According to a New Research, nearly one-third of all Americans stay constantly online. This figure was 21% in 2015, which is an indication of the increasing acceptance of smartphones and other mobile devices. 

Growth in smartphone usage means a change in consumer purchasing behaviour. As much as 83% of the entire purchase decision happens before the buyer contacts the organization. Between 70% and 80% of interactions associated with purchases have gone online, and a lot of decision-makers are catching up. Now more than ever, across industries, all businesses are investing in a digital content marketing strategy after COVID-19 and hybrid work environments.

why do you need content marketing

Content marketing is crucial as it allows businesses to connect to wider audiences and thereby brings brand awareness to their products, helps gain credibility and trust with audiences, and converts visitors to customers. 

 

What you will learn

 

When consumers find content marketing practices more persuasive as compared with ads or promotional messages. 

Generating traffic, raising brand awareness, and establishing authority and perceived expertise for your brand through content marketing.

Consumers are more inclined to trust and buy from your business when you create and share useful and helpful content with them on a consistent basis. 

The importance of enhancing the level playing field and returning on investment through SEO and content marketing working hand in hand.

 

Why is Content Marketing Important?

 

Content marketing can indeed benefit your business in various ways. It can be:

 

Adding more engagement time with the audience

Bringing added traction to social networks

Generating trust with the audience

Generating a greater number of leads, mostly with higher quality

 

What is the purpose of content marketing?

Industrialists advertise for building trust and credibility with the target audience using the means of creating helpful content and distributing it. This should be something vital to them. 

 

It comprises providing useful information or insights or resources that respond to the pain point or interest of an audience. Creating long-term relationships with customers, building an authority in their industry, and positioning oneself as a resource are things this important marketing tool achieves. Ultimately, content marketing ends in persuading people to purchase things.

 

what is the primary goal of content marketing?

 

The main component in content marketing is the creation of valuable, relevant content that matches your target audience and ultimately translates into sales.

 

The difference between content marketing and traditional marketing is that consumers, these days, don’t like to be sold to. Rather, they want learning before it reaches a level of trust and engagement with your organization. Hence, the important element in your content marketing strategy is nurturing your audience with knowledge about how to deal with their difficulties rather than just trying to sell them your product.

 

Is Content Marketing Valuable?

 

Questions Surrounding the Value of Content Marketing

One can look at the many forms of digital content marketing available to businesses for investment. Perhaps, out of all of them, content marketing will prove most rewarding, for it almost stands alone in supporting your overall digital strategy. Content marketing alone helps bring leads to businesses, but it also has a role in customer retention by presenting information on issues of interest to audiences.

 

 

 

Content marketing is fast becoming an industry standard now, with 91% of B2B content marketers practicing content marketing to reach their customers. The building of a B2B content marketing strategy has kept gliding companies onward and upward. But despite the prevalence of this discipline, marketers often face the challenge of proving it to be worthwhile to C-Suite and higher management. 

 

Many questions often arise when marketers go to present their case for investing in content. Questions like, “What makes content marketing worth our budget?” or, “What is the ROI?” would be typical. If these questions are being asked in your company, and your marketing people have found it difficult justifying the value of content marketing to the different stakeholders in the company, this blog would help.

 

Few reasons why content marketing is important

 

Content marketing plays an imperative role in educating audiences regarding the brand, building trust and customer loyalty, and finally leading to purchases. By producing useful and entertaining content targeted to individuals across the different phases of the buyer’s journey, businesses can enhance their reputation as thought leaders in their field and build a loyal audience. Here are 10 reasons why content marketing is indeed very essential.

 

Reaching interested audiences

When people are actively searching for your content or when social-media algorithms figure out that they have similar interests, that is when content marketing really pulls through. Making sure you are reaching an audience that is most likely to be interested in the products or services that you bring to the table therefore ensures that you are talking to a qualified bunch.

 

“Most users would rather enjoy reading an article than have their browsing interrupted by an advertisement.” Actually presenting yourself to your user when they are in search of actual information from you is a whole deal more effective than bugging their browsing with ads that they do not want.

