The importance of content marketing

Content marketing sounds simply like a phrase used to describe something minor and pointless, but what it really means is engagement. Marketing has come a long way since the advent of the internet. It’s no longer restricted to one-way traffic in the same fashion as radio, television and print.

Engagement is the new marketing currency. 

You can just tell an audience about your product or service anymore. Consumers and customers want to be shown how your business can make a meaningful difference to their lives. 

Slow marketing for sustainable, long-term results

For many businesses, content marketing falls into the too hard basket. There are many facets of content marketing:

• social media 
• email outreach
• articles
• blogs
• podcasts
• videos

It can seem overwhelming. 

Content marketing is time-consuming but worthwhile 

There’s no way around it. But the benefits of spending this time creating compelling content are undeniable. Traditional media, TV, radio and print, may still wield considerable power with their immediacy, but creating a digital presence is imperative for companies of every size, regardless of the industry. 

Customers are savvier than ever and the usual marketing spin is no longer considered the right way to communicate with your audience. People want to be informed, not distracted. Content marketing, whether self-managed or through a digital marketing agency, gives businesses the opportunity to show off what they know. It’s no longer enough to say you’re the best – you need to show it. 

Showcase your expertise and build strong relationships

Creating informative content is more than simply telling a reader or viewer what you know – it’s a chance to show them how well you know it. Developing this relationship is critical for building trust and convincing people to part with their money. It’s a chance to showcase expertise and build a rapport that goes beyond a single transaction. If, for example, a plumber writes a blog about how to unblock a toilet, in the past this might be considered incongruous with attempting to bring in a customer who needs their toilet unblocked. Detailing the process may seem like giving away precious information and costing the business money, however, content marketing demands that businesses write about real things and provide real information. Show a customer that you know what you’re talking about and your chances of securing their business increase. Plus, even if you don’t secure their business, who knows who they’ll tell about finding the right information on your website. 

Give your SEO a boost

The knock-on effect of creating such an archive of knowledge is its usefulness in search engine optimisation. Google, and all search engines, work under the premise that people are looking for answers and a site that can provide them and resolve a user’s issue is more valuable to their site. People seem to forget that search engines are businesses. They aren’t democratic, benevolent organisations. Their survival and success depend upon their ability to find websites that give them what they need to satisfy their users. A website that is packed with accurate and detailed content will be more useful to them, leading to better organic ranking results and more exposure for your business. 

The other side of the SEO coin is that a site with a lot of content will be more attractive to search engine crawlers. Thin sites, or those with minimal content, are less likely to rank highly, simply because crawlers have less to read and analyse. Modern websites are often highly stylised, with graphics, taglines and pithy phrasing of their content. This is fine from a branding perspective, but offers very little on the content marketing side of the equation. A blog is an effective way to build credibility and inform visitors, while providing dense, keyword-rich content for search engines to read. 

Blogs and other digital content marketing strategies are the connective tissue that turn a great-looking website into a high ranking one. Coupled with the increased engagement, this will drive sales and leads to improve your bottom line, now and in the future.