Content marketing is a hyped strategy in online marketing. There must be a reason why 88% of B2B marketers engage in content marketing.
Image Source Content Marketing Institute
But often the benefits of content marketing seem to be unclear. There is far more to content marketing than the effects of content on search rankings. Content also has a fixed role in social media marketing, as it gives you something to share on your social media accounts – without shouting promotional messages all the time.
But there is far more to content marketing that you should be aware of. And by carefully laying out your content marketing strategy you can focus on some of these benefits.
Some of the benefits of content marketing also depend on how you pursue your content marketing: Are you only publishing on your own website? Are you guest posting? Is your content good enough? What types of content are you using? And much more.
So what is it that you can achieve with content marketing? Here are 13 benefits of content marketing:
This means you have more content that people can find and consume. If the content is good enough some of the website visitors will spend more time on your site since they have more information to consume.
When I started out with social media marketing one of my biggest problems was: What should I post on my social channels? If you produce an endless stream of outstanding content (even better is evergreen content) you can use this content on your social channels. The question what you should post becomes far less intimidating. And what is more: your audience will love your updates since they always contain great information.
3. Better authority or recognition
Content can set you apart. Imagine you have some competitors and all of them are offering basically the same quality of products or solutions. But one of them also provides related expert content: Manuals, tips, tricks, case studies and more. Which one would you choose?
Content marketing can help you be the outstanding thoroughbred in a field of seemingly similar horses.
4. Higher visibility in search engines
Of course, content is not the only ranking factor in search engines. But the more content you have, the more chances you also have that someone searches for what you provide. Even without a ton of backlinks some long tail keywords or phrases may bring you some visitors to your website.
I don’t want to focus on the SEO aspect of content marketing in this article, but there is no denying the fact that content marketing has a positive impact on your SEO efforts.
This traffic can come from search engines or your social channels. It can also come from a variety of other sources. If you have a ton of great information on your website, your chances are good that people will gladly come to this content and eventually share it.
While it is a legend that great content will automatically rise to fame, with a little help and distribution from your side, more great content will help you get more traffic.
Image source: Kapost Blog
A wise man once told me that a buying audience is an engaged audience. People will forget about you and your products if you fail to engage them. Content can be a great tool to get more engagement. And this engagement will help you in many other aspects of marketing.
The more valuable information you offer on your website, the more time will at least some people from your audience spend on your site. And the more time people spend on your site, the more chance you have to get them to perform some kind of action that you want them to perform. For instance, you can get them to sign up for your newsletter – or even better to buy your products.
Image Source Hubspot
8. Better brand perception
If you don’t produce content the things you have to talk about are limited. There certainly are other ways of producing a great brand perception, but one legitimate way is to provide value to your target group via the outstanding and helpful content you provide.
In addition, if you have content you can share on your social media channels you will be recognized as a valuable brand – instead of a self-promoting annoyance.
9. Improved customer and consumer relationships
Content gives you a unique opportunity to stay in touch with your customers – without being annoying and over-promoting. Your customers will appreciate your efforts to provide value with your content.
Content helps build and maintain relationships.
Image Source Content Marketing Institute
10. Better conversion rates
Valuable information in content builds trust and trust powers conversions. While content marketing needs an up-front investment of time and skill that often cannot directly be connected to conversions – with time the content marketing efforts will pay back manyfold. In the end, the conversion rates will see a strong impact from the content marketing efforts.
Image Source: Content Marketing Institute
11. Decreased marketing costs
Content marketing is often perceived as expensive. The reason for this misconception may be that the investment in content is an upfront investment and the allocation of revenue per investment is somewhat more complicated than with advertising.
But content marketing is highly scalable. The return on invest may take some time to build up – but it is certainly efficient.
Image Source: Demand Metric
12. Immunity against increasing ad blocking
Ad blocking becomes an increasing problem for advertisers and publishers. Approximately over 200 Mio. users use ad blockers.
Content marketing is more or less immune against this marketing boon – if you do not rely on advertising as a distribution channel.
Image Source PageFair
13. Allows higher prices
You may not have heard of this benefit before. But it follows from all other mentioned benefits of content marketing.
We have talked about conversion rates before. So there is not much doubt about content marketing being able to make you money. But there is more to it.
Content marketing actually allows you to ask higher prices. It increases the value of your products or services. How?
Marcus Sheridan (The Sales Lion) nails it down for you:
Image Source: ConvinceAndConvert
Basically, the rules are similar to influencer marketing: Content marketing builds your influence, it builds trust in your expertise and knowledge – and it increases the demand for what you have to offer.
Final words on the benefits of content marketing
I have built two businesses based on content marketing. Content marketing came to us as an answer to our marketing questions when we had no money for advertising and needed results (fast).
And the answer was neither fancy nor very special content. We produced written content with the experience and knowledge we had to offer. Simple blog posts published on our own website combined with guest posting and targeted social media content distribution proved the scalable and cost-efficient marketing strategy that we had been looking for.
And you know what? You can do it, too!
This content was originally published here.