Content marketing is important because it helps businesses reach wider audiences and drive brand awareness for their products, build credibility and trust with audiences, and convert visitors into customers.
What you will learn
- Why consumers are more receptive to content marketing practices versus being bombarded with ads or promotional messages.
- How content marketing can be important to generate traffic, raise brand awareness and increase your brand's authority and perceived expertise.
- How consumers are more likely to trust and buy from your business if you regularly create and share useful and helpful content that they care about.
- How combining search engine optimization and content marketing can be important to level the playing field and increasing ROI
What is the purpose of content marketing?
The purpose of content marketing is to build trust and credibility with your target audience through creating and distributing helpful content that they care about.
By providing useful information, insights, and resources that address the pain points and interests of your audience, you forge long term relationships with your customers, establish your authority in their industry, and position yourself as a valuable resource. The end goal of content marketing is to get people to buy your products and services.
What is the most important part of content marketing?
The most important part of content marketing is creating valuable, relevant content that resonates with your target audience and ultimately leads to purchases.
Unlike traditional marketing methods, content marketing relies on the fact that consumers don't like being sold to. They'd rather learn to first trust and engage with you organically. And so it is crucial that your content marketing strategy is based on nurturing your audience with information that helps them address their challenges, instead of trying to sell them your product.
10 reasons why content marketing is important
Content marketing is important because it helps people learn about a brand, builds trust and loyalty among customers, and ultimately gets people to buy something. Businesses can position themselves as thought leaders in their industry and build a loyal following by providing useful and interesting content at different stages of the buyer's journey. Here are 10 reasons why content marketing is important.
Reach interested audiences
With content marketing, your content only shows up when people are actively looking for it on search engines or when social media algorithms figure out that they have similar interests. Reaching audiences who are most likely to be interested in your products or services ensures that you're communicating with a qualified pool.
Most people would rather read an article than be hindered by an ad. Appearing in front of users when they’re actually seeking information from you is so much more effective than interrupting their browsing activity with unwanted ads.
For example, "video compressor" has a monthly search volume of 90,500. If you have a video tool, you should definitely be using content to rank for this term, and draw in these users.
Of course, you'll still have to create high quality content that resonates with your users, and employ search engine optimization. For example, Sales Hacker, a B2B blog for sales professionals, found itself in a competitive niche against the likes of Hubspot and Salesforce.
By researching their audience to understand which content types they were most interested in, Sales Hacker uncovered keyword clusters like "sales prospecting" and "sales operations." They focused on creating high quality evergreen content that was actionable with examples, and grew from 19k monthly sessions to over 100k monthly sessions in just over a year.
Drive brand awareness
High quality content can put your brand in front of users who may not have heard of it but are in the market for related products and services. By frequently creating and sharing valuable and relevant content on channels that your target market frequents, you can help them become familiar with your company and enter your content marketing funnel.
Content marketing can be a powerful tool to raise brand awareness for your products and services. According to McKinsey's research, when faced with too many options, consumers fall back on brands that they are familiar with.
Brands in the initial consideration stage can be up to three times more likely to be purchased than brands that aren’t.
Combining content marketing and SEO to create high-quality articles that rank for your target keyword can drive brand awareness via search engines. By including keywords and optimizing for search intent, you can improve your chances of being found on the first page of search results. Capitalizing on trends in your content can also help you appear on discovery platforms like Google Discover.
Zapier, for example uses content marketing to drive brand awareness for its tools. Its core offering, "automation platform," only has about 2400 monthly search visits, which isn’t enough to drive meaningful traffic.
So instead, they create pages with how to keywords that their target audience is typing into search engines. This content strategy allows them to use hundreds of keywords and expand awareness of their tools among a target market.
When people find your content helpful, informative, or entertaining, they are more likely to share it with their own networks, which can help to further your reach.
Establish experience, expertise, trust and authority
One of the reasons that content marketing is important for your business is because it provides you with an opportunity to build credibility and trust with your target audiences. Creating case studies, in-depth guides and walkthroughs showcase your business' knowledge and expertise leading to increased trust and industry authority amongst your target audience, and peers.
