Content marketing is a marketing approach where businesses provide relevant and valuable information (content) to educate and engage their ideal target market. The ultimate aim of this marketing as with all marketing is to acquire and retain ideal customers/clients for their business.
Content marketing has actually been around for a long time, even before the internet…. think about magazines, printed newsletters, advertorials in newspapers. So it isn’t a new thing and isn’t just a fad trend that will disappear.
Now days a lot of the content marketing you see is online in the form of blogs, videos, ebooks, white papers, infographics, and interviews.
So what is all the fuss about? Is it actually worth doing content marketing? And the big question… will it get real results for my business?
Well like most things, it does depend on how you do it! There are certainly plenty of businesses out there spending a huge amount of time and money doing content marketing that isn’t working. Obviously in these cases it isn’t worth it! But that certainly doesn’t mean that these very businesses can’t make it work because…
There are equally plenty of businesses that get massive results from doing content marketing. In fact some businesses focus solely on content marketing to attain and retain customers/clients because it works so well.
You can do content marketing the wrong way which won’t get you the results, and you can do it the right way that will get you results.
There are so many vast benefits in doing content marketing but here are just a few of the main benefits that you can experience when you do content marketing right:
Benefits of Content Marketing
- Increases the exposure and impact your business has
- Helps you to build credibility and authority
- Attracts the exact people that you want as customers/clients (aka. your ideal clients)
- Builds trust with your target market
- Generates enquires and increases sales
- Generates more traffic to your website
- Higher visibility on search engines (aka. Free traffic)
- More social traffic and free marketing via social sharing
- Improves your brand reputation
- Can keep working over the long term providing you leverage
- Helps build customer loyalty and retain customers/clients for longer
- Increases the buying frequency of current or past customers/clients
According to Marketing Insider Group, content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates (aka. sales), and often creates an 8 fold boost in web traffic. We’ve personally seen results that either match those stats or out-perform them from our own experience with our content marketing and from our clients results as well.
We are a content consuming society right now. Have a think for a minute, and think about the content that you consume on a daily or weekly basis… articles, blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, online videos…
… you are ironically reading some content marketing right now in this blog post!
And I’m sure some of the content that you have consumed over the years has actually lead you to making purchasing decisions where you have bought off those businesses. So it does work!
Content marketing is powerful. You can absolutely build a thriving business without it, but why would you not want to take advantage of all the great benefits that it can bring?
Want to know how to do content marketing the right way to get you real results for your business?
Check out our upcoming course where I will cover that and so much more to do with digital marketing and growing your business.
