18 Benefits of Content Marketing That You Can’t Ignore

Content is everywhere! Nearly all forms of communication involve creating and sharing content. From newspapers to blogs and books to websites, videos, pictures, and much more, we consume tons of content daily.

It appears to be a fantastic chance for businesses to spread the word about their goods. And here is where different types of content marketing come into play!

The fact that around 82% of marketers use content marketing to drive sales further validates its importance.

However, if you are still unsure about it and want to gain a deeper understanding, this blog will help you.

Know the meaning and benefits of content marketing in greater detail and the process you should follow to help you improve your campaigns.

So, without further ado, let’s begin!

What Is Content Marketing?

A content marketing strategy includes developing and sharing high-quality information with the goal of raising awareness, interest, or demand for a product or service. In other words, content marketing is the use of text or media content for marketing purposes. 

The common forms of content here include blog posts, social media posts, articles, videos, etc. There may not be explicit promotion within such content pieces and they would provide entertainment or informational value. Hence, it is often different from pure copywriting.

Now, we know what content marketing is and what it’s not. So, it’s time to understand the importance that content marketing holds in any marketing campaign.

Top Benefits Of Content Marketing

Content carries the promotional message in an informational, attractive, and engaging form to the prospective customer. As discussed, this raises awareness, interest or desire in the minds of the potential customers. And this leads to the action of purchase. 

As a result, marketing using high-quality content is a crucial component of the sales cycle for all businesses. It helps get new customers over time while retaining existing ones. Moreover, it is relatively inexpensive in comparison to running advertising campaigns. And this levels the playing field for businesses of different sizes.

But this was just an overview! Let’s get to the specifics and explore the key content marketing benefits for a business. Here’s your answer for – What are the benefits of content marketing?

1. Improved SERP rankings

Content optimized for search engines will rank high in the search engine results pages (SERP) and raise your internet visibility. The search engine optimization (SEO) techniques include,

• Keyword addition
• Title and URL optimization
• Content structuring
• Content quality
• Search intent optimization
• Tags optimization
• Website performance optimization
• Backlink building

You can apply SEO Copywriting to various content types such as website content, blog posts, videos, social media posts, etc. Accordingly, you must apply SEO for diverse search engines such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest etc.

2. Increase in website traffic

This is one of the major advantages of content marketing. Nevertheless, the ultimate aim of a content marketing funnel is to boost the brand’s website traffic. Content marketers attract high traffic to the business’s website with high-quality and targeted content.

3. Better lead generation

Effective content marketing can attract new customers while retaining existing customers by facilitating the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, and action) sales funnel through high-quality content. This ensures a constant supply of high-quality leads at a relatively low cost. 

All you need is a good strategy and competent content creators to compete with the best in the business! As a result, you will have interested prospects who you can readily convert into customers. 

4. Increase in conversions

Conversions are amongst the key benefits of content marketing, as converting prospective customers into buyers is the whole point of marketing! This benefit is closely related to lead generation, as leads eventually convert to customers. 

If your content is relevant, engaging and compelling enough, your interested leads will feel the desire to buy your product or service and eventually convert into paying customers. However, this does not happen overnight and requires constant effort, as conversions are the final stage of the sales funnel.

5. Improved brand image and visibility

High-quality content leaves a positive impression on the reader’s mind about your brand and its products or services. Even subtle mentions within exceptional content will ensure that the audience forms a positive image of your brand and its offerings.

Moreover, your audience will share content with good informative or entertainment value with like-minded people. This will increase your reach and visibility across platforms. And this is crucial to help you stand out from the growing competition and build your brand image.

6. Increased social media following

As you read in the previous point, your readers are more likely to share high-quality content. And this creates an exponential rise in your viewership and following, especially on social media platforms. 

You can upload content to relevant groups for free and watch the magic as impressed viewers share your content and follow you! With the vast user base, reach, and influence of social media, your popularity on social platforms will turn into actual sales.