These factors have even been designated as E-E-A-T factors in Google's search quality rating guidelines, highlighting their significance to consumer decisions (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). Frequently publishing valuable content that your target audience cares about can earn you their trust and forge a long term relationship.
Verywell Fit, an online health magazine, for example, is careful about displaying its authority and expertise when offering health advice. Its blog posts feature important information about authors and a peer review process.
They even publish a list of their review board members.
In a crowded market where credibility is a key factor in how people decide what to buy, establishing your credibility through content marketing can be a key to success.
Rank in search engines for better visibility
Informative, updated content can help you rank in the search engine result pages driving traffic and potential customers to your website. With thousands of blog posts being published every day, all vying for the top rankings on Google, an SEO driven content marketing strategy can help you win the top positions for your target keyword.
Search engines like Google like to show users websites that show they know a lot about a certain topic. For instance, Cloudflare's content hub on DNS servers contains 32 pages that cover the topic comprehensively and rank for nearly 8000 search queries, drawing in 35,000 organic monthly visitors to their website.
Using keyword clusters to cover a topic in its entirety with in-depth articles can help you establish topical authority, in the eyes of both search engines and potential customers.
Take "customer service" as an example. Creating blog posts on several related topics will demonstrate your expertise on the subject.
As you gain topical authority and your articles are recognized as being helpful, your blog posts will climb higher in the search engine rankings, drawing in more traffic. This can increase the likelihood of other websites linking to you and solidifying your position in the search results for months, or even years as you continue to update your blog.
Nurturing your audience
Imagine yourself in a consumer's shoes. Most people on the internet are still educating themselves about their own situations and how to solve them. For them, the difficult part is separating the noise from actual value to help them make a decision that they won't regret.
Based on a Hubspot study, it takes about 8 touch points to affect a sale. While that may vary across different industries, the point here is that a user's familiarity with your product is important to their decision.
Unlike traditional marketing methods, which target people when they are ready to buy, the importance of content marketing is that you can guide users from the beginning of their buyer's journey, when they are just becoming aware of your product, to the point where they are ready to buy.
For example, Brainstation's cybersecurity career guide nurtures their audience by explaining what cybersecurity is and what a cybersecurity analyst does, all the way through interview questions and cover letter examples.
Creating content for every stage of the decision process can help ensure that you have their attention when they're ready to take action. Content marketing helps build trust and credibility before a sale by educating people through the different stages of their decision-making process. This could take weeks, months, or even years. Having a good experience with your brand is very important to how they think about your products and services.
Grow lead generation
As your content marketing reaches wider audiences, you will experience an increase in inquiries and sign ups for your product. You can expect to see a boost in lead generation and find that your audience is increasingly receptive to your offers because of the trust you've earned. This legal website for example, used SEO driven content to increase its leads by over 2000%!
According to a study by Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less, highlighting its importance to improving your bottom line. A strategic marketing approach focused on high quality content creation can attract and engage potential customers, ultimately driving them towards a purchase decision.
Drive sales and revenue
As readers go through a consumer decision journey, they experience a series of stages before making a purchase. These stages include initial consideration, active evaluation, the moment of purchase, and post-purchase. By creating content that speaks to customers at each stage of their journey, you can influence their purchase decisions.
For example, putting informative and educational content at the beginning of the decision-making process can attract potential customers and make your business a trusted authority in your field.
Take the search query "tracking my time" as an example. It has an informational search intent, which means folks are in a learning phase, and are most interested in long-form articles like "how to" guides, "best practises", or "tips and techniques."
By creating content that highlights the unique value of your products or services in the active evaluation or consideration stage , you can differentiate yourself from competitors and increase the likelihood of a purchase.
"Tracking employee example," for example is a customer investigation into the best available options, and will draw from comparisons and listings.
At the moment of purchase, customers are making their final decision. Content that emphasizes the benefits and value of your products or services can increase your chances of closing a sale.
