How Content Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand

Why is everyone buzzing about content marketing and is it worth the hype? First of all, let’s define it. According to the Content Marketing Institute, it’s the strategic marketing approach focused on content that is created and distributed with the intent to be relevant and valuable in order to drive profitable customer action(s). Also, Neil Patel adds to this definition by emphasizing its storytelling quality to build a relationship with and engage your target audience.

People Want to Consume Content

The main key to content marketing is the “relevant and valuable” part– people actually want to consume it. In today’s information age, we instinctively search browsers to learn more about topics of interest. Further, this leads to our exposure to various types of branded and non-branded content across different channels. The main difference is that we hold some of what we see (content marketing pieces) with higher regard– therefore, allowing it to have a stronger influence on our purchasing behavior. Meanwhile, other pieces of content are sometimes viewed as “spam”, which has the opposite effect.

Within the digital space, types of content marketing include:

• Blogs and educational articles
• E-books
• Infographics
• Paid ads
• Podcasts
• Social Media (posts, tweets, stories, and videos)
• Videos (educational and entertainment)
• Webinars
• White papers and research studies

Benefits of Content Marketing

There are many ways a well-executed content marketing strategy can benefit your brand or organization, and we’ve outlined our top five below:

Education of Products and/or Services

Firstly, this provides you with the opportunity to paint a picture of a present challenge or need within your industry and cleverly present your products and/or services as the ideal solution(s). Therefore, this is extremely beneficial to newer technologies or brands with products that require more of an explanation to justify its usage to their target audiences.

Brand Awareness, Credibility and Thought Leadership

Secondly, this allows you to grow awareness of your brand, which can increase the credibility of your product claims. Content marketing, if widely shared or even gone viral, can help to establish you as an authority within your industry. This subsequently leads to a higher level of trust among your target audiences.

Engage Target Audiences

Getting the attention of your target audience is one thing, but engaging prospective customers while also re-engaging existing customers is another – and content marketing helps brands do all of the above. One of the amazing benefits of an engage target audience is having brand advocates and product evangelists share your content while singing praises of your products. As marketers, we love “word of mouth” referrals!

Increase Site Traffic and Improve SEO

This provides backlinks to your website from various channels and helps increase the credibility of your site’s landing page content. Collectively, these efforts help to improve organic search. Meanwhile, content marketing directs more new users to your site, which is a typical KPI for digital marketers.

Drive Sales and Conversions

This is the pinnacle of all digital marketing efforts, acquiring the customer in whatever way your brand has defined it. In addition to the ways content marketing can benefit your brand mentioned above, it also establishes a content mapping-based journey. That helps create content for each stage of the customer journey or the touchpoints in the sales funnel and increases conversion rates. Customers experience differing barriers and motivations throughout the sales funnel, and the right content helps to nudge things along.

Is Content Marketing Worth the Hype? 

Now that we covered the benefits of content marketing, let’s return to the question of whether or not it is worth doing. The answer to this depends on your brand or organization’s main goals and KPIs. For brands that want to better educate, establish credibility, and engage their target audiences, we highly recommend establishing a content marketing strategy. And, if you aim to increase your site traffic while improving SEO, moving the needle to drive sales, or increase your conversion rates, then it’s absolutely worth the hype and the budget!

In conclusion, content marketing has become a global practice. It’s used by a majority of marketers, from prominent organizations to smaller businesses, according to Content Marketing Institute Annual Research. Interested in adding content marketing to your marketing strategy? Contact our team for a consultation!

Frequently Asked Questions