7. Higher audience engagement

Customers don’t want you to push products on them! The resistance to promotion is growing steeply, and copywriting alone can not counter that. However, high-quality content with the subtle promotion will grab the audience’s attention.

So, you should engage your target audience with exceptional content like blogs, videos, and pictures that they’ll love and share. If you play your cards right, your audience will look forward to your content and start liking your brand!

8. Increased audience retention

Retaining your audience can be challenging in the present times. This is because people have a really short or even missing attention span for marketing messages! For instance, the average viewing duration on YouTube videos is only between 30-50% of the video’s duration. 

But this is where marketing through top-quality content can make a world of difference! 

Excellent content can retain the audience’s attention and make the intended impact, despite a reduced average attention span. You need to stand out with creative and correctly-timed content, and this is possible through effective content marketing. 

9. Better relationship with customers and brand loyalty

Your relationship with prospective and existing customers can be the deciding factor when they’re out to make a purchase. If your content is interesting, relatable, and correctly timed, the viewers will likely start relating with you. This is especially true if you respond positively to the comments, suggestions, or even criticism they express on your content.

Brand loyalty is another key advantage of good content marketing KPIs that builds on the previous point. As your customers start relating to your excellent content and responsiveness, they will recall your brand while making purchase decisions. And if your offerings are really good, these prospects will become loyal to your brand.

As a result, they would purchase your offerings every time and start suggesting them to others. And this is why a loyal customer base is a priceless asset for any business.

10. Cost-effectiveness

As you saw earlier, creating and sharing good content is often inexpensive in comparison with large-scale advertising. Moreover, you can create good SEO content at little to no cost and share it for free on top platforms. And this lets you compete on a level playing field with the giants in the industry!

Now, tools for content planning, creation, optimization, and analysis can help you with content marketing. However, these tools are mostly inexpensive, and even a small team of creators and marketers can witness a big improvement in sales. Hence, content marketing is a really cost-effective marketing strategy. 

11. Competitiveness

We’ll conclude our list of the benefits of content marketing with the ultimate deciding factor! The biggest challenge for any marketer is indisputably the cut-throat competition in almost every industry. Therefore, going with plain advertising campaigns is often insufficient. You need a low-cost yet effective method to capture your audience’s attention amidst the huge competition.

And this is what content marketing provides! A well-planned and creative strategy can help you outshine the crowd and build your recognition with high cost-effectiveness. Good content marketing will boost your return on marketing investments and conversions giving you that crucial competitive advantage.

12. Higher credibility and authority

If you can create valuable content that resonates with the target audience, you can improve your credibility and authority. 

Creating content around your target audience’s pain points and providing valuable suggestions and opinions about the same will make readers think you have ample knowledge about your industry. This way, they will look up to you for advice and take your word for it, thereby building your authority. However, this won’t happen overnight. You have to invest time and effort into it. 

13.  Faster movement through the marketing funnel

A potential customer goes through different phases during their buying process before they reach the endpoint – which is making a purchase. The first step is to realize they are facing a challenge; the next step is to identify it, search for a solution, and then finalize one after careful research.

By creating content that engages potential customers at every stage of their journey, you can speed up the whole process by guiding them in the right direction. It can make prospects move swiftly through the journey, thereby improving your bottom line. 

14. Compounding effect

If you are looking for a way to get more traffic to your website over a period of time, there is nothing better than creating valuable blog content. Certain blog posts can help you enjoy the compounding effect as they continue to give you enough traffic organically over a long time period. Even though such evergreen blogs will only be a handful, they can generate a considerable amount of traffic consistently.

Again this is not an overnight phenomenon; you have to wait for a while to see results, but it is definitely going to be worth it. Just try to focus on creating blog posts that are relevant to your target audience. 

15. Suitability for all industries

Many marketers argue that content marketing would work for their niche or industry, but this is not the truth. In fact, content marketing can work for almost any industry, be it B2B or B2C. From manufacturing to technology, almost every business can benefit from it.

