As a business owner, where will your next client come from? Will they find you, or will you find them? This is not the same thing. If you want to succeed in the business world, you must learn how to leverage inbound marketing to attract a clearly defined audience who are looking for a solution to solve a need or a challenge. For you to carry out a successful inbound marketing strategy, you cannot ignore content marketing. It is the foundation of optimization and social media shares.
Whether you are carrying out business-to-business or business-to-consumer marketing, the benefits of content marketing are immeasurable. However, to succeed in content marketing, you must remember that it is not a “one-size-fits-all” marketing activity. It is a carefully planned process requiring the focused delivery of regular and consistent content to increase visibility and demonstrate expertise. When properly planned and carried out, content marketing will benefit your business in the following ways:
Boost Website Traffic and SEO
Content marketing is the foundation of organic search and the best way to drive traffic to your business website. It’s almost impossible to carry out successful SEO without a consistent content strategy. It’s important to generate high-quality content that is useful to the reader continuously. If your content answers your audience’s questions, your website will rank better in the Search Engines.
When your content includes backlinks from high-authority websites and blogs, Google will trust your website more and improve your ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). But for you to get backlinks from these sites, your content should be unique, data-driven, and excite, inform, intrigue, and inspire the reader.
Every piece of content you produce allows you to add keywords that strengthen your SEO results. Over time, these keywords accumulate, resulting in huge targeted traffic. This will boost your SEO strategy and a better ROI.
Establish Expertise, Authority, and Trust
One of the major benefits of content marketing is establishing Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT), something that Google wants to see on websites. Is your content showing expertise in your area? Is it authoritative in its facts and data? How well can the readers trust your content? If your content has the above three qualities, it will become a trusted brand and will likely get mentions from authoritative brands.
Again, this boils down to the strength of your SEO. If a page keeps on appearing on SERP with every search, it will gain the trust of those searching. If they have to decide, they will choose the most popular brand from their search results. This is because they have established authority and expertise.
Brand Awareness
Getting your content across to people through blog posts and social media channels is a great way of creating brand awareness. It will get your brand in front of your target audience. Creating useful content that gets found continuously whenever someone is looking for an answer boosts your brand awareness and reputation.
Think of a brand like Mazda. They create different types of content to build their brand awareness. They have one of the best magazines, which gives employee highlights, talks about the testing of Mazda vehicles, fun stories, and everything about celebrating the Mazda community. Once this content is shared on social media, it reaches many people through reshares and links and will reach numerous people.
Improved Relationship with Your Audience
Providing your audience with actionable content makes them continually turn to your business whenever they look for a solution to their problems. Your potential customers have unique needs; therefore, you should strive to provide content in various forms. While some people prefer to read, others prefer to watch videos, while yet others like to listen to podcasts and other recorded material. There’s no universal format to meet all these needs at once.
It is important to find a way to connect to your audience in the most suitable format for them. If your customers can connect with you and get a solution to what they are looking for, they will have a better relationship with your brand.
Whether you deliver content through emails, webinars, podcasts, blogs, infographics, interviews, or videos, keeping your voice and values consistent is important. When you meet your audience’s needs, you create loyalty, trust, and a profitable relationship for your customers.
Lead Generation
One of the major benefits of content marketing is generating inbound leads. Creating quality content consistently helps you to have a large digital footprint. This gives your business a bigger opportunity to appear in search results.
Writing great content is one of the easiest ways of moving a new customer from awareness to purchase. It keeps your audience engaged and moves them through the sales funnel. An SEO-optimized content that solves problems ranks high on search engines, increasing organic traffic. This presents a great opportunity for visitors to become leads.
It Is An Investment
Remember that proving your expertise by producing content is an investment in itself. People want to know if you can help them and if your content influences their buying decisions. If you have not started on this effective marketing strategy, you can work with someone with expertise in this area to give you clarity and direction.