Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Your audience is looking for quality, relevant content when looking for answers online. They’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t provide this content. More importantly, it won’t be long before they start considering the only logical option – why wouldn’t I buy from the same person whose content I consume? This is the contest that you cannot afford to lose!
If this all seems too simplified, we don’t blame you. Here’s a breakdown of the top seven long-term benefits of great content marketing and why you should redirect your attention this way.
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#1 Slowly Establishing Trust
People love great content but won’t convert because you do one thing right. When you give them good advice or provide great information, they’ll be grateful, and you may even earn a favor with them. However, earning a favor and earning someone’s trust is different.
Just think about meeting someone for the first time. You have no idea what kind of person they are. Sure, they may be fun to be around and seem like they have much going on in their lives, but how will they act under pressure? Ideally, you want to see this new person in as many different scenarios as possible.
The same thing happens with content marketing, as well.
Your content needs continuity. Regardless of your niche, people want to know if you’re a one-hit wonder or if you can consistently deliver.
Then, your audience wants to know if they can trust you. When you write an article on a subject matter, you can get lucky with the research. The first stat you’ve decided to use might be trustworthy and just what your audience needs, but if you’re not doing the right research, you won’t be able to hide this laziness forever. It will take time for your audience to determine if your information is reliable, your content is consistently decent, and more.
With great content comes a better SERP, and people tend to trust brands with great visibility. According to specialists from renowned web flow agencies, well-designed landing pages and amazing content are the quickest way for you to climb this ladder.
#2 Creating A Community
One of the most important benefits of content marketing is how it helps create a community. Quality content will spark much discussion.
Also, people will actively link to and quote your content, making people link to the post for reference or use quotes. According to SEO experts, brand mentions can be just as relevant for your digital marketing, regardless if we’re talking about link-building opportunities (as a part of your SEO).
Remember that spawning a community also helps your future sales. You see, brand loyalty sometimes starts with a community. For instance, regardless of the statistics or characteristics, iPhone users are unlikely to switch to Android phones. This is the type of loyalty that you cannot buy. Since just 20% of loyal customers bring in about 80% of your entire profit, this is the key component to the success and growth of your enterprise.
Just remember that a community will disband without continuous re-engagement. This is why you need a regular stream of new relevant content. You can foster this type of engagement through great content marketing for years to come.
Even beyond that, through great content, you can educate your customers and give them the tools to help themselves. Just think about the last few technical issues you had. Did you immediately contact customer service, or did you try to look for solutions online? Where did you look for the answer if the latter was the case? Chances are that you look up forums, subreddits, and the comment section. The value of an educated community should not be taken for granted.
#3 Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand recognition revolves around people recognizing your brand markers, while brand awareness involves them knowing a thing or two about your brand. Now, there are a few ways this can be done:
They can get to know you using your services or products if you’re an enterprise.
If you’re an organization or a blog/vlog, the only way to get to know you is through your content.
By ensuring that the content is of high quality, you’ll increase a high engagement rate. For instance, leaving markers suggesting how long it takes to read a piece of content and making it skimmable increases the chance that people will go through it. By writing a compelling introduction, you’ll increase the chance that they’ll read the entirety of the content (after all, seven out of ten people read only headlines).
You’re not always looking to sell something; even if you are writing a promotional piece, you want to convince people to buy. This means that you need to display great logical consistency throughout the article. People consume content to be either:
- Informed
- Entertained
- Educated
Your ability to do all three things heavily depends on presenting your ideas in the best light possible.
#4 Great For SEO
The next thing you need to understand is the importance of great content for SEO. Regardless of the algorithm changes, quality content always reigns supreme.
- Great content increases the CTR. The engagement with the content is much greater when it is well-structured, informative, and eloquently written.
- If people pause to read the content (which is the case with quality content), the average retention time will be much longer.
- People are likelier to share quality-written, well-researched, and well-structured content. In other words, the reach of your content will drastically increase.
- If they like your content, people are more likely to return to it, and it’s worth mentioning that return rate also factors in as an important SEO metric.
- Quality content is more likely to generate many backlinks. If you update it occasionally, you’ll have a much easier job growing your rank.
Keep in mind that Google is not necessarily hating AI-written content. What Google sanctions is the fact that these articles have no new information (it’s all just recycled content). Original, well-written content is probably the most change-resilient investment you can make. This way, your rank will remain unphased no matter how the algorithm changes.
#5 Incredibly Cost-Effective
A major benefit of content marketing is that it’s incredibly cost-effective. You produce it once, and it’s there forever. If it’s quality, it can produce backlinks and internal links for years. Sure, for this, it would have to be evergreen, but even if it’s related to a current topic, there are ways to get ahead of things.
- For instance, you could update the numbers regularly to get the latest statistic.
- Then, you could recycle old content and turn it into a different format. For instance, you could turn a blog post into an infographic or conclusions from a podcast episode into a blog post. Since producing content takes time and research, it seems wasteful to just let a good topic slide. Just ensure you also have a great site architecture so that finding all these subsequent posts is effortless.
- You can also use an old post for a historic comparison. For instance, if you do a stat page for 2018, you can use it as a comparison tool to show major industry changes and trends over time.
In the end, what’s an evergreen piece of content? Imagine reviewing a finished product (movie, game, etc.). Even in ten years, if people still use it, your content will still be relevant and generate traffic.
In other words, content marketing perpetually creates benefits.
#6 Lead Generation And Conversions Are Greater
Identifying your audience is just one piece of the puzzle. The thing is that this audience usually needs to be guided toward becoming paying customers. The rule of seven indicates that to become a paying customer, a person needs to interact with your brand on at least seven different occasions.
You must identify your audience and then bombard them with your content until they make this leap.
The key thing to understand here is the buyer’s journey. How do they learn of you? How do they become interested in what you have to offer? What are some of their earliest concerns? How do they muster the courage to proceed to the next step?
To help you understand this, here are the steps on the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
The most important part of the equation is that you can produce content for each stage. Producing content in subsequent episodes (parts, playlists, etc.) can be quite effective and may ensure a steady flow of regular customers.
Through content, you can help buyers:
- Recognize problems
- Compare and differentiate
- Reduce risks
- Reinforce their decisions
Just remember that for all of this to hold, content creation and curation need to be in the hands of someone who understands the subject matter.
Wrapping Up
Great content takes quite a bit to produce, but once it’s out there, it lives a life of its own. People will replicate, reference, and even try to steal it. All of this increases your reach and relevance in the digital world. Well-written content will get traffic and generate backlinks years into its existence. This is why, when done right, content marketing continues creating perpetuity benefits. This is why investing in quality and taking your time to produce decent content is always worth your time.
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