Do you want to know how content marketing helps business growth?
Many business owners aren’t sure whether investing in content marketing is worth the time, effort, and resources.
My answer to anyone who asks is always YES!
Content marketing is 100% worth it. 💯
It’s one of the most effective channels and strategies for growing any business.
As a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – ultimately driving profitable customer action – it has become an indispensable part of any digital marketing strategy.
After all, 70% of people would rather learn about companies through articles rather than ads.
This blog post will show you why that’s true.
- We’ll delve into why content marketing is important for entrepreneurs, founders, business owners, and marketers.
- We’ll examine the important role of content marketing in running impactful digital marketing campaigns.
- We’ll look at some best practices to help ensure your campaigns are successful.
Moreover, we will discuss how quality content improves your search engine rankings and enhances the user experience, leading to better engagement with potential customers.
By implementing a good content marketing plan, you can create a positive brand reputation that encourages repeat sales from satisfied clients.
Table of Contents:
- Unlocking the Power of Content Marketing for Your Business
The Basics: What is Content Marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – ultimately driving profitable customer action.
Instead of directly pitching your products or services, you provide useful information that helps solve problems or entertains your target audience.
That’s why every business that wants to make an impact must have a good content marketing strategy — one that also ensures you meet your target audience where they are in their buyer’s journey, and gives them the exact information they’re looking for.
In short, content marketing makes it easier for you to grow your business by attracting the people who are most likely to find your products and services valuable.
This is way better than traditional marketing, where you have to throw tons of money into ads that only result in a trickle of relevant visitors.
Why Long-Form Content Matters to Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t just about creating content for the sake of publishing blog posts on your blog.
To ensure your content marketing generates the desired results, you must focus on quality content.
That means creating in-depth, long-form content that answers every possible question your target audience may have.
- Better SEO: Search engines like Google prefer in-depth articles over short ones because they provide more value to users. Long-form content tends to rank higher in search results as it covers topics comprehensively.
- Increased engagement: Longer articles keep readers engaged for longer periods which leads them towards taking desired actions such as subscribing or making purchases.
- Showcase your expertise: Creating quality content allows you to showcase your knowledge in your industry niche, thereby establishing yourself as a thought leader.
- Grow your email list: Long-form content can be easily repurposed into a lead magnet to bolster your email marketing efforts.
If you want to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you should definitely consider adding long-form content to your mix of content.
To create winning long-form content, you need a process. Guess what? I’ve got it for you right here. 🎉 Get my Content Process Blueprint for the full map to creating profitable content from A to Z.
How Content Marketing Helps Business Growth: 7 Benefits
Ready to dive into how content marketing helps business growth?
Let’s look at some benefits of content creation and marketing. These are especially helpful for small businesses on a shoestring budget, but any size business can use them too.
1. A Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
One of the primary benefits of content marketing for businesses is that it’s one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies.
Compared to traditional advertising methods like TV commercials or print ads, content marketing costs less while generating more leads. It’s an economical approach to getting in touch with your desired demographic and generating brand recognition.
Plus, considering that one piece of content can generate leads and drive sales for years, investing in content marketing is a no-brainer.
In short, content marketing makes it easier for small businesses to compete with brands with bigger marketing budgets.
2. Builds Trust with Your Audience
One of the reasons content marketing is so powerful is that it helps you build trust with your customers. This can drive profitable customer action resulting in business growth.
By providing valuable content that addresses the needs of your audience, you establish trust and credibility. This helps build long-lasting relationships with customers who are more likely to become loyal advocates for your brand.
Plus, research shows that 70% of buyers read at least 3-5 pieces of content before talking to sales.
This means gaining buyer trust becomes more difficult if you don’t have enough content on a particular topic, product, or service. You may lose your leads to competitors who have enough content to foster trust with their brand.
However, by showcasing your expertise, you become a thought leader in your space. As a result, building trust with your target market becomes super easy. It also helps encourage repeat sales as your customers will deem you an expert they can rely on.
3. Increases Organic Traffic
A well-executed content marketing strategy can boost organic traffic from search engines like Google. With higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll attract more potential customers without spending extra money on advertising.
And with search engines being the biggest source of online traffic, you need to know how to bring that traffic to your site. The best way to do that is by developing content marketing strategies and content designed to attract said traffic to your business website.
This is one of the ways an effective content strategy helps business growth the most.
The more content you create, the more visible your brand’s online presence, resulting in…
You guessed it: More traffic to your site. 📈
4. Excellent Inbound Marketing Channel
Content marketing is one of the most effective inbound lead-generation tactics.