The only thing you have to bear in mind is to find the right topics and create content around them so the target audience finds it relevant and useful. If you do it diligently, your effort will certainly pay off.

16. Increased informed buyers

The biggest benefit of content marketing is that you can educate your customers on how to use your product or service well, even before they purchase it. You can give them first-hand information about your solution by creating valuable content around it. Your effort will pay you in the long run as you will get more inbound leads. 

17. Increased chances of virality

The best part about content marketing is that it is quite different from old-school word-of-mouth marketing. If your content is interesting and informative, there are higher chances of it going viral. You obviously can’t get such results with traditional marketing efforts, can you?

Content like videos & social media posts is more likely to go viral than other kinds of content. Additionally, make sure that your blog posts, videos and other content pieces are shareable so that it reaches the maximum number of people.

18. Freedom to experiment

With content marketing, you can always experiment around with different topics and approaches to make the content useful & relatable to the target audience. Even if you don’t succeed at getting the desired results, there is always a chance to improve.

If you can try things that, according to you, are beneficial in improving your company’s marketing game. However, you must be careful because your content can make or break your image. 

The Content Marketing Process

The content marketing process is chronological, which includes strategizing, planning, creating, optimizing, sharing, and analyzing content. 

Let’s take a look at the key steps involved in cost effective content marketing to help you begin-

1. Content strategizing

This is the first and most crucial step in applying content marketing as it sets the direction for all upcoming steps. A wrong or rigid strategy can derail all your subsequent marketing efforts.

Hence, it is important to analyze the desires and pain points of your target audience, as well as your competitors’ strategies. Moreover,  you must get the strategy designed only by expert marketers, while keeping the opinions of all functionaries in mind.

2. Content planning

The strategy will give you a general idea of the type of content needed and the target audience. Now, you must lay out a plan to decide the following:

• Content topics
• Content format
• Content creators
• Medium of sharing
• Publishing schedule
• Feedback methods 

The plan formulation should be based on both internal and external factors to ensure easy application. After all, the plan directs every subsequent step in the content marketing process. So you need it to be perfect!

3. Content creation and optimization

The next step is the creation of high-quality content by expert content writers. Your content must be relatable, error-free, and easy to understand, along with hints of subtle promotion. Moreover, you must apply SEO practices properly to enable better content discovery. This SEO may include keyword addition, backlink building, intent optimization, structuring, video title and tag optimization, and more!

4. Content publishing

Once created, you must share the content on platforms that your target audience visits. These could include blog sites, YouTube, search engines, social media, and backlinks on other sites.

This stage requires publishing, optimizing, and indexing your content in a planned and targeted manner. When done right, publishing at the right place and time will ensure that your audience discovers it on relevant searches.

5. Content analysis and improvement

Lastly, you must analyze the performance of your content and content marketing campaign using the right tools. This may include using Google Analytics, YouTube Studio, Facebook Ads manager, or other analytics tools.

Based on analysis results, you need to find what platform and content type works best for you and what doesn’t. Then, as per your observation, you must improve your content strategy and eventually return to the planning phase. 

After all, the modern market is highly dynamic, and you can’t go with the same campaign for a long time! So, the key is to start and continue a cyclic content marketing process. Here, the improvements at the end of one campaign find their place in the next strategy and planning phase.

Start Your Content Marketing Campaign To Sky-Rocket Conversions!

So, you have seen how content marketing drives sales. It is indeed an effective marketing strategy to gain new customers and retain existing ones while maintaining positive brand awareness. High-quality content can increase popularity and conversions for your business, even if you don’t have deep pockets (which is one of the biggest content marketing benefits!)

So, now that you know why content marketing is important, it is a great idea to start planning, creating, and sharing high-quality content to market your brand and its offerings effectively.

Here’s a pro tip before you start- It is a challenge to create several content pieces from scratch. But you can easily solve that with an AI-powered content generation tool, which can generate lucid, realistic, and engaging content for any content marketing campaign!

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