What is content marketing and why is it important? It pains us to see some businesses, especially startups not understanding the significance of content marketing. And knowing that content marketing has been proven to deliver resounding success in growing audience engagement, driving sales, and building a brand presence, we can’t help but tell you why investing in content marketing is a good idea.

But before diving in, let’s take a look at what is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and sharing valuable and relevant content that your audience is craving. This type of content also boosts your brand awareness, reach, sales, loyalty, and interactions. Types of content include videos, podcasts, blog posts, infographics, images, and so on.

That said, here is why your business should consider investing in content marketing:

Benefits of content marketing

1. Increase audience retention

With great content, it is much easier to keep your current audience around and coming back for more. Just focus on creating quality content and they will never go to other sources of information besides your website.

2. Better social media traction

Have you tried everything at your disposal and still can’t see much traction despite having a huge follower base? Content marketing is your answer. Focus on creating targeted content and you will see your business gain traction on social media much faster.

3. Enhance SEO effort

Any serious marketer will tell you that to excel in digital marketing —you must pair SEO and content marketing. Both must work together for you to see your desired results. And when it comes to SEO, great content ensures you build trust, remain visible, and most importantly rank higher in search engines.

4. Establish trust with your audience

Great content helps businesses create and nurture strong relationships with their audience. A good example is when a business creates content that provides answers to questions raised. This is something you can also do seamlessly, right?

Tip! Leverage SEO so that your content shows up on the first SERP (search engine result page) when your prospects search for content that addresses their needs.

5. Improve conversions

Quality content has also been linked to an increase in conversions. This means, if you create the right type of content continuously, there is a higher probability that more of your customers will purchase from you after reading your articles. If you commit to publishing content that helps your audience make the right purchasing decision, you are almost guaranteed of seeing an increase in conversions.

6. Helps you build links

The number one reason other websites would prefer to link to you is because of your great content. If you are able to create such content persistently, no doubt, you will receive more requests from websites wanting to link to you. Not to mention that more backlinks can lead to an increase in your page authority and website rank if these links are coming from sites with high Domain Authority (DA).

7. Generate leads

Content marketing also plays an important role in lead generation. This works well when you create quality-content and include some CTAs (calls to action), which, when clicked, generate new leads. You can have CTAs anywhere in your content —bottom-of-post, inline, in the hero, or even on the side panel.

8. Content is essential during each stage of the marketing funnel

A marketing funnel helps you journey with prospects from the time they start to become aware of their problems and looking for solutions to the time they make a purchase. That is, from the Top-of-Funnel to the Middle-of-Funnel and eventually to the Bottom-of-Funnel.

During each stage of the funnel, quality content plays a big role in helping your prospects make the right decision. Here’s how:

• Top-of-Funnel (TOFU): At the top of the funnel, great content educates your prospective customers and gets them the information they need to decide which solution might help.
• Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU): In this stage, your content is meant to educate leads on the different options available so that they can start to narrow down and come closer to a final buying decision.
• Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU): Once leads reach here, it means that they are ready to convert. Therefore, the role of content during this stage is to give a final nudge of encouragement to potential buyers and help them make an informed purchasing decision.

In general, content marketing is indispensable in every stage of the marketing funnel. We have reaped a lot by using the right content to push our prospective customers down the funnel. And by the way, it is not difficult to do this if you have a solid content marketing strategy in place.

9. Build authority

Building your authority online is something you shouldn’t take lightly. This is because once your brand is established as a credible source of information, it will be easier to rank higher in search engines. Are you not looking to rank higher on SERPs?

Pro tip! Make sure to create content that demonstrates your expertise if you really want your customers to trust you.

10. Sets you apart from your rivals

The digital marketplace is not for the fainthearted. If you really want to stand out in this market, you must show it. Content marketing offers an effective way for your business to set itself apart from other businesses in the industry. But how? It is simple. Create content that is unique to your brand and most importantly write about what your prospects are looking for.

11. Achieve a profound understanding of your real clients

We are sure you are now asking how content marketing will help you achieve this, right? This is exactly what happens.

Publish great pieces of content and track each one to see which is performing well. Now, based on the information you gather, you move on to create additional content that best suits your target audience; content that is aligned with the best performing pieces. Analytical tools come in handy here. As well, we recommend evaluating your content often as this will enable you to create better content progressively.

12. Content marketing is inexpensive in the long run

Yes, compared to other forms of traffic acquisition, content marketing is significantly cheaper. At first, it may seem expensive, but in the long-term, it isn’t. For example, according to Ahrefs, their blog ranks in Google for more than 193,000 keywords and generates about 51,000 monthly search visits.

If they were to gain that traffic via Google ads they would have to spend approximately $795,000 per month. That is a lot of money.

Now given they are spending nowhere near that amount to create and optimize it is fair to say content marketing is less expensive when compared to paid ads in the long run.

13. Educate your audience

Every piece of content you create must educate or offer a solution to the problem your prospects are currently facing. In fact, buyers are hungrier for information than ever before because they have realized how powerful content is. If you can guarantee them you are the hub for the information or knowledge they need, no doubt they will always come back for more.

What is content scoring?

Now you know how important it is, it’s time for you to analyze your existing content. Content scoring is essentially the process of assessing and quantifying the real potential of content by tracking how individual content pieces perform in generating and converting leads.

It helps marketers focus only on the content that has a higher probability of generating and converting leads. That is content with higher resonance. Here is an infographic that demonstrates how content scoring can work.

How to score your content

• Establish scoring criteria: To create a sound content scoring system, you need to establish a foundation built on whichever engagement metric has the most significant impact on your content. For some, it may be shares on social media, while for others it can be page views.
• Create a campaign: Once you have identified which metric matters to you most, create a campaign, and add the successful content that meets your metric threshold. For instance, if you decide that 1,000 page views are high-performing, add all the content assets that meet the said criteria.
• Monitor content performance: Measure how each new piece of content you create is performing. Ascertain content assets meet your success metric — 1,000 page views, for instance — include them in the campaign. Continue including content to build a small sample size of high-performing content.
• Evaluate what works: Now that your high-performing content is segregated, you can further analyze what makes your content perform. Although it is difficult to quantify, you can discover patterns within your content that you can then replicate.
• Rinse and repeat: Although these patterns are always changing, this manual process is an effective way to score your content and take action on your insights in the future.

Scoring content manually is quite tedious but very effective at the same time. However, you can use an automated tool like Atomic AI to understand your customers and their expectation. And once you figure out what they need, then make sure to replicate that repeatedly.

Conclusion

Yes. Content marketing is a key strategy for marketing your business. I’ve shown you 13 reasons why content marketing is important. Also gave you tips on how to make your content marketing more effective.

But the aspects of content marketing can be very complex.

So, if you’re looking for a blog that provides valuable content about content marketing, you’ve come to the right place! Check out other articles we’ve written to help you grow your business.