Content marketing is no more a new marketing concept; it is now an essential marketing strategy for every business in every industry.
If you have a doubt question about if content marketing is important for your business?
Then the answer is a resounding YES! It is important to your business and every other business in the world.
The importance of content marketing in digital marketing is related to its potential to increase the volume of quality traffic that visits your business website.
“Content is King” as they say because it can be used in creating awareness, and customer loyalty and it can be used to generate quality leads for your business which will sustain healthy sales growth between your business and its customers.
Perfectly strategized and properly executed content has the power to pull your potential audience to your business website, which is the place you can convert them into leads and paying customers.
The best way to drive traffic to your business website is through your website blog content.
Your content must be of excellent quality before it can work for you and bring you a positive result.
The higher the quality of your content, the more valuable the content will be to your audience and the more likely they will trust, and engage with your business.
The more they engage with your business and spend more time on your website, the more they become a prospect and paying customers.
This will let you have a big ROI in your content marketing strategy.
Let’s take a deeper look into content marketing, starting with its definition.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is exclusively focused on the creation and consistent distribution of valuable, relevant, unique, educational content which is aimed to attract and retain your business's potential audience.
Content marketing is about showing the world that you are an authority in your industry and you know what you are doing better than any of your competitors.
As an SEO professional, I refer to the practice of creating original, unique, and great content for use in online marketing activities as content marketing.
The ability to create excellent content on your website is a powerful marketing tool. Because your website content is original and it is only yours.
Why is content marketing important to your business?
You can leverage content marketing to build your business's online reputation.
Online viewers are served up with various forms of content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, gifs, presentations, podcasts, and social media posts.
By offering value in this sort of way, you are not only enticing online viewers, but you are also building brand trust.
5 Advantages of content marketing for your business.
1. Content is at the heart of every single digital marketing strategy.
The critical importance of content marketing to digital marketing is its ability to connect and support all the elements of your business's digital marketing campaign.
It is like a hub, with the supporting elements of your business marketing plan being the spokes.
The content that you create for your business can be used for your website blog post, your email marketing campaign, your social media campaign, and your paid advertisement campaign.
With an available solid content marketing strategy, each digital channel will use the best marketing strategy to achieve your business marketing goals and sales revenue targets.
Your business will create educational, engaging, and high-quality content that will be built into and supports each of your business's digital marketing campaigns.
For example, let’s say you ran a paid ad campaign which was aim to draw a high volume of traffic to your website.
Once visitors start to visit your website through your ad, you will also need quality and compelling content that will make them stay longer on your website and also make them want to come back to your website again, and again.
The quality of your website experience will determine if they will sign up for your website offer (if you have any) and provide you with their personal information (Email address).
And your email marketing campaign will also need content to promote a happy relationship between you and your customers.
Nurture your prospects with online content
You need to nurture your leads with quality content. In the marketing world, we call it nurturing campaign.
When you create email content that is valuable, compelling, and engaging, it will persuade your leads to take the required action.
Some content can be re-used: content like blog posts can be repurposed or used for drip email campaigns or social media posts.
Is the importance of content marketing's fundamental role in all other areas of your digital marketing campaign clear to you now?
It is the common subject matter that integrates with all your marketing campaign and makes them work.
2. Consistent content produces a huge Return on Investment (ROI)
Content marketing did not only get ahead of a traditional marketing strategy by a landslide, but it also drives in huge numbers of website visitors and leads.
The consistent production and distribution of original content will boost your business website traffic, and the more your website traffic increases, the more your conversions increase too.
A well-planned and strategize conversion strategy will bring in high-quality leads for your business.
Website conversions are valuable because they are a building block for your business sales funnel.
The website visitors that converted to paying customers have chosen to actively engage with your content by accepting the offers that are displayed on your website.
The offers might be in form of an infographic, an explainer video, or a white paper.
You can use content marketing for your business buyer’s journey. Provide your buyers with valuable information at each stage of their buying cycle.
This way, website visitors will be able to convert into leads and become new paying customers from there.
It is a constant disposition of quality content that nurture your potential audience through each step taken.
3. Search Engine Love great content for better Optimization (SEO)
When an online user performs a search query on the Search engine.
Search engine giant like Google crawls all the websites on the web for original and unique content to determine which website contains the best answer to the user's query.
Quality content usually generates more website traffic because the search engine loves to rank websites with quality content higher than websites with inferior content.
Optimizing your websites for search engine ranking is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the technical reasons why your website needs great content.
Once you have great content on your website the search engine will make your website become visible to your potential audiences on the internet.
A lot of people, including buyers of your business products and services go online and make use of platforms like Google to find solutions to their problems with the help of keyword queries.
For example, if you are looking to buy a car in Lagos, you might want to search for “Best place to buy a car in Lagos” or “Cheap cars in Lagos”.
Google will then show the best content that is available on the net for those keywords query.
