10 Ways Content Marketing is Important For Your Business

Content marketing is important for the sustainability and growth of all kinds of online businesses. Content is at the heart of all digital marketing campaigns and is the medium to reach your target audience.

To be successful with content creation though, you need to have a plan and specific goals and this is what content marketing is all about.

Content marketing will guide you on what type of content to create, where to publish it, who to target, and how to measure the results.

In this guide, you’ll learn why is content marketing important and the benefits it can offer to any type of business.

We’ll start with a definition of what is content marketing and then explain the importance of content marketing.

• What is content marketing?
• Why is content marketing important?

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the marketing process of creating, publishing, and promoting relevant content to a pre-defined online audience.

The goal of content marketing is to assist an online business in increasing brand awareness, achieve better SEO rankings and engage with its audience in the various digital marketing channels.

To take advantage of all the benefits of content marketing, you need to have a content marketing strategy.

Through a content strategy, you can specify what type of content to create and when to publish it, which audience to target and how to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

Let’s see below the 10 most important reasons why content marketing is essential for the success of any business.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is important for online businesses because:

1. It has a great Return On Investment (ROI)
2. It provides fuel to run all digital marketing campaigns
3. It’s a great way to increase brand awareness, to improve brand reputation and build user trust
4. Content marketing can help increase conversions
5. It’s the best way to improve your Google rankings
6. It’s a great way to engage with your potential customers
7. It can help you differentiate your business from competitors
8. Content marketing is important for a business steady growth
9. It can help you establish authority with users and Google
10. Content marketing helps you understand your customers better

1. It has a great Return on Investment (ROI)

Content marketing is not a low-cost process but it has a great ROI. Creating high-quality content on a regular basis is expensive as it requires a lot of time and money but it’s the best investment you can make for your business.

Good content is considered an “asset” for an online business that can generate profit in the form of more organic visits, brand mentions, and social media engagement.

In terms of numbers, studies show that companies that run content marketing campaigns get more traffic and leads compared to companies that don’t have a formal content strategy.

• Increase in site visits by up to 55%
• 434% more pages indexed by search engines
• 97% more backlinks
• On average they get 5X more leads because of content marketing

In addition, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and every dollar spent on content marketing generates 3X more leads.

2. It provides fuel to run all digital marketing campaigns

Content marketing is part of digital marketing. Digital marketing is the process to follow to promote your business using ALL available online marketing channels.

For all other digital marketing channels to work and generate good results, they need high-quality content that is relevant to their target audience.

For example:

For your SEO campaigns to work and help you rank high on Google, you need content that satisfies the intent of the users and at the same time is also SEO friendly.

For your social media campaigns to generate engagement, followers, likes, and shares, you need content that will entice your audience.

For your email marketing campaigns to generate sales, you need content that is convincing to encourage users to take the final step and make a purchase.

3. It’s a great way to increase brand awareness, to improve brand reputation and build user trust

Content marketing is one of the best ways to increase awareness about your brand and how your products or services can help solve people’s problems.

This can be done using various channels, the most important being search engine optimization but also paid advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing.

Let’s see below some examples of how this is done in practice:

When users have a problem or need, they will most probably use a search engine to look for information and solutions. They are still in the awareness face and want to find out how to solve a problem or get an answer to a question.

With content marketing, you can get generate content that educates, informs and suggests possible ways to solve their problem or answer their question.

If you do this successfully, people will most likely take note of your brand (or bookmark your website, share it with your followers, subscribe to your newsletter) and re-visit it to get more information and updates.

They will eventually become loyal followers and ambassadors of your brand and this positively influences other users (and search engines) to trust your brand.

This is exactly the same process we follow on our blog. We strategically provide content that helps users learn SEO and answer questions related to digital marketing.

Through content, we establish our brand as a trustworthy source for all their online marketing needs and as a result, we get tens of email subscribers per day that join our community, more leads for digital marketing services and sales of our online SEO courses.

4. Content marketing can help increase conversions

When you start an online business, the ultimate goal is to run a successful and profitable business that will generate money. To make money you need to have conversions and content marketing can help a lot in this process.

Consumers are ‘bombarded’ with ads in their Facebook feed, Google search results, Twitter, Instagram, and all online networks they use and it’s getting harder and more expensive to get their attention.

The competition is high on all niches and the number of ad placements is limited. A better way to utilize your resources, and that includes time and money, is to create content assets to position your brand in all stages of the customer journey.

