Content marketing is very popular at the moment and with good reason. Whether you write fantasy novels or run a multi-million dollar financial services corporation, it’s an effective means of marketing products and services to a wide range of audiences. But that’s not the only reason you might choose to use content marketing. There are heaps of benefits associated with content marketing. Here are just 26 of them.
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The brand-building benefits of content marketing
A key benefit of content marketing is that it has the potential to strongly contribute to a business’s brand-building efforts. This is often an undervalued benefit of employing content marketing but if you’re considering using it as one of your business’s marketing strategies I strongly suggest you give a lot of thought to how you can use content to build your brand.
If used to market your brand, business content marketing may:
- Increase awareness and recognition of your brand
- Build trust in your brand
- Improve your business’s credibility
- Help you demonstrate your business’s authority and leadership in your industry
- Help you position your business as an industry expert
The sales benefits of content marketing
Perhaps the most sought-after benefits of content marketing are those that more directly contribute to boosting sales. When it comes to this, content marketing can:
- Attract prospects to your website
- Generate leads
- Pre-qualify those leads so you’re more likely to be able to convert a higher proportion of those leads
- Convert your prospects and leads into paying customers more frequently and in less time (you need content-copy funnels for this)
Content marketing benefits associated with building website traffic
Content marketing probably has the biggest impact on factors that contribute to building website traffic. Since more traffic means more potential buyers are exposed to your marketing messages, this can really drive sales. Content marketing should help build your website’s traffic by:
- Cumulatively contributing to your off-page SEO (search engine optimisation) so more people find you as a result of doing a Google (or other search engine) search
- Providing plenty of opportunities for other websites to create backlinks to your website (this is an important part of off-page SEO that deserves its own point)
- Improving your brand’s domain authority so all your web pages are viewed more favourably by search engines (again, an important part of off-page SEO)
- Directly driving search and social traffic to your website
Content marketing benefits associated with improving a business’s relationship with its prospects, leads and customers
One really effective method for boosting sales is to improve customer satisfaction. The happier your customers are with your products and services, the more likely they will be to make repeat purchases and encourage their friends and other contacts to make a purchase.
Convincing a lead to take the leap and buy that first product or service from a business is the hardest part of marketing. Once you’ve done that bit, if you make sure your customers are really happy with their purchases then it’s much easier and cheaper to convince them to spend more money with your business.
Content marketing is one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction. Using this marketing strategy you can provide such things as product instructions, case studies that show innovative ways to use a product or service and guidelines for increasing the life of your products. Customers really appreciate these kinds of value ads.
But content marketing isn’t just helpful when a customer has made a purchase. You can also use it to great effect before the purchase where it’s effective at building connections between you and your prospects. The stronger a connection your prospects have with you, the more likely they will be to feel comfortable and confident buying from you.
In summary, content marketing can help you:
- Win your customers’ loyalty
- Increase your audience’s engagement with your brand and messaging
- Build lasting ‘personal’ connections with your audience as well as increase your audience’s affinity with your brand
- Help customers get more out of a product or service
- Encourage customers to advocate for your brand and provide the tools for them to do so really easily (and potentially without realising that’s what they’re doing)
Content marketing benefits associated with broader marketing and advertising activities
Content marketing is an effective marketing approach by itself but it’ll really come into its own if you combine it with other marketing and advertising strategies. In this regard, content marketing can be highly beneficial because it:
- Supports other marketing strategies
- Decreases advertising costs (or boosts the return on existing costs)
- Becomes more effective over time unlike many forms of paid advertising, which generally become less effective over time (especially if you’re running paid ads on social media)
- Generates more detailed data for remarketing ads so you can produce highly targeted remarking ads and then match them to highly specific segments of your website traffic
- Enables you to target specific audiences with highly tailored messaging
The internal business benefits of content marketing
Much of what you’ve heard about content marketing was probably focussed on the external benefits of the marketing approach. But if your business has more than a couple of employees, you can also take advantage of some internal benefits that content marketing provides. For instance, content marketing can:
- Improve your employees’ morale by showcasing the wins they’ve contributed to and celebrating staff that’ve done a really great job
- Improve your recruitment processes by helping you attract candidates that are better suited to your organisation as well as helping you to attract more of those ideal candidates
Another benefit of content marketing
There’s one other thing that a lot of businesses overlook when thinking about the benefits of content marketing — testing. You see, content marketing can be used to test out new ideas. That could be new marketing ideas, new content ideas or pretty much any other kind of new business idea you can think of. With a loyal audience of readers and content consumers, you’ve got ready access to your ideal target market. You can ask them what they think of your ideas outright or you could elicit their thoughts indirectly by, for instance, writing a blog post about a product or service that you’re thinking of introducing and seeing how popular the post is when compared with your average statistics.
Learn more
Want to learn more about content marketing? Check out these other relevant posts:
- Read this if you’re excited by the potential benefits of content marketing and you want to know more about how content marketing works — 7 min read
- If you want to get your content marketing efforts organised, read this article that describes the differences between a content strategy and content marketing — 2 min read
- Read 7 types of blog posts that drive sales if you’ve decided you want to try content marketing and you’re looking to write your first piece of new content to contribute to your strategy — 9 min read
- If you’ve read this article and are still a little puzzled about what content marketing actually is, check out this article that describes exactly what content marketing is — 1 min read
- If you wondered what SEO is when you read this article, read up on what SEO is and why it’s useful — 2 min read