What are the benefits of content marketing?

Introduction

Attracting and engaging with customers is a monumental task. It often requires significant time and effort investment on the part of businesses and product owners. One strategy that has proven to be highly effective is content marketing. By creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content, businesses can attract and most often retain an engaged audience which can later on be converted into paying customers. In this short article, we will explore the benefits of content marketing and why it has become such an important part of almost all widely spread marketing strategies.

Trust & Authority

Authority is the core metric tracked by search engines to denote how trustworthy your site is. One of the primary benefits of content marketing is its ability to build brand awareness and trust with potential customers. By creating high quality, informative, and engaging content, businesses establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry, showcasing their expertise and values. This in turn leads to increased brand recognition, loyalty, and ultimately, customer advocacy. In broad terms, that's what search engines considers "authority".

Traffic Leads To Sales

Content marketing is also an effective way to drive website traffic and generate leads, and leads in turn convert into sales. By optimizing content with relevant keywords, businesses can improve their search engine rankings, which increases product/website visibility and attracts more visitors. Additionally, content marketing can be used to nurture leads through the sales funnels, providing valuable information and insights that businesses can utilize in a variety of ways to increase their revenue.

Cheap Customer Acquisition

Another major benefit of content marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Unlike traditional forms of marketing, such as print or TV advertising, which often are extremely expensive and less granular, content marketing can be produced and distributed at a relatively low cost. Furthermore, content marketing is trackable and measurable which allows businesses to know in real time how successful any given campaign is. Data driven decision making is not just a "nice to have" thing; it's the difference maker between large scale success and ultimate failure.

Improved Engagement and Retention

As we mentioned earlier, content marketing is extremely effective at improving customer engagement and retention. By creating content that resonates with the target audience, businesses can build strong relationships with their customers. This relationship can later on be monetized in a variety of different ways. A happy customer will always recommend your product. A prime example of that would be Digital Ocean. Their content marketing strategy set them apart from their competition in many ways, which in turn leads to an increase in sales and advocacy. This site you're currently reading is hosted on their platform thanks to, at least in part, how helpful their content team was earlier on in our careers. And because of that, we've been loyal customers for almost a decade now.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the benefits of content marketing are clear. By creating and distributing valuable and relevant content, businesses can build brand awareness and trust, driving traffic, leads and ultimately sales. All of which can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods.