- Welcome to the world of content marketing.
Content marketing focuses on driving sales by giving your customers what they’re looking for while they’re actively searching for it.
Today, we’re going to talk about the top 13 benefits of content marketing to help you understand how valuable this marketing strategy can be for your business.
First, we’ll share the top 13 content marketing benefits. Then, we’ll delve into how you can get started with an effective content marketing strategy.
The Top 13 Reasons to Invest in Content Marketing
Don’t believe me? Just head over to YouTube and look up interviews with Matt Cutts (the former head of webspam at Google). You’ll be hard pressed to find him to respond to a question about how to rank higher in Google with anything other than “write great content.”
Google is obsessed with providing their users with the search experiences that deliver what they’re looking for. High-quality content is often the best way to provide that experience.
A 2018 study from SparkToro found that Google sends 10x more traffic to the average website than Facebook (and more than 10x for any other website).
In other words, content marketing dramatically boosts website traffic from your most effective traffic channel (organic search).
Content marketing drives more sales
Boosting website traffic is meaningless if it doesn’t result in more sales.
Most of your customers won’t be ready to buy from you the first time that they hear about your business. People go through a buying process before committing to a purchase. With smaller products (ex. a pack of gum), this buying process is quick; with larger products (ex. a new car), this process takes much longer.
We’re going to take an image from our friends at HubSpot about the inbound marketing methodology to help demonstrate.
why content marketing
Before making a purchase, people realize that they have a problem that needs solving (awareness). They take time to research and better understand their problem (consideration). Then, they make a decision on which solution is best for them (decision).
A fully constructed content marketing system helps your potential customers during all 3 of these stages by educating them on what they’re searching for.
Bringing your potential customers 1 step closer to making a purchase.
Building a relationship with your target audience to make them more likely to work with your business, instead of your competitors.
If that’s not enough, inbound leads (i.e. leads from online marketing) have a 14.6% conversion rate, while outbound leads (leads from cold calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate. Why is content marketing so important? Content marketing drives more sales.
And helps put sales on autopilot
Cold sales outreach is hard as hell.
I know because that’s where 50% of my time went for my first three months of doing Junto full time.
People are busy, and none of those people were searching for marketing services.
The result: a lot of disappointment. I ended up wasting a lot of time and money on campaigns that failed to drive any ROI for Junto.
Around March 2017, we stopped doing cold outreach entirely. Instead, we decided to focus on digital marketing, with the majority of our efforts being put towards content marketing.
Today, potential partners reach out to us when they’re ready to work with us. We have a conversation about their goals, identify the right approach to help them grow, and see if we’re the right team for them to partner with. In some cases we are; in other cases we aren’t. Either way, we help each of those potential partners to find the right solution to help them grow.
Content marketing helps transition sales from forcing a customer to buy your product to being a valuable resource that is there when your customers are ready to buy from you. Click to Tweet this.
Content marketing lets you control the conversation
It’s no secret that selling a product becomes much easier when your customer is looking for what you sell.
Let’s say you sell high-end sofas. Someone on the hunt for a $300 sofa isn’t going to be easy to sell to. By the time they walk into your store, they’ve already made up their mind about what type of sofa they need.
However, what if you could talk to that person while they were researching sofas? What if you could talk to them about the importance of paying a premium for quality before they made up their mind about how much they were going to spend?
Controlling the conversation while your most likely customers are educating themselves is invaluable. The same holds true for everything from car insurance to business software.
So why not write about these conversation points? Why not control the conversation when your customers are deciding what they need? Chances are your competitors are beating you to the punch and stealing your best potential customers.
Why is content marketing so important? Content marketing lets you control the conversation.
It’s way less annoying than traditional marketing
Nobody likes being interrupted in the middle of their day by people trying to sell them something.
40% of internet users already use ad blockers, and that number isn’t going to decrease over time.
Sure, banner ads can be a good way to showcase your brand. But spending money on TV commercials and other forms of advertising that interrupt your customers doesn’t sound like the best way to win them over.
Content marketing, on the other hand, enables you to build customer relationships by putting your brand in front of your customers in a way that helps them. Click to Tweet this.
So why are you still paying hundreds of dollars for a 30-second TV commercial? Content marketing costs way less (and is way more effective). Talk to us instead.