By providing them with valuable content at all stages of the journey, you’ll be able to get their attention and establish a long-term relationship between your customers and your brand.

This relationship will eventually lead to more conversions as it will be easier for users to buy products or services from brands they trust and have proved that they can help them.

5. It’s the best way to improve your Google Rankings

Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. Once you setup a website and ensure that it is SEO friendly, the next step is to come up with a content marketing plan to target specific keywords to make your website visible on Google and other search engines.

Content marketing is important in SEO because:

• Through content, you can target specific search terms that you want your website to appear in search.
• High-quality content can attract backlinks from other websites and this increases your domain authority which leads to higher rankings.
• Websites with good content are considered by Google as high-quality websites and this positively influences their rankings.

So, instead of thinking of trying or relying on any other techniques to trick Google algorithms, the best way to improve your SEO is by publishing high-quality content that satisfies the needs of the users on a regular basis.

6. It’s a great way to engage with your potential customers

Everything mentioned so far work towards a common goal which is to use the content as the medium of communication between your company and both your existing and potential customers.

In content marketing, this is known as inbound marketing and this is the way for companies to build channels of bi-directional communication with their customers.

Bi-directional means that potential customers can communicate with you in the form of post comments, social post comments, feedback forms, messages, etc.

Without content marketing this form of communication is not possible because either you publish the wrong type of content, promoting it to the wrong type of people or not measuring and monitoring user responses.

With content marketing, this process is clearly defined with metrics, tools, and ways to optimize user engagement with your content.

7. It can help you differentiate your business from competitors

Content marketing when done right, can help you differentiate your business from competitors.

Consumers using Google or Facebook can easily spot brands that care for the customers by providing them with valuable content.

Statistics show that:

• 84% of people expect brands to produce content that entertains, provides solutions and produces great experiences and events.
• 91% of consumers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity.
• 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a company’s products and services through content instead of ads.

If your competitors are not already active with content, then this is your chance to stand out and differentiate your brand.

If they are already active with content, then you can analyze their campaigns to find the strength and weaknesses and offer your audience content that is better and more valuable.

Make no mistake, the Internet may be flooded with millions of new pages per day but not all content is helpful. There is still room for improvement and content gaps in almost any niche you can think of.

8. Content marketing is important for a business steady growth

One of the best ways to grow a business online is by having a library of evergreen content assets.

Evergreen content is the type of content that is always relevant and not associated with a specific time period.

Content can be in any form like blogs, videos, podcasts, images, infographics or any combination of the above.

By creating, publishing and promoting evergreen content on the different channels, you’ll eventually:

• Achieve higher rankings and get more traffic from search engines
• Rank higher on YouTube and get more views and subscribers
• Get more followers on Facebook and Twitter
• Get more engagement on Pinterest
• Grow your list of email subscribers

This combination will generate more leads and conversions and allow you to steadily grow your business by providing for more content.

Companies that have a solid content marketing plan in place with ways to measure the effectiveness of their content, can predict with high accuracy what would be the effect on their traffic and sales by publishing more content.

9. It can help you establish authority with users and Google

Content marketing is important for another reason. Through content, you can establish your business as an authoritative resource in your niche.

Authoritative resources are websites that are considered experts in their field and this helps tremendously in establishing trust between the website and users and between the website and Google.

When this is achieved, it translates to more sales, higher rankings and an increase in brand reputation.

The way to do this is by:

• Publishing high-quality content that is unbiased, informative and based on facts.
• Having the content written by recognized experts on the field.
• Seeking brand mentions and links to prove to Google that your website is perceived by others as an authoritative resource.

For example, what is the first website that comes in mind when it comes to health-related content? Maybe its WebMD or Healthline.

Why? Because through their content they managed to be considered by others as the experts on medical-related queries.

All their content is written and verified by doctors and this increases trust and makes both users and Google feel that information provided by those sites is accurate and correct.

10. Content marketing helps you understand your customers better

If you take a look at the content marketing lifecycle diagram, you’ll see that before starting a content marketing campaign, you need to learn as many details as possible about your customers.

You need to do your research to identify your target audience, create buyer personas so that you can target them with the right content.

This process is extremely valuable for all your digital marketing campaigns. Your findings can be used to create customer profiles and segment your audience on all channels and get better results.

Also, when measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns, you’ll learn a lot about your customer needs, likes, dislikes and this will help you optimize your campaigns even more.