Why you should do content marketing for your website or business
Some of you may heard the buzz. “Content is king,” they say. “Content is everything,” even. While there are great debates to be had over the accuracy of the phrase, the point is that content is a bit different than other areas of marketing like in social media and SEO, in that many of them are really only around because of content.
For one thing, without content, SEOs would have nothing to optimize for the search engines. The metadata they add to the posts is an attempt to help the algorithms of those robots like Google and Facebook to wrap their digital brains around the complexities of the content they’re indexing. Every link that is earned by every marketer points to a piece of content, and the keywords that people type into search engines are an attempt to find content.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is any type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers, according to wikipedia. In another definition, Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling anything. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.
How can my business or website benefit from content marketing?
One of the reasons that some companies have hesitated to allocate resources to content marketing is that it can be a little difficult to really grasp the benefits of it. Getting people to think more highly of your business certainly sounds great and all, but the results are quite nebulous. In this case, it helps to begin thinking about just how many benefits that content marketing can bring to your business or website.
There is no “silver bullet” or one-size-fits-all content marketing strategy, plan or success framework that applies to every organization. Although, it’s certainly true that in each case, common elements exist for successful content marketing programs. Here are the list of the intangibles and tangibles of content marketing:
The intangibles
Strong brand awareness
Creating the right content gives your audience something to talk about. When they’re talking about, they’re teaching each other about your company, passing recommendations and links around in the process. This type of awareness of your brand is a marketing gold for you.
Respect and admiration in the industry
The respect and admiration of your audience will take a lot of time to build, as they require earning of trust. Once you’ve proven your knowledge and your integrity you can become the guiding light that people will turn to when everyone else is simply contributing to confusion. Sites that don’t care a lick about quality are bound to give bad and misleading advice, making your readers scratch their heads and wonder who they can trust and that should be you.
Indirect cstomer conversation
If you’re creating content that will target potential customers, you’re shortening the distance between those people and your products/services, making it all the more likely they’ll make a purchase later on.
Team coordination
Content marketing is a foundation which an entire marketing campaigns can be built. Creating content gives you a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with teams you might not talk to often enough. You can work with some engineers to make sure your content shows up the way it should be online. You can also work with social and community teams to make sure that gorgeous content of yours is effectively promoted.
The tangibles
Website Traffic
Traffic may be the obvious benefit, but it is also one of the very important ones. Creating a good content will bring more people to your site, where they’ll also find information about your company and your products/services.
SEO
The number of ways in which content benefits SEO is far too great to count here. In short, great content attracts editorial links, which tells Google you’re important and authoritative. Google can also crawl your content, getting a far better idea of what your company is about, allowing it to return your site for more relevant queries.
Direct customer conversions
A good product description can convince people that you’ve got a unique value to offer them that what you have can level them up. This will bring your customer numbers up like almost nothing else.