While companies finally started to figure out the fact that content marketing is vital for growth and sustained profit, there are still some that do not use it. Resources are not being allocated, usually because of the fact that it is hard to understand the true benefits associated with content marketing. It does sound great that people end up seeing your business as being greater but how can you measure actual results?
When looking at content marketing we need to take an approach that is quite different than what we normally do with traditional marketing. If you want to decide whether or not content marketing is good for your business, you need to think about associated benefits. Here is what you should consider.
Intangible Benefits Of Content Marketing
We should start with this because the intangible benefits are those that most business owners fail to see. Whether you own a business or you want to talk to a client about why he should invest in content marketing, it is difficult to even think about these. Intangible benefits you have to be aware of include:
- Stronger Brand Awareness
As you create content, the audience you have has something to talk about. When people talk about you, others learn of your existence. It is as simple as that. Recommendations can be passed and you can even get organic backlinks simply because of the high quality of the content that was created.
- Industry Respect
The admiration and respect of the audience takes a lot of time to build. Trust needs to be earned first. After you manage to prove that you have industry knowledge and your integrity is as high as it should be, the brand turns into a high authority figure.
The websites that do not care about quality will eventually offer bad advice. Readers do not trust them. In fact, because of the fact that there are so many bad sites out there, in many industry there are countless people that do not know who to trust. If you use content marketing and you do it right, you stand out as who the people can trust.
- Indirect Conversions
Think about how you buy food in the supermarket. Aren’t there many products that you buy simply because of the brand and what you heard about it? Good content marketing builds content that does target a potential customer. There is simply a much higher possibility that a later purchase will appear because of that content. It is just a shame that this cannot be tracked since many more conversions happen because of content marketing than what can be measured.
- Increased Team Coordination
Another intangible benefit of using content marketing is that different staff members have to work together in order to build good strategies. For instance, you need the content creator to communicate with the social media marketer and with the HR department in order to make sure that everything will be in place for the campaign to run smoothly.
Tangible Benefits Of Content Marketing
These are the benefits that can be measured and analyzed. Marketers can easily use this data in order to show that everything is working or identify what is not working. Those benefits that should be considered are:
- Website Traffic
This is the most obvious benefit you get. It is also one of the really important ones. As great content is created, people end up on the website since they want to find the information they are looking for. With good content marketing, the information they need is actually about your services, products or company.
- Better SEO Results
Content marketing is incredibly valuable for modern search engine optimization. This is why even Monetary Library offers brand building services. Simply put, really good content will attract links. Google will see the site as having higher authority in the industry. Also, content is crawled and the search engines can better figure out what the company is all about. You basically end up growing in search engine results when you use content marketing. This brings more traffic and more profits.
- Direct Conversions
The best possible example is creating very good product descriptions capable of convincing people that unique value is offered. In this case, it is content marketing that leads to the conversion. As opposed to the indirect conversions, these happen directly and can be measured.
Is Content Marketing Good For Your Business?
Since you made it to this point, it should be pretty obvious that content marketing is actually really good for any business. However, there is one thing you should be aware of:
Benefits are not going to immediately appear!
Content marketing is not like buying ads. It takes time for results to appear and much effort. However, as time passes, more and more results become visible. Using content marketing does generate a snowball once it starts going, when done right, of course.
Can You Use Content Marketing When Budget Is Limited?
The short answer is YES. However, an answer that is a little longer would be: “Yes, because you can do as much content marketing as your budget allows it.”
For instance, when you rely on creating blog articles, you can create as many as you can with the money that is available. The idea is to create evergreen content whenever possible. Such content does not require increased upkeep and more money invested at the beginning, as is the case with news sites.
When resources are limited there is one advantage that should become instantly visible: the team needs to focus on creating the BEST possible content. The business is forced to be careful with targeting and curating. Oftentimes this leads to an even more effective content marketing strategy than what would be seen when available budget is high.
Quality Always Beats Quantity!