Content marketing has become an essential part of any successful marketing strategy in the digital age. As a small business or website owner, understanding the importance of content marketing and why you should invest in it can be the difference between success and failure.
What is Content Marketing?
It may be obvious, but let’s make sure we are all on the same page. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves consistently creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience. The purpose of content marketing is to educate, inform, and entertain customers and prospects with the ultimate goal of driving them to take action.
Types of Content
Content can come in various forms, such as blog posts, infographics, videos, social media
posts, podcasts, whitepapers, webinars, and as technology develops and new trends appear the possibilities are pretty endless. The key is to create content that resonates with your
target audience and provides them with value. Stuck for ideas? check out this article for content marketing ideas for small businesses.
One type of content that has been consistent throughout the changes in technology and style has been the blog post like the one you are reading now. In fact, here are a couple of statistics to prove it:
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71% of buyers viewed a blog post during their buying journey. (Source: Content Preferences Survey Report)
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66% of buyers said that blog posts were instrumental in their buying process. (Source: Business 2 Community)
6 Ways Content Marketing Help?
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Building Brand Awareness
Content marketing is an effective way to build brand awareness and establish a strong online presence. By consistently creating valuable content, businesses can attract new visitors to
their website and social media pages. This creates an opportunity to introduce them to your brand, build trust and loyalty, and ultimately turn them into paying customers. And there is no better medium than the blog post.
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Establishing Authority
Creating high-quality and informative content can help establish your business as an authority in your industry. By sharing your knowledge and expertise through blogs, webinars, and other content types, you can position yourself as a thought leader, trusted advisor, and expert in your field and this inevitably leads to more visibility, credibility, and influence.
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Generating Leads and Sales
Of course, content marketing can be an effective way to generate leads and sales and this should be the aim of your content marketing strategy. By providing valuable content that addresses your target audience’s pain points and needs, you can attract potential customers who are actively seeking solutions to their problems. This can lead to increased website
traffic, more leads, and ultimately more sales. The key here though is to not do it in an aggressive sales first approach, be helpful, and be genuine about wanting to help and naturally customers will be drawn to you.
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Improving SEO
This should be pretty obvious. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of any successful online marketing strategy. By creating high-quality content that is optimised
for specific keywords, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic. This can lead to increased visibility, more leads, and ultimately more sales.
Organic search should be a long term strategy. But the sooner you start the quicker you will benefit from it and it is the most effective tactic with the biggest ROI.
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Fostering Customer Relationships
Content marketing helps businesses build stronger relationships with their customers.
Creating content that addresses their needs and interests, is an effective way that businesses can foster a deeper connection with their audience. This plays on natural human behaviours of reciprocity and is proven to lead to increased loyalty, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
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Cost-Effective Marketing
Compared to alternative marketing methods such as paid search, PPC, banner ads, TV, and print ads, content marketing is relatively inexpensive. While there is a cost associated with creating high-quality content, it is much less expensive than traditional advertising. Also, content marketing has a longer lifespan than traditional advertising, meaning it can continue to drive leads and sales long after it’s created.
So how do you do it?
You can either create the content yourself or if you don’t have the time or the skills – pay someone else to do it. I know what you are thinking, if I pay someone to write articles for me, it is not going to be cost effective! – And this can be the case. Because content marketing is
proven to be so effective there are a lot of content marketing agencies offering services. The agency model is usually a subscription or retainer model, This means large businesses with big budgets are dominating content marketing and it is becoming really expensive. It is common to pay anywhere between £200 – £1,500 a month and be bound by an annual contract.
By using a fixed-fee content service like BizKit UK, you can cut costs by skipping costly retainers and only paying for what you need and because there is no contract, you can reduce or increase your output as you want, and each piece it will always cost the same for the same number of words. So businesses can scale their content production as they grow. By outsourcing your content creation, you can focus on growing your business while still producing high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Content marketing is an essential part of any successful digital marketing strategy. It helps businesses build brand awareness, establish authority, generate leads and sales, improve SEO, foster customer relationships, and is a cost-effective way to market your business. By creating high-quality, valuable, and relevant content, businesses can attract and retain customers, build trust and loyalty, and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
