Why is content marketing important? Because good content marketing builds your reputation as a thought leader and helps you connect with your audience.
A good content marketing strategy helps you to consistently produce valuable information which people start to rely on over time. By using the different types of content marketing, you can build trust among potential and current clients. A good strategy can also help you to grow your audience over time.
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How is content marketing different from traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing has become an accepted part of our everyday life. However, the bad news is that paying for flyers, billboards and even social media advertisements is expensive.
In addition, traditional advertisements are becoming more annoying for the public and less effective for marketers over time. In fact, 96% of buyers don’t trust traditional advertisements anymore. Why? Because they always come off as blatant sales pitches.
So, how do you get around people’s general suspicion of traditional marketing?
By using content marketing, that’s how. Content marketing is the strategic use of creative and informative material to promote your company’s core product or service. For example, you can use blog posts and infographics to share important information and educate your audience. In time, your audience starts to rely on you as a source of valuable information and insights.
People who trust you are far more likely to buy your core product or service than people who don’t trust you. And content marketing far more effective at building trust than traditional marketing is.
So, why is content marketing important for my brand or client?
We’re not saying you should abandon your traditional marketing altogether. Direct marketing still has benefits for any brand. However, content marketing will help boost your overall marketing efforts. In fact, content marketing done well helps you convert more leads into clients over time.
Data sourced from: MarketingTech
In order to answer this question, “Why is content marketing important,” let’s discuss the benefits of good content marketing in detail:
1) Improves your SEO
If you consistently produce good-quality content over time, then you will increase your ranking on Google’s search engines. In other words, once you’ve optimized your content, it’ll be easier for people to find you online when they search for a topic you’ve written about.
Beyond simply producing consistent and good-quality content, there are many other ways to optimize your content for Google. For instance, if you’re a blogger, you should focus on keywords and topic clusters.
Do you struggle to find good content to post on your social media channels? With a content marketing strategy, you don’t need to keep worrying about how to craft the perfect post at the last minute.
If you do your content marketing right, you will already have interesting content of your own. What’s more, you will have this content in different forms. Let’s assume you’ve written a blog post about how to take care of budgies.
Many people would be happy to read a blog post about taking care of budgies. However, this piece of content shouldn’t begin and end as a blog post. Budgies are colourful and energetic birds which people enjoy watching in action. For this reason, turning the original blog post into a video and an infographic would help you in two ways:
- It would help you to reach more people with your tips for taking care of budgies.
- It would help you to creatively optimize your content for each social media platform. For example, you could use the video to add content and variety to your YouTube channel. Similarly, the infographic could help you grow on Instagram, a platform which thrives on visual content.
3) Improves your organic reach
Once you have a reputation – both on Google and in people’s minds – as a thought leader, your organic reach will grow. Organic reach is important because it helps people to find your content without any paid advertisements.
Let’s imagine someone finds you through a Google search for a topic which you’ve written about. A second person finds out about you through an online advertisement that interrupted their browsing. Who will trust you more? Who will be more eager to learn more about you.
The first person who found you independently is more likely to trust you.
This is because in the first case, the person was looking for a solution to a problem they know they have, and they found that you have a good solution. In the second case, however, the person was probably looking for something else when you interrupted them to market your products or services.
Think about those advertisements which are always interrupting your YouTube videos. Or the advertisements which pop up when you’re engrossed in a fascinating blog post. Aren’t they annoying? Be honest. How often do you stop to watch YouTube advertisements or read popup advertisements to the end?
At the end of the day, people will be more open to learning more about you and your products if they think they found you naturally. The moment you push advertisements in people’s faces, they get annoyed and suspicious.
This is why you should never ignore the power of organic reach. Organic reach generates more conversions than paid reach, simply because the people you reach organically will trust you more.
4) Helps you retain an audience
A good content marketing strategy helps you build a positive long-term relationship with your target audience. In time, people who realize that you’re always producing engaging and enjoyable content will start to rely on you.
If you create a regular publishing schedule in your blog editorial calendar, people will eventually start coming to your blog to check out new pieces on their own. People who start to trust you to inform and educate them turn into long-term clients. They can even turn into clients for a lifetime.
No one wants to be a one-hit wonder. Take time to develop a comprehensive content marketing strategy so that you can sustain a good reputation for life.
5) Saves you money
To answer the question “why is content marketing important?” it’s also important to point out that content marketing is owned media. Not only is owned media under your control, but it also costs less than paid media like advertisements.
It’s true that in order to produce good quality content, you only need to pay talented people to create the content. It’s also a good idea to budget for project management software which helps your team to produce more content for your clients using one comprehensive solution. You might also want to take some content marketing courses every now and then to keep your skills up-to-date.
Producing good quality content sounds expensive, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, even with all this expenditure, content marketing still costs much less than traditional advertising. In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising while generating three times the number of leads.
6) Showcases your expertise
When you produce content which answers people’s questions and solves their problems, you give them a clear idea of what you do well. A good content marketing strategy highlights your expertise.
People who consume your content will know what you’re good at as well as what you do better than your competitors. By setting yourself apart from your competitors, you will have a stronger and more memorable brand image.
7) Generates backlinks
Another way to answer your the question “why is content marketing important?” is to highlight the power of backlinks for building a brand’s reputation. If the content you produce is both consistent and of high-quality, then other thought leaders will start linking to you on their websites.
Why should you be excited about backlinks? Although it takes time to attract backlinks naturally (you can choose to buy backlinks), they increase your domain authority. Ultimately, this increases your SEO and makes it easier for people to stumble upon your brand in an organic way.
8) Serves as a good foundation for your overall digital marketing
In order for your digital marketing strategy to work, you need creative content to drive it. Having a content strategy in place solves this problem. Once you’ve already thought through what content you will produce, it’s easy to manage your social media platforms. Ultimately, a good content marketing strategy will also help you manage online advertisements as well as advertisements.
So, why is content marketing important?
By using creative content strategically, you will be able to generate enough interesting content to educate and entertain your target audience. If you can do this consistently, then you will build positive long-term relationships with both potential and current clients. For this reason, the first step in developing a digital marketing strategy should always be building a content marketing strategy.