 

Another example is “video compressor.” Monthly searches come in at around 90,500. If you have a video tool, use some content to rank for this term and attract these users in.

 

For this, of course, you must produce high-quality content that resonates with the end-user and optimize it. Take Sales Hacker, a B2B sales-centric blog. It found itself locked in what must have felt like an eternal struggle against big names like Hubspot and Salesforce. 

 

Sales Hacker dug into researching its audience to find out what content types their audience wanted; through this effort, they discovered cluster keywords in the likes of “sales prospecting” and “sales operations.” They focused on high-quality evergreen content with actionable examples, growing from 19,000 monthly sessions to over 100,000 monthly sessions in just over a year.

 

Drive brand awareness

High-quality content will take your brand in front of users who have probably never heard of it but are in the market for the products or services similar to yours. Then, by constantly providing and offering valuable and relevant content on preferred platforms, your target audience can easily recognize your company and enter into the content marketing funnel created for them.

 

Content marketing could arguably be one of the best ways to build brand awareness for whatever you offer. According to research done by McKinsey, when people are faced with too many choices, they would always fall back to brands they are familiar with.

 

The more the brands in the initial consideration stage, the threefold increase in their purchase rate compared to brands not in the consideration stage. 

 

Creating articles of high quality using both content marketing and SEO will boost the visibility of your product and services on search engines. Introduce keywords with relevance to your product or service, and optimize your articles for search intent to increase your chances of appearing on the first page. In addition, exploiting trends in your articles will set you up to appear on discovery platforms such as Google Discover.

 

An excellent example of inbound content marketing and brand awareness is Zapier.

 

More than that, they prepare pages featuring how keywords of the target audience entered into the search engine while searching this phrase. Content strategy permits them to be featured with hundreds of keywords using top-of-mind awareness of tools within a target market.

 

Sharing user networks with your material would likely happen if it proves to be useful, informative, or entertaining; thus, the reach will continue to build.

 

Create experience, expertise, trust and authority

Building credibility and trust among the target audiences of the business is possible through content marketing. Case studies, in-depth guides, and walkthroughs demonstrate a know-how that your business possesses and the expertise it can provide, with resulting trust and authority in the industry with your target audience, and among peers. 

 

These factors have even become E-E-A-T factors in Google’s search quality rating guidelines, thereby stressing their importance on consumer determination (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). It will build trust from the audience and a lifetime relationship if it regularly publishes material which the target audience influences. 

 

Examples include fascinating articles on wellness, like the one that Verywell Fit posts online. Such blogs usually have significant information relating to the authors and the peer-review process.

 

They even feature a comprehensive list of members who comprise their review board. 

 

In an environment where a user can purchase as per credible endorsements by others, it is time that content marketing played its part in credibility construction. 

 

Indexed by search engines for visibility gain: Gauge the eminence of content: highly informative and kept current-an assurance for ranking in search engine result pages that drive traffic and prospective customers to your website.

 

Thousands of blog posts are published on the same day and fight tooth and nail to get to the most coveted ranking on Google, whereas an SEO driven content marketing strategy will help you rank in the first page positions at your desired keyword. 

 

Actually, Google would prefer to show a website in its result set for searches that could “prove” the expertise of that particular site in regard to a very specific niche. For example, the content hub at Cloudflare revolves around DNS servers. It features around 32 pages on that topic, all of which rank for around 8000 different search queries and have around 35,000 organic visitors drawn to their site. 

 

You can really build such thematic authority in the eyes of search engines and potential customers using keyword clusters that comprehensively cover a topic with in-depth articles.

 

“Customer service”, for example. It proves that you are an expert in what you publish when showing blog posts on various related topics. 

 

As the blog post gains this topical authority and is regularly recognized as being helpful, it will climb up the ranks within the search engines, bringing in more visitors as time passes.

 

Nonetheless, while content marketing is rapidly gaining traction among audiences, inquiries or signups for the product will increase. Expectations for increased lead generation are based on the trustworthiness you’ve built with your audience, who will likely be more receptive to your offers. This legal website, for example, used SEO-driven content to drive leads up by more than 2000%!

