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Not sure if content marketing is right for your business? As one of the few marketing strategies with very little up front cost and the potential for high ROI, I highly encourage you to rethink your stance.
Seth Godin famously said, "Content marketing is the only marketing left," and for good reason. Creating your own content provides your business with a variety of untapped opportunities to increase sales. Whether you publish a few blog posts a week, record a podcast, or film original video, any form of original content helps in turning information-seeking consumers into customers. Here's four reasons why...
1. Content marketing will supplement your current marketing strategy.
For a lot of businesses, content marketing seems far off from what they are currently doing. In actuality, it probably fits right in. Are you already running a PPC campaign? Focusing on SEO? Growing your social media marketing campaign? You probably answered "yes" at least once.
Content marketing complements all three of these marketing strategies. How so? For PPC, it gives you more landing page opportunities. Sometimes a customer may not be in the buying stage of the sales funnel, but they are actively seeking more information. Publishing blog posts that dive into different industry topics can serve as the perfect place to direct these customers to the answers they are seeking--and to your business. Once potential customer lands on your blog post, you can show them advertisem*nts once they leave your site via Adwords Remarketing.
If you've already implemented SEO on your website, you know the importance keywords play in boosting your search rankings. Through a blog, you are able to incorporate more keywords in a search-engine friendly manner that will continue to improve your rankings in an organic and inexpensive way.
Social media is a staple for most businesses, but finding relevant material to share with your audience can be a struggle. By creating your own content, you are able to enhance your social media presence and direct an already interested customer right to your website.
2. Drive targeted traffic to your website.
Content marketing can help you increase visitors to your site through all of the aforementioned channels. Even better, that traffic is high-quality traffic. Studies have shown that content marketing is more effective at obtaining leads than traditional interruption-based messaging. It also proves to have a better rate of converting traffic to leads, actually doubling the average website conversion rate from 6% to 12%. Why? It is because you are connecting with customers at a time when they need information about what you have to offer. Rather than pushing an advertisem*nt on them, you give them helpful content, which creates trust. That trust builds a relationship between your business and the customer. In fact, it could be said that content marketing is the only scalable form of relationship-based marketing.
3. There is very little risk involved.
Whether you run ads on Facebook, launch a PPC campaign, or invest in display ads, it's going to cost you money. There is usually a lot of upfront costs with all of those marketing strategies. Sometimes it takes trial and error until you find the right marketing mix that brings quality traffic to your site through paid ads.
On the flip side, content marketing has very little upfront costs and since you will likely be publishing it on your own