5 Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Important

Whatever the product or service you’re trying to sell, having a tried and tested marketing strategy is essential for your success. With traditional advertising models no longer as effective as before, people and companies increasingly turn to content marketing. In this comprehensive blog post, you’ll learn why.

What Is Content Marketing?

First things first: content marketing refers to a type of marketing that involves the creation of materials like blogs, videos, social media posts, etc. that are subsequently published online.

While this content is not meant to overtly promote a company or brand, it helps to prompt interest in its products or services. One important facet of content marketing involves social media marketing and management.

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

For over a decade, content marketing has been the primary way for companies and brands to reach their target audiences. With time, consumer behavior has slowly shifted away from network tv and more towards the internet, social media, and streaming services.

Because of this, practically everyone that wants their company to succeed needs to employ content marketing strategies. Through content marketing, companies can drive traffic, build brand awareness, develop trust, increase sales, and grow their businesses.

In fact, we don’t just repeat what we’ve read online – we’ve experienced this ourselves!

In this article, we’ll dive into all the nitty and gritty of it and help you implement it in your business strategy by going over the top 5 reasons why content marketing is important.

To become successful requires you to be customer-centric. That means you need to understand your customers’ pain points and provide value by offering solutions. The same goes for your content marketing strategy.

By creating content that is helpful and timeless, more people are likely going to search for, find and read it. As a result, you’ll rank on Google, and potentially even on its first or one of the first pages. When you consistently do this, you’ll drive more traffic to your site over time.

Unlike paid ad campaigns that only provide you with traffic as long as you pay, content marketing can give you a continuous flow of readers. Once you generate lots of organic traffic, you won’t have to work so hard anymore because people will continue to visit and read your site on their own.

It’s unlikely that anyone will search for the product or services you sell, find, click on and purchase them. They’ll usually go through a journey first, one that looks like this:

1. They find out that you exist
2. They learn about what you offer and whether you can help provide value or solve their problems
3. They discover why you’re their best solution
4. Once convinced, they become your customers

Marketing funnels work like that and out of all the ways you can choose to bring people into your marketing funnel, content marketing may be the easiest, most cost-efficient, and most effective one.

Here’s an example: If Tom wanted to learn how to build a website, he’ll likely enter a search time like “easiest way to build a website” into Google and come across a blog post by a web designer that answers his query. Once he reads it, he’ll close it and work on his website.

While working on his site, he might need more info, and look for YouTube tutorials that can simplify his process. Now, he finds a video from that same web designer that he read the “easiest way to build a website” blog post prior and watches it. Perhaps, he’ll go through the channel or blog to look for more useful content.

Since he’s consumed a number of videos and articles from the same source, he now trusts the web designer, and, to make things easier on himself, purchases his services. Instead of building the website himself, he’ll hire that same web designer to create it for him.

This is an example of how content marketing can work to convert a practical stranger on the internet into a buying customer. If that content hadn’t existed, Tom would have never found and hired the web designer.

Without content, you’re limited to what you can share on your marketing channel. For example, most brands use their social media to share content like videos or blog posts they’ve created. If they don’t have any, they’re left to share content with others or post photos and illustrations that may not convert as much.

Newsletters or email marketing work the same way: they’re used to share videos and blog posts. But even if you were to pay for ads on your social channels or on Google, you’d have to share something. And that something is content.

On top of that, one of the most organic and effective ways of marketing is word of mouth. When people read your content and like it, they’ll likely share it with friends, family, and colleagues. But without any content, what would they be sharing about you?

In most cases, people will come across your content because they have questions they need answers to or problems they want solutions to. Perhaps you provide a service that can help them with their questions and problems.

Whatever reasons they have to read your content, they do so to learn something. Along the way, they learn about the products or services you offer and likely become interested in them.

Now, if they’re interested in the content you share – which should be related to your niche/product/service – they’ll naturally gravitate towards what you have to offer.

That means, content marketing not only helps you to attract readers but also to acquire qualified prospects that are more likely to convert to loyal and long-term paying customers.

Gone are the days when it cost a fortune to air an ad. Today’s marketing strategies don’t always require help from an agency. In fact, many brands do their marketing in-house.

That and the fact that using SEO can help you organically rank on Google without having to pay money to reach customers makes content marketing the most cost-effective way to attract and acquire targeted traffic.

If you consistently work on your strategy through content writing, creating videos, etc., you won’t have to go the paid ad route and save large amounts of money in the future.

Now that you know how important content marketing is, here are some steps to help you get started.

1. Know Your Target Audience

A common mistake in content marketing is not knowing who you’re targeting. If you don’t know who will consume your content, you won’t create the content that attracts them. An excellent way to find your target audience is to create a buying persona, someone imaginary that represents your ideal customer.

2. Find Out What People Are Searching For

Unless you know what people are searching for, you won’t get results with this digital marketing strategy. Ideally, your content would rank on the first pages of search engines, including Google and YouTube. And one of the best ways to ensure that is to create content that your audience is searching for.

How to do that? First, brainstorm topics related to your niche. Then, come up with some keywords and enter them into a free keyword tool like Semrush.

This will result in different keywords and show you how many people search for them every month. Use this to come up with content that you know will have an audience.

3. Publish Consistently

Consistency is one of the most important factors in helping you rank in search engines. A great way to ensure you publish regularly is to create and commit to a content calendar. This is essentially a schedule of posts that you plan to publish, including their topics (or headlines) and target publishing dates.

Over time, you’ll find out how often you should post content. While 1-2 articles per week may work for some, others need to publish content more often. Of course, this also depends on your time, budget and resources. Whatever you decide on, make sure to be consistent.

4. Promote Your Content

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, there are hundreds, if not thousands of competitors that you have to go against online.

Instead of just creating and publishing your content, take it one step further and promote it. That way, your content is more likely going to be discovered. This is especially important for newbies.

Content marketing can help your business take off and find success. But it won’t happen overnight. With consistency and grit, you’ll be able to drive more traffic to your site, build brand awareness and trust, rank higher on Google, and ultimately increase your sales. So don’t wait any longer and get started today!