Let’s be honest: after the year we’ve all just had, we’ve been spending much more time in front of a screen than ever before. Because of our increased screen time, now more than ever, content marketing is crucial for businesses. Read on to discover how this type of marketing strategy can enhance your business’s success with the important considerations of content marketing benefits.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before jumping into its significance, we have to understand what content marketing really is. First of all, it is important to acknowledge that content marketing may be an unfamiliar term, but everyone encounters content marketing whether or not they recognize it as such. SEMRush explains that 87% of marketers use some sort of content funnel, with the goal being content that is both high-quality and targeted, information that is aesthetically organized, and able to “cut through the clutter” to reach those who could become clients.
Really, the name says it all: content marketing is creating content that markets a business. This is usually more or less indirect marketing, where content references the given business’s products or services but is not an exclusive sales pitch. Instead, with content marketing, marketers target their original content to their audience to get consumers engaged with their company as a source of information. For instance, a keyword-optimized homepage can boost your SERPs rankings and organic traffic:
And well-written, frequently updated blog content can help demonstrate your business’s authority, increasing your SEO value:
Content marketing benefits include that type of company-client trust developed when consumers see the business as a viable, trusted source of quality content.
Why Is Content Marketing So Important Today?
With the effects of the pandemic even more dramatically increasing digital device use which was already on the rise, people all over the world are more tied to the Internet than ever. With more screen time comes more online shopping, more digital content, and more ads — which means we’re all getting better at filtering out pointed sales pitches and ignoring these targeted forms of marketing.
About 27% of Americans are utilizing ad blockers, with the highest use in the 18-to-24-year-old age range. This number may continue to rise along with the trailing percentages for other age groups. While direct marketing approaches were traditionally effective, in today’s world those strategies are increasingly seen as intrusive and unsophisticated.
With more digitally savvy and aware consumers than ever before, today’s businesses can turn to content marketing as a more sophisticated and trustworthy kind of marketing. We’ve found that content marketing can generate three times more leads than conventional marketing tactics, and Forbes reported that content marketing was 62% less costly in 2016 than other strategies. This low expense and higher lead generation prove to be some of the most potent content marketing benefits.
Content Marketing Benefits
So in today’s world, content marketing has become a great alternative to those conventional marketing tactics. Content marketing benefits include enhanced customer engagement and relationship as well as the potential to increase SEO and visibility for the business’s digital presence.
Improving Customer Engagement and Relationship
One of the most important content marketing benefits is the relationship it forges between the company and clients. When consumers recognize a company for its quality content, they see that business as dependable and authoritative in its field. That type of trust leads to ideal business relationships where customers consistently return to the source for content.
Customers who find quality content on a business’s website will naturally associate that source with quality. In today’s saturated market with essentially unlimited, relatively easy-to-find options for just about any product or service all over the Internet, the most important content marketing benefit may be that original content helps your business stand out from the crowd — in a good way, of course!
So, content marketing benefits your business by presenting your company as an authority to potential clients. In this way, content marketing not only improves customer engagement but also makes them more likely to become repeat customers as well as the ideal kinds of clients who talk up your business for you. Besides this overlooked content marketing benefit that simply raises the number of times potential clients will want to visit and return to a business’s website, clients also associate the content source with expertise as well as their satisfaction in getting the answers they wanted.
Increasing SEO and Visibility
The more content on a business’s website, the more potential pieces that can make that website visible. Content marketing is a great way to increase SEO, since unique content, especially when it is properly optimized for audience queries, does well in search engine algorithms. Useful, quality content associated with a business can only help its reputation to customers and its visibility in Internet searches.
While a website with content optimized for computer searches is critical, today’s most successful businesses also cater to users on their phones, including various apps. Businesses and marketers are capitalizing on the use of social media for their content distribution. The more places your business has content, the more visible they are, and the better recognition they’ll have, both through SEO and name familiarity with their audience.
Can Content Marketing Help Me Succeed?
While there is no foolproof way to guarantee a business’s success, content marketing benefits should not be discounted. Content marketing improves customer engagement and the client-consumer relationship by forging trust through repeated satisfactory interactions. That repeated quality also increases SEO and visibility. Ultimately, content marketing is crucial to business, helping customers to better find and trust the source of such quality content as a source for products or services as well.
The Future of Business
No business wants to be left behind, and today’s market is particularly volatile, not only fast-moving but also quickly changing. Semrush reports that 90% of content marketers changed their content marketing as of last year to adapt to users’ changing needs. This number signifies the importance of researching and pushing ahead of the crowd with effective and quality content marketing. If you take advantage of content marketing benefits, your business can boom and your relationship with your clients can be better than ever.