Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Business?
As you launch a business, your goal is to reach potential customers, acquire those potential customers and make sales on your services or products, as your brand is ready to go out into the market. But this raises the question: how do I achieve all that? Some of the marketing initiatives available that you might be aware of demand money, and you are running on a low financial budget. You also may not have the resources to fulfill those marketing initiatives. The answer to all this is: Content Marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that deals with content. Simple, right!!
To put into perspective, content marketing is part of digital marketing, and it is based on a strategy for creating valuable and relevant content aimed at your target audience. The content you create, aims to answer your customers’ intent, what they are looking for, and/or grab their interest, in an engaging way. In doing so, you create content, that garners readership, followership, and raising your brand awareness among your target audience. If you would like to know more about digital marketing, how it works, and the different digital strategies that come with it, then click here.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Builds brand awareness: Think about it. If you keep posting content online relatable to your customers, at the same time those customers are searching online, or surfing the web on social media or through search engines, you are creating a bridge between your brand and your customers. This allows for a continued conversation and engagement towards your brand. The more valuable and engaging content you post out there, the more you create a buzz among your audience, raising your brand awareness.
According to Web Hosting Secret Revealed, “global internet users grew by 8.6 percent over the past 12 months, with 350 million new users contributing to an overall total of 4.437 billion by the start of April 2019”. In 2020, an estimated 2.05 billion digital buyers accessed or purchased goods and services online (Statista, 2020). You can now start to imagine the impact of what content marketing brings to your brand, as you connect with the billions of customers out there, but in this case towards your own target audience relevant to your products or services.
Creates brand personality and brand loyalty: As individuals, we love it when we hang out with people that we feel close to and enjoy their company because their personality matches with ours. The more time we spend together, the more we become accustomed to each other, and build trust and loyalty together along the way. The same goes for your business and your brand. By continuously creating content that is valuable, engaging, and relatable to your customers, you become part of the group. Customers would then love to reach out to you, or hear from you every time they go online, or when they think of what to do next with their day.
Your brand’s personality should match with your customer’s personality. So, based on your customer persona, and what your brand offers them, your content should aim to build on that, connecting both personalities together.
There are five brand personality traits with common human traits
The more engaging content you create for your customers, the more you allow for dialogue to happen on both ends. An invested relationship is established between your brand and your customers, building on their emotions, resulting in brand loyalty online on your website or your different social media platforms. This can always be accomplished as long as your content remains consistent throughout every messaging you put out there.
A great example of this, is Direct to Consumer (DTC) Vessi waterproof shoes. They are a start up company from Vancouver, Canada. Vessi has been able to enter the shoes market by their digital marketing efforts, while producing great content marketing for both their social media and website blog called “the forecast”. By doing so, they were able to connect with their customers at a personal level, creating a buzz around their brand and build a major loyal brand following.
Creates brand authority online: The content you create is content that could make or break you. The content you create should be content you know your customers will appreciate. This is key towards building your online authority among the many brands out there on the web.
Providing content that is valuable and solves certain issues for your audience based on their search intent online, will make your brand stand out from the crowd, and become the go-to brand for information related to topics circling within your industry. An exceptional business with brand authority online, will have its content liked, shared, followed. Other websites appreciating the solid information as well will end linking back to it as reference or as acknowledgment. A great example would be entrepreneur.com, a magazine that focuses on business related news, and has built a great authoritative track record throughout its presence online based on its trusted content. If you type “marketing for online business” in Google search, you will find their website showing up in the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This brings me to talk about another benefit, which is SEO.
Builds your Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Content marketing is essential to your online presence and to be found by your target audience. Without generating any sort of relatable, engaging, and valuable content for your audience, your website would remain idle, and remain without any organic clicks through search engines. Generating content, allows for your SEO settings to take shape, and boost traffic towards your website. The more content you post online based on your audience search intent, the more your posts generate click through rates from your target market, along with other websites. In return this increases and boosts your ranking on SERP, as well as your authoritative presence mentioned earlier.
Content can be presented using different presentation formats: While your content must be consistent, the way you present it, does not have to be. Individuals have different ways of absorbing and engaging with information online. Some like to read, some like to watch videos, some like to listen to audio, and some like to interact. This allows for a wide source of flexibility for your content to be delivered consistently but in different formats towards your online audience. Creating creative ways to present your content, builds variety and many ways to create a buzz around your brand.
Convert Generated Content into Sales: Content can be the driving force to your business website and your social media presence. It is like winery tasting through a vineyard. You view the selection of available wine, and take a quick sniff to prepare yourself for the appealing taste. You then like the taste, and you end up getting hooked and end up purchasing the type of red/white wine brand you enjoyed.
Content marketing is the same, it grabs potential audience’s attention, building awareness, consideration, and conversion. Engaging content will make your potential customers discover your brand. If they like your content, and view more of your content, they will end up considering your brand and following you online. The last stage would be for your potential customers becoming actual customers and end up purchasing your products or services. Content must first engage, and then make a sale, as mentioned by Gary Vaynerchuk, author of “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World”. He mentions that to make a sale and ROI, a business must jab, jab, jab, first (engage), then release that right hook, which is basically your potential content that drives a sale.
Conclusion
To sum it up, content marketing is important for business because it is like athletes training for a championship. The athletes keep training everyday to build muscle and stamina, becoming more aware of their abilities, and the more they train, the more eager they become to compete, and sooner or later, they become fully ready to compete in the championship and win that gold medal at the end of the final stretch. So, focus on your content, research what your potential audience is looking for online that is related to your products or services, and start generating content, and eventually you will build a foundation for success.