 

Matter-of-factly, a Demand Metric study finds that content marketing yields three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing as its operation is cost-effective by 62%, showing content marketing’s direct contribution to your bottom line. A strategic marketing approach that prioritizes high-quality content creation can attract and engage potential customers and ultimately convert them into purchases.

 

Grow sales and revenues

During a consumer decision journey, a reader will encounter various stages before sealing the deal. These stages are initiated with consideration, active evaluation, actual purchase, and post-purchase. By creating content that engages customers at each stage in their journey will have an impact on their purchasing decisions.

 

For example, by presenting informative and educational content at the top of the decision-making funnel, potential customers are attracted and the business becomes a trusted authority in its field.

 

By having a glimpse on the search “tracking my time, it explores,” holds an informational intent, meaning that people are in a learning phase and are primarily interested in long-form articles like “how to” guides, or “best practices,” or “tips and techniques.”

 

Creating such content that hones in on your products’ or services’ unique values in consideration or active evaluation will position you well against your competitors, increasing the chance that a consumer will make a purchase. 

 

“Tracking employee example” will be the customer’s research on the best options available, using comparisons and listings as fodder for making their decision. 

 

At this very moment, the actual buying decision is being made. The content that conveys product or service benefits or value increases your chances of closing on the sale.

 

Post-purchase is when customers consider their experience and decide whether or not to become repeat customers. Providing content that adds value and encourages customers will serve to retain them and enhance the odds of further purchases.

 

By utilizing content marketing to build authority, the time it takes to make a sale can shorten and thus create an edge against the competition. Value has to be there for the products to be sold, but content can help engender customer loyalty and advocacy for the brand, which in turn translates into more sales and revenue. Furthermore, content marketers obtain conversion rates on their websites that are six times greater.

 

Monitor the competitors

One of the steps to the creation of quality content is the analysis of competitors’ content marketing strategies. Auditing competitors’ content will shed valuable insight on their tactics, methods, and resources from which you can learn.

  Market share acquisition is simultaneous to Thrive. The first thrust towards the widespread popularity of content marketing is its being a monopoly where to the highest bidder goes the advertising, thus putting variable costs on the production of good content. By virtue of this, smaller companies have a chance to compete with the bigger ones just because of their gaining popularity through worthy content.

 

Hubspot is a quintessential example of a company that has utilized content marketing to increase its market share. SEO-driven content marketing made Hubspot a leader in inbound marketing; thus, it was generating tons of traffic and building a steady following with interesting articles targeting potential customers. HubSpot is now a name to reckon with in the marketing software sector with around one-third of the market against the older strongholds like Salesforce.

 

With the ability of content marketing combined with a good product to earn trust and brand loyalty, the ultimate result will be an increase in market share.

 

Massive ROI

It is specifically because of these characteristics that content marketing cuts down on customer acquisition costs since content is very effective at creating leads and also improves conversion rates at a low cost. Research indicates that content marketing generates three times the leads per dollar spent compared to paid search ads-and it is not too difficult to see why. 

 

Let us take blogging on your website: your costs are limited to researching and publishing posts. Today, with AI and SEO tools becoming part of content creation, you can further control the content marketing expenses. 

 

Once published, an article can remain in the search rankings and bring visitors for life, especially if you continue to keep it relevant and updated. That’s a completely different story compared to a social campaign or pay-per-click. This makes it clear just how important content marketing is to your digital marketing strategy.

 

Since the website itself has no direct expenses in driving traffic, you can see the return on investment for this type of content far exceeds that for any other type of marketing.

 

This blog on DIY home restoration, for instance, gets about 100,000 visitors a month.

 

And just how much is that traffic worth? Sixty-one thousand dollars! 

 

That is more than seven hundred thousand dollars for the whole year.

 

For a small firm, that would be a large amount to invest, but an SEO-led content marketing strategy allows them to reach almost 100,000 visitors every month on a shoestring budget.