: 20 June 2018 Published: 04 June 2018