The few businesses that have mastered how to get to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) are the big winners in the organic search.
Content will bring qualified traffic to your website. This means that one of the best ways that you can drive organic traffic to your website is through great and quality content.
Deliver quality content to online users and search engine experience for a double win!
A search engine like Google works to find the most unique and original piece of information regarding the particular search keyword query that was asked in the search engine.
This creates the need for quality content so that your business website can attract your potential audience.
You need to have in the back of your mind that the search engine algorithms changes periodically and the Google search engine is always improving its ability to deliver relevant and original content to online users in response to their keyword queries.
In recent years, Google algorithm updates increasingly reward websites with original and quality content and do away with or punish websites with inferior content.
For this reason, up-to-date content is rewarded over outdated content.
This means that your marketing campaign must include the creation of new content as well as updating old content.
Evaluate your content and make changes to stay relevant!
To stay up to date, you can repurpose your existing website contents and evaluate changes in your content keywords so that your content will continue to perform better in the Search engine result pages (SERPs).
Repurposing the old content on your website will help you maintain a high ranking for relevant keywords on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and keeps bringing in a huge volume of qualified traffic to your website.
Content creation is the most effective SEO strategy used in increasing qualified traffic to your business website.
Websites that post new blog content consistently have an average of 450% more indexed pages by the search engines than those that don’t publish at all.
The more quality content that you have on your website, the more pages the search engine will have to index and show to online users in the search engine result pages (SERPs)
You also need to know that more content on your website does not necessarily result in a high volume of traffic.
However, it does give your website the opportunity to rank for more keywords on the search engine, and this can in turn also drive more traffic to your website.
Creating blog posts on various topics that are relevant to your target customers will give your business website more opportunities to rank for the important keywords that your target customers are searching for on the search engine.
A high number of original and quality great content on your website will also let your website visitors spend more time on your website.
The longer your website visitor stays on your website, the more the search engine will make sure your website becomes visible to your target audience.
Customers spending more time on your website will indicate to Google that your website provides great and valuable content to online users.
4. Content marketing is Cost-Effective.
Content marketing is an affordable marketing strategy that generates 3x more leads than the traditional marketing method.
This fact should get the attention of small businesses that want growth and success. Content marketing is a less expensive and more effective marketing method compared to many forms of traditional marketing methods.
You also need to know the fact that content marketing is affordable but time intensive, and it can also take a little while before you will begin to see the results of your efforts.
This is mostly the case when it comes to SEO. Meanwhile, when it comes to producing great and quality content, a little will go a long way for your business.
You should also have this at the back of your mind unless you hire an agency or an SEO expert, creating quality great content takes a lot of time and effort.
Once you are done with your content and it has been published on your website, the search engine crawlers will also need time to digest, to know what your content is all about before they start to rank it. Over time great content will rise in the search engine result page rankings, it is not an overnight success.
The key to content marketing Return on Investment (ROI) is to create a content marketing strategy that will understand your target audience and their needs, what they will like to read, the type of content they like to consume, how they want to consume their content, where they want to consume their content.
Your Return on Investment will be maximized when strategic content marketing tactics have been created for your target audience. An important early step in a great content marketing campaign is the development of a customer avatar or customer “Persona”.
Your good understanding of your ideal customer will help in creating the best content they are actively looking for on the internet.
5. Buyers are hungry for content.
Buyers are hungry for content, give it to them and increase your business sales.
There are a huge number of studies that shows the importance of content marketing for your business growth. Your target customers are hungry for great content.
Let that content that is actively looking for come from you so that they can trust you enough to buy from you.
Let’s quickly get down to these facts to know more about why you will need content for your business.
Internet users spend 30% of their time online reading content and more than 75% are reading content about businesses that interest them, over half are reading content marketing titles every month including myself.
These days, most people check their mobile phones immediately after they wake up from sleep. We constantly consume content.
As business, it is a win for you when you respond to what your target customers want or are searching for. Your target customers want great content that answers their doubt questions about your business product offering and services because of this you will have to create compelling and valuable content that will help them at each stage of their buying cycle.
Valuable information is provided to online users through great content that the search engine flagged as content with high-quality information. You should also note that the Google algorithm rates content according to three criteria which are: Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
Having Expertise simple means that you have suitable credentials in your industry. An example of this is a Website developer writing information about how to create a website.
Authority on the other hand will go with the quality of your content, how detailed you are about it, and how well your content is written.
The last is Trust: It is related to the validation of the information that is given, whether it is through citations, links to customer service information, or the volume of great content on your website. Trust is built over time.
Making sure that your website content covers all these areas is a sure way for you to get rewarded by the google search engine and also increases the potential of giving your target customers content that will get noticed.
There are many platforms you can take advantage of to create content today. You can do it through blogging on your website, on youtube, or over social media. Create content to educate and entertain your customers showing them what your business is all about and why they need to purchase from you.