With over 5 billion internet users today, content has become a crucial growth currency for brands, raking in new leads, new customers and increased profits but a some brands are still unsure about the benefits of content marketing.
As a new brand, I was not exactly certain about the role of content marketing in driving visibility and new customers for a small business. We stumbled on it and decided to try it only because we could not afford paid marketing at the time. And then everything changed.
After using content marketing as a core of our organic growth marketing in more than 7 years and evolving the similar strategy for a number of our clients, one of the most crucial insights I’ve learned is that you cannot afford to ignore content marketing if you’re planning to scale your business to the next level.
In fact, according to a study, over 70 percent of surveyed companies reported that content marketing is very effective in driving new leads for their business especially when it comes to building trust and long term relationships with new leads.
If you’re still struggling to understand how content marketing can benefit your business or the ways you can use it to drive growth and profit, in this article, I’ll share the insights I learned and how you can get started from scratch.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of CREATING and DISTRIBUTING valuable content to a well a DEFINED audience over a given period of time so as to drive a SPECIFIC OUTCOME.
It is a result driven digital marketing strategy targeted at evolving very clear outcomes, both for the creator and the user. The following are some of the core benefits of content marketing for businesses…
Builds Authority & Credibility
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Creating and sharing quality and valuable content is an effective strategy used by brands to demonstrate expertise and knowledge in a specific field.
By consistently sharing great content you can build credibility for your brand while demonstrating a level of expertise that can always be associated with the brand in the long term.
This is one of the important benefit of content marketing for small businesses that’s often times ignored because the result most often does not show up immediately, although it eventually does.
As a brand looking to build thought leadership and credibility in any specific niche, you want to establish your self as a thought leader by creating solution driven content that will meet your audience at the point of need, consistently.
To build credibility with your content, you have to create content for a specific niche, industry and audience, meet the needs of this audience better than other content creators in that niche, show up consistently and keep getting better.
Improves Search Traffic
One of the most well known benefits of content marketing for small businesses is that it drives improved search engine traffic to a website.
Most marketers will not tell you this but according to research, websites that creates and share content regularly do generate far more returns on investments, compared to websites that ignore content marketing completely.
Beyond websites, creating and sharing content on other platforms like social media for example improves your visibility across the platforms. It also positions you favorably with the platform algorithm, leading to improved engagement.
Generally as a creator, the more you continue to create and share valuable and well optimized content targeted at solving the queries, questions and needs of a specified audience, the more you attract quality and very specific traffic to your website.
Doing this consistently increases your chances of getting new clients, making more sales and ultimately, driving business growth.
To get the most out of this, you want to create and share valuable content that are well optimized with search keywords and positioned for optimum brand prominence.
Creates Brand Visibility
Personally, one of the first benefits of content marketing for small businesses that we experience when we first started out was improve brand visibility. It was totally hard to show up in front of our target audience without ads or content.
Like it was back then, today; most B2B brands get into content marketing because they want their brands to be visible to their target audience.
And the good thing about content marketing is that as you continue creating and sharing content for your business, more and more people get to see and engage with your content.
As they continue engaging with your content, they become more aware of your brand. As this continues, they eventually grow to like and trust your brand overtime.
As a brand seeking to build followers, fans and all round credibility with your audience, content marketing is one of the go to strategy you want to use.
To get the most from using content to build brand visibility, you have to be very strategic. Focus on building content that appeals to your audience. Create content that aligns with how you want your brand to be perceived and also, lean in towards virality.
Drives Leads & Conversions
Content Marketing drives organic leads. It attracts people to your website and by extension, gets them to know about your business. This is exactly how we closed our first sales using strategic marketing.
I do not see this merely as one of the most crucial benefits of content marketing for small businesses, it’s one of the key reasons why most brands create content.
While using content marketing to attract new clients is not a bad idea, most users are not aware that this is one of the goals behind most content they consume online.
Done well, content marketing attracts high quality traffic (or warm leads) to your business website. And over time as you continue to nurture these leads using strategic marketing, a part of that original traffic can transition into direct or indirect paying customers.
To make the most from this, you’ll have to know your audience, understand the kind of content that matters to them, how they want to consume that content and then create and share that with them, consistently.
Builds Tribes & Raving Fans
Content marketing provides a great resource for businesses to build, grow and nurture their tribes (audiences and fans).
In the digital world, tribes are people who believe in you and the things you do. You can call them your fans, customers, brand evangelists etc.
No matter the name you choose, these people come to associate with your brand because they consume and derive value from your content.
A clear example of this is the fan base of celebrities like the Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuck, Seth Godin etc. The fans rally around these celebrities because they love them and the content they create.
Your fans will rally around you because they can relate to the content you create. And for this reason they will promote, defend and stand up for you.
They become your foremost ambassadors because you’re providing high and consistent value for them whenever they come to your blog.
Building and nurturing tribes is one of the important benefits of content marketing that has inspired most brands to get into content marketing. But consistency is very important here especially if you want to create an audience for the long term.
Improves Social Media Reach
Social media thrives on content. The more valuable content you create and share with your audiences, the more impact you get to make.
This is a key aspect of the benefits of content marketing for small businesses that keeps most companies coming over to create content again and again.
Considering that a large number of your potential customers are already using social media in one way or the other.
With content marketing, you can plug into this audiences by creating content that appeals to them and sharing it right where they are.
Additionally, with content marketing, you’re able to interact, engage and create value for your audience right on the social media.
In return, this expands your reach on the platform as more and more people get to consume your content, learn about your brand, trust you and potentially grow a likeness for your brand.
Increases Search Engine Ranking
Creating and sharing top quality content is a great way to increase the search engine ranking for your website. This is one of the popular benefits of content marketing for small businesses. And it has been widely used by marketers to optimize websites for visibility.
Beyond direct ranking, in the age and time of Artificial Intelligence and Generative Engine Optimization, Content Marketing provides the AI tools, data to learn and understand your brand effectively, helping position you prominently on web searches.
Further away from ranking, it also builds your credibility in terms of backlinks. With a decent backlinks from high authority websites, you can get improved domain authority and overall page rank which are credibility indicators for search engines.
In a nutshell, as a business owner, content marketing provides you an opportunity to build a more resilient and long term search engine optimization strategy that will deliver consistent ROIs for your business.
You can use it as a launch pad to create a long term visibility for your websites while using other strategies to build more short term results. But to make impressionable ROIs with this, you have to be very specific about your goals, create content that aligns with your goals and audience needs, focus on optimizing and improving your outcomes and keep showing up consistently.
Final Words
As you’ve noticed, the benefits of content marketing for small businesses is very real and difficult to ignore. Using the strategies you learned today will improve your outcomes and get you to start getting ROIs from digital marketing in the long term.
But, it is also important to evolve strategies that work for you as you begin to use these. So, after implementing these strategies, yo have to study and evaluate your outcomes at intervals, to improve on them.
Also, strategies and algorithms are changing everyday. To stay on top of your game in getting consistent results, you have to keep learning. And you can start by signing up for our content marketing course where we train and mentor you to become better at creating result driven content marketing campaigns here.
But, if you’d rather prefer a one on one content marketing session with me, reach out to our team here.
Now that you’ve learned about how content marketing benefits your small business, I’d like to know, what’s your biggest fear when it comes to content marketing? Drop your comment below.
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