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing tactic that relies on attracting, engaging, and converting leads to customers. This is opposed to traditional marketing tactics, which are more invasive (like interruptive ads).
Source: HubSpot
The effectiveness of this marketing strategy hinges on creating quality content. This is relevant content your target audience finds beneficial.
Your blog content must be tailored to meet your prospective customers’ needs, not just your own.
Developing a content strategy with custom content specifically designed to appeal to prospective customers is also a powerful way to build a positive brand reputation. This, too, will help attract your target audience to your business.
With traditional marketing tactics losing their impact, digital marketing strategies like content marketing are the key to drawing customers down your marketing funnel.
5. Improves Conversion Rates
Persuasive and informative content encourages readers to take action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Addressing their pain points and offering solutions through your products or services increases the chances of converting them into paying customers.
Content helps your customers make the right purchase decisions — buying from you instead of your competitors.
That’s why your digital marketing campaigns must include high-quality content created for every stage of the buyer’s journey. This will help boost conversions at every stage of your marketing funnel.
From blog content to social media content to everything in between, carefully crafted marketing messages will result in better conversion rates, leading to more sales.
6. Increased Social Media Engagement
Social media marketing has become an invaluable part of any digital marketing strategy.
With over 4.8 billion users globally, social media is a powerful platform for businesses to market themselves.
Source: Statista
High-quality content is necessary here as it is more likely to be shared. It can also generate engagement on social media platforms. This can increase brand exposure, increase reach, and lead to potential new customers.
Executed well, social media content can be an invaluable part of your marketing funnel. It can also drive profitable customer action, leading to more subscribers or sales.
7. Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is the high costs associated with customer acquisition.
Well, that’s mainly true with traditional marketing strategies.
But content marketing is different.
One way how content marketing helps business growth is by lowering customer acquisition costs. This is because great content generates leads organically.
That helps explain why it costs 62% less than traditional methods but generates 3x the leads.
Plus, relevant content will continue bringing results for years as long as it’s evergreen. And with content marketing costs being significantly lower than those of other marketing strategies, you spend way less to acquire customers.
Leveraging Content Marketing: Tips for Success
To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you must follow content marketing best practices. Some of the most important to note include:
Define Your Goals
Clearly define what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy.
Whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or thought leadership, having specific goals will guide your content creation and distribution.
Defining your goals will also help you know how to measure your success, including the KPIs (key performance indicators) to focus on to track your progress.
Create High-quality Content
High-quality content is essential in ensuring your content marketing strategies hit the mark.
There’s just too much fluff-filled content being published on the internet. To stand out from all the generic content, you’ll need to ensure that you go the extra mile to create custom content that will satisfy your audience’s needs.
Investing in great content results in higher engagement. This is because your articles will provide value to your target audience by solving problems or answering questions they might have about topics related to your industry niche.
Create Content for Each Step of the Buyer Journey
Because different potential customers are at different stages in their buying journeys, you must create content for each of these stages.
This means creating content for top-of-funnel (ToFu), middle-of-funnel (MoFu), and bottom-of-funnel (BoFu).
For more detail on the buyer’s journey and each stage, read this HubSpot guide.
Source: Active Campaign
Creating custom content for these different stages helps you meet your prospects where they are and draw them into your business.
Market Your Content
It’s called content marketing for a reason — you have to promote the content you create so it reaches a wider audience.
Contrary to popular belief, great content doesn’t market itself. Instead, you have to be proactive in ensuring your content gains as much visibility as possible.
Content marketing entails promoting your content across various channels like social media platforms. You can also leverage email marketing, guest blogging etc. This helps you reach a wider audience and generate more leads, sales, and revenue.
Now That You Know How Content Marketing Helps Business Growth… What’s Next?
Content marketing is an effective way to help your business grow and scale.
Producing valuable content can help you form meaningful connections with clients, increase conversions, and boost awareness for your company.
With the right content strategy and execution of content marketing tactics, you can reach your goals faster than ever before.
So, now that you know how content marketing helps business growth, it’s time to go ahead and start investing in effective content — including your content strategy.
Don’t know how to build one? Feel like you’re missing some key skills and strategies that will catapult your business to the top?
You’re not alone. I created my mentorship program, the Content Transformation System, for people EXACTLY like you 💕
This coaching program gives you the knowledge you need to start doing content marketing strategically — and grow your business by leaps and bounds.
Ready to find out more? Watch my free training for a preview of the lessons and results you can expect inside.