In the post-purchase stage, customers are evaluating their experience and deciding whether or not to become repeat customers. Using content to provide value and support can help you keep customers and make it more likely that they will buy from you again.
Using content marketing to build your credibility can shorten the time it takes to make a sale and give you an edge over competitors. Your product has to offer value, but content can drive customer loyalty and advocacy for your brand to bring in more sales and revenue. Plus, content marketers see six times higher conversion rates on their websites.
Monitor the competition
One of the steps to creating quality content is to analyze your competitors' content marketing strategies. By analyzing your competitors' content with audit tools, you can gain valuable insights into their tactics, messaging, and market positioning, enabling you to make more informed decisions about your own content planning.
This includes the types of content they produce, the platforms they use, the topics they cover, and the messaging they use to engage their audience.
For starters, audit tools can help you identify keywords that are missing in their article.
And then use them in your own content.
Because a significant portion of their audience will overlap with yours, you can use this information to identify gaps in the market and develop a more effective content marketing strategy.
Monitoring your competitors' content can also help you identify new opportunities. You can identify new industry trends and topics that resonate with your competitors' audiences and create content around those or related themes. Keeping tabs on your competitors can ensure that your content stays relevant and innovative.
Win market share
One of the reasons content marketing is so widely practised is that that unlike paid advertising, which rewards the highest bidder, creating quality content relies on providing value. As a result, smaller companies can compete alongside larger organisations by creating valuable content.
Hubspot is a good example of a company that has used content marketing to grow its market share. As a result of their SEO driven content marketing efforts, HubSpot was able to establish itself as a leader in the inbound marketing industry. They were able to attract a large audience and build a loyal following by providing valuable content to potential customers. Today, HubSpot is a respected name in the marketing software industry and has been able to acquire over a third of the market against the likes of older incumbents like Salesforce.
When paired with a great product, the importance of content marketing in building trust and brand loyalty can lead to a larger market share.
Tremendous ROI
The efficiency of content in generating leads and the improved conversion rate it offers at low costs mean that content marketing can greatly lower your customer acquisition costs. Studies show that content marketing is three times more effective than paid search ads when it comes to lead generation per dollar spent. And it's not too difficult to see why.
Take your website's blog, for example; your costs are limited to researching and publishing blog posts. With AI and SEO tools making their way into content creation, you can control your content marketing costs even better.
A published article can sit in search rankings and bring you visitors for an eternity, especially if you continue to keep it relevant and updated. Compare this to a social media campaign or paid advertising and you can see why content marketing is so important in your digital marketing strategy.
Since there are no direct costs to get people to your website, your content's return on investment will be much higher than with other marketing methods.
For example, this blog about DIY home restorations has close to a 100,000 monthly visitors.
But take a look at what that traffic is worth. Sixty one thousand dollars!
Over seven hundred thousand dollars per year.
That would be a lot of money to spend for a small business but using an SEO driven content marketing strategy helps them reach almost 100,000 visitors every month without a huge budget.
Key takeaways
- Content marketing is important because unlike advertising, it offers you the opportunity to create meaningful relationships with your target audience through high quality content.
- Content marketing can help bring people to your site and make them aware of your brand, which helps you reach more people with your products and services.
- By creating and sharing helpful content that your audience cares about on a regular basis, you can earn their trust and build a name for yourself.
- Your credibility with this target market can be a big factor in how they decide what to buy when they're ready to become customers.
- Combining your content marketing with search engine optimization can land your pages on the first page of search results, and draw in visitors to your blog whom you can then nurture with valuable content.
- Content marketing has the best return on investment (ROI) among traditional marketing channels because it costs less to get new customers and has higher conversion rates because your target audience trusts you.
Conclusion
We've talked about why content marketing is important for businesses, how it helps them reach more people, build credibility and trust, and turn visitors into customers. The importance of consistently creating valuable and relevant content that resonates with your target audiences cannot be overstated.
Which channels have been the most effective for your content marketing?
