If you’re the owner of a website that’s promoting products or services, you’ve likely already discovered – or are about to discover – that selling those products and services via your website requires more than just photos, videos, and a clever pitch. More and more, customers who land on your site are looking for valuable and useful content that helps them find answers to their most pressing questions and assists them in solving their issues. That’s where quality content enters the picture.
American author and marketing guru, Seth Godin, spells it out simply when he notes that “Content IS marketing”. In short, Godin understands that a focus on good content is what brings customers to the table and keeps them there, where they can enjoy a feast of useful information that may prompt them to make a purchase and/or return again and again.
Content marketing features 3 key benefits
Surf your way through the internet, visiting companies large and small, and you’ll recognize that the vast majority of successful marketers are using content marketing to their benefit, including large corporations that are household names peddling products or services you’ve been using for decades.
Why? Because the benefits are many. In particular, content marketing offers these three benefits, all of which can increase your bottom line.
Increased sales – There are numerous ways that content marketing can boost sales. When you provide helpful and insightful content on your website, you increase sales by:
- Bringing relevant buyers to your site – These are individuals that are truly interested in what you offer.
- Improving brand awareness and recall – Customers/clients will start to remember you each time they land on your site and read your excellent content.
- Increasing buyer engagement with your brand – The more potential customers interact with you, the more likely they are to stick around and/or come back again.
- Nurturing leads with important information they need – Again, quality content addresses individual issues and challenges, cultivating leads that will come back for more pertinent info.
Cost-effectiveness – Because providing premium content information that is pertinent to customers’ interest increases the value of the message, you’ll get more bang for your buck, so to speak.
- If you are directing your content towards your ideal target audience, you’ll find that you are spending fewer dollars to attract traffic to your website. Furthermore, you’ll attract so-called “niche customers,” who may be thought leaders in their fields of interest, thus spreading the word about your useful content to others like them.
- While you may spend money to purchase or create quality content, in the long-run it’s much less expensive than doling out money for one-way advertising.
- You can deliver your content in a variety of ways, which also contributes to cost effectiveness. Besides posting content on your website, you can use it on social media or even as part of a podcast.
- Companies can re-use or repurpose their content, which is also a money saver. For example, you can take a relatively long article or post and turn it into several blogs spread over a number of individual posts. A clever content creator can make those blogs seem like new content with relatively little effort.
- Search engines reward businesses that publish quality content. So, because you’ll appear higher in the rankings, you’ll be likely to get more clicks.
Brand loyalty
Because quality content marketing promotes brand awareness, you’ll find that brand loyalty will grow as well. Once customers recognize that you are providing them with the information they need – and at no cost – they’ll keep coming back for more.
- If you continue to provide updated and relevant content, you should be able to maintain a loyal customer base that not only sticks with you but also talks about you to others in their field.
New to content marketing?
If you’re unfamiliar with the particulars of content marketing and creating an all-important content strategy, the experts at Watershed9 can assist you in getting started. We can:
- Help you learn the basics of putting a marketing content plan in place
- Assist you in designing a content marketing strategy that will work for businesses like yours
- Put our team or writers to work for you writing quality content for your website and other platforms (emails, social media, etc.)
Intrigued? Ready to get started? Contact us for a no-obligation consultation about content marketing and how it can benefit your business. Call 604-337-1449 for more information.