Content marketing can make or break a small business’s brand strategy.
In today’s audience-driven marketing landscape, prospective buyers are smarter than ever and are leveraging online tools to find the best solutions to their problems. If you want them to choose your brand over a competitor, you need content that meets them where they’re at in the process of making a purchase, whether it’s blogs, landing pages, white papers, a podcast, or video ads on paid social media.
Regardless of the type of content and delivery channels you choose, the benefits of content marketing can’t be understated.
Search Engine Journal reports these statistics proving the effectiveness of content marketing:
- Content marketing generates triple the leads of traditional marketing at a 62% drop in cost.
- 56% of marketers say blogs are an effective form of marketing content, with 10% saying it produces the highest ROI.
- 62% of B2B purchasers said they relied on content such as case studies and webinars to inform their purchasing decision.
Whether you’re a fledgling startup or an established brand in your community, you can leverage the benefits of content marketing to grow your audience and your business. Here are the top 4 benefits of content marketing.
Benefit #1: Curating Your Audience
Luckily, you don’t have to build your audience from scratch—they already exist! Your goal in curating your audience is simply to bring the people together that naturally fit into a relationship with your brand.
Remember, you aren’t trying to bring in random people, but you’re trying to organically reach the people who are looking for your solutions and just haven’t found them yet.
Chances are that you’ve already developed your marketing personas and/or ideal customer profile (ICP). If you haven’t, now’s a good time to flesh these out, so you can tailor your content accordingly. Whereas marketing personas offer key insights into the demographics, goals, challenges, and needs of your customers, an ICP gives you a broad scale roadmap for an ideal business to sell to, helping you align your solutions and better target leads.
Once you have personas and/or an ICP, you’ll know the audience you’re going to curate. They’re the people who are already seeking what you’re offering, and you’re simply providing that with your content on the channels where they’re most likely to find it.
Benefit #2: Thought Leadership
Thought leadership has become an overused buzzword that many business owners might gloss over. However, thought leadership in content marketing offers the opportunity to develop your brand and elevate your team members as experts in your field—which is critical to marketing success.
Positioning your brand as a leader in your industry means your audience will be more likely to trust you and be more likely to eventually become a customer.
Thought leadership is about building trust. It’s an opportunity to answer the question, “Why should someone listen to you?” After all, your competitors are positioning themselves as experts in your industry as well.
Other questions to consider include:
- What makes you more qualified than competitors to meet a prospective buyer’s needs?
- What are you saying that’s unique or covers an angle of a topic others have neglected?
- Does your content cover all the questions someone might have throughout their buyer’s journey in a way that is clear and tells a cohesive story?
Use your content to answer these critical questions. Content should establish you as an authority on how to solve your audience’s pain points and strengthen the relationship between your audience and brand.
Benefit #3: Asset Building
Content is a vehicle to help build the overall value of your business.
It may be useful to think of your website as a critical asset your business relies on in the same way that a manufacturer may rely on a new piece of machinery they’ve invested in. That machinery requires maintenance, upkeep, and resources dedicated to keeping it running safely and smoothly so that it remains an asset rather than becoming a liability.
For example, let’s say you are the president of a printing business. As your company grows over time, you will need to invest in better assets. Eventually, you may need a new printing machine because your old equipment may become outdated or break down. While the new machine is an investment, it will allow your company to serve more clients.
The moral of the story is that investing in a better website—and therefore a more effective content strategy—is just like investing in that printing machine.
In the pre-digital age when companies were evaluated, they were assessed by individuals. Today, evaluations are completed on a digital level. What matters is the value of your digital real estate when compared to your competitors.
Benefit #4: Developing New Business
Another benefit of content marketing is that it helps you find new customers. They have a problem, and they’re looking for a solution. That solution is precisely what your business provides.
By answering questions and providing value, your content is attracting new potential customers to your storefront—be that a local brick-and-mortar building or a D2C digital storefront for e-commerce.
In some ways your website and your storefront aren’t directly associated, but in other ways they are intrinsically connected. You build trust between your brand and audience via content that delivers your unique value proposition. That doesn’t mean you’re trying to make a direct sale with each piece of content. Quite the opposite—you’re helping your audience find solutions to their problems organically. By building trust, your storefront is the one they’re more likely to visit.
If a retailer could ensure that 1,000 patrons came to their storefront a day, they would do it. They may be window shoppers, but they are more likely to buy than someone who’s not window shopping at all. Content marketing helps you build that level of visibility for your brand.
The Benefits of Content Marketing Professionals
The benefits of leveraging content to achieve your marketing goals and grow your business are clear. If you aren’t curating your audience, fostering trust and authority, building your digital assets, and developing new leads and conversions with content marketing, you’re losing ground to competitors who are. Content marketing success is all but essential to keeping pace with other brands in digital marketing.
However, the process of building and executing a successful content strategy can be arduous, time-consuming, and resource intensive. Many teams may not have the time or employees to dedicate to producing high-performing content on a regular schedule.
You may find that you need additional help achieving your goals and reaping all the benefits of content marketing. That’s where the professionals at Content Workshop come in. We understand the marketing challenges you face and want to help businesses like yours achieve their content goals.
We work with our clients to build a content marketing plan that fits their needs and will consistently meet their performance goals. Contact us here to learn more about how Content Workshop can help you.
