For many modern businesses, content marketing – sometimes called inbound marketing – guides prospects down the marketing funnel. Whether a small business or a global enterprise, it’s an important part of a B2C or B2B marketing strategy.
How can content marketing help a business?
Like copywriting, quality content is your 24/7 salesperson.
Engaging content can lure potential customers in out of hours, answer their questions, educate them on how to use your product/service, grow your brand awareness, and convert a potential customer into an actual customer.
In fact, a Forbes study showed that 84% of businesses found content marketing helped grow their brand awareness, while 76% found it useful for generating demand and leads. 63% said it helped with nurturing their audience and 58% said it helped with generating sales and revenue.
It’s THAT good.
But wait! There’s so much more…
It helps you refine your brand voice
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to content marketing or you’ve been doing it for a while; creating regular social media or SEO content helps you refine your voice.
Your brand voice is a crucial part of who you are as a business. It’s what your audience will subconsciously connect with (or not). It can filter out customers and candidates who are the wrong fit before they ever get in touch.
The stronger your brand voice (and brand visuals), the quicker you’ll build brand loyalty. This is partly because these things will make your brand more memorable, particularly if it’s something your audience connects with.
Most of us have a certain way of writing, especially if we haven’t done much since leaving academia. When we switch to content writing, we have to train ourselves to write in a way that connects with readers, not teachers.
Good content requires a totally different style from anything your English teacher taught you. Whether you got an A or an F, everyone is on an even playing field when they’re new to writing blog content. Or writing about a new industry.
It makes you memorable
A website with quality content and high-quality web design will stand out in someone’s mind.
For example, I’ve had clients compliment my web design on this site in the past – they loved the colours and layout, which helped them remember me among my competitors.
You want to avoid having a website that looks like it was designed on Geocities in 2005. It should be easy for your audience to find the information that they need.
After all, you designed your product/service to make their life easier. Why should your website be any different? It’s a reflection of your brand, after all.
It establishes you as a thought leader
Thought leadership can be a powerful tool for brand awareness. It shows your existing audience, and people who are new to your orbit, what matters to you.
Providing valuable information – with a side of your opinions and experiences – is what makes you stand out. And it’s becoming increasingly important in the sea of content that’s published daily.
For instance, when I talk about my novel-writing background, or chronic health issues, that content always gets the most engagement on social media. On every platform. (Except TikTok, as I’ve trained the algorithm to focus on books.)
The topics resonate with my audience, who either find my novel writing interesting or have health issues themselves. It also shows I have experience writing long-form content and understand the ins and outs of writing for health.
Part of growing thought leadership means jumping on trends and offering your unique insights. You can’t directly include that in your marketing plan – too much of it happens unexpectedly.
Instead, make a note to regularly look for industry trends you or your content marketer can capitalise on and turn into thought leadership content.
What your marketing plan can help with is the content type you use to share your thoughts and opinions. This could be a combination of blog posts and social media posts, or video content that you publish to multiple platforms.
You get more exposure with search engine optimisation (SEO)
While algorithms are always changing, that doesn’t mean SEO is less relevant or ineffective.
It’s the biggest source of traffic to this site and continues to attract thousands of readers to my writing blog, which I haven’t updated since 2023.
The key to a great SEO strategy is to create high-quality content that’s valuable to your audience. It’s not just about hitting the keyword markers. Your content has to have something to say. It has to have meaning.
Relevant content works for search engines and readers. If it only works for one of those, it won’t get seen, and your marketing efforts will be wasted.
It grows your audience
Who doesn’t want a bigger audience?
An effective content strategy attracts more people into your orbit. They find you through SEO, social media marketing, and referrals.
Your digital marketing strategy might even work alongside your traditional marketing strategy, particularly if you go to events. They create a holistic experience where people keep hearing about you and so get to know you.
You can then get people on to your email list and use your email marketing strategy to deepen your relationship with them and further guide them down your marketing funnel.
You can answer FAQs (without repeating yourself)
The best part about content marketing is that it can answer common questions. This can save your sales and support teams HUGE amounts of time.
Why?
Because instead of repeating themselves, they can refer people to your content.
So then they have more time to spend on sales calls with prospects who are further down the funnel and closer to converting.
It also helps anyone who may not bother getting in touch if they have any questions.
I have to confess, I’m one of those people – if my questions aren’t answered on a company’s website, I’ll take my business elsewhere.
When questions are answered on a company’s website, I can read their blog posts, get the answers I need, get a feel for the company, then decide if I want to continue through the marketing funnel with them or research their competitors first.
The more your business grows, the more questions people will come to you with that you may not have thought of before – and can turn into content.
Some of these will be basic industry questions, like ‘how can content marketing help a business?’ while others will be specific to you and your business, such as ‘what’s your blog post writing process like?’
Combining these content types helps you educate your audience so that when they finally reach out to you, they’re at a higher stage of awareness and therefore more likely to convert.
It can convert a potential customer into a client (while you sleep)
When done well, all these factors combine to convert a potential customer into a client. Once you’ve written and optimised the post, your great content can bring people to your business for years to come.
If it starts to become less effective, you can look at updating it so that it continues to be valuable content while reflecting industry marketing changes or changes in the wider world. (Need help updating your content? Get in touch!)
Conclusion
According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buying processes are difficult or complex. So if you use content to streamline that process, you get to show potential customers what they could achieve if you worked together.
An effective content marketing strategy brings people into your circle and shortens your sales cycle. It’s a non-stop salesperson that builds brand awareness through high-quality content.
A successful content marketing strategy requires upfront work to ensure you get these results from it. It’s also worth noting that, initially, content marketing can take a few weeks or even months to show its impact.
However, once you start consistently publishing SEO content and/or social media content, you’ll start to see the results.
Not getting the results you want from your content creation? I’ve got some packages available for content strategy and SEO strategy as well as blog post writing. Get in touch to find out how we could work together to get you the content marketing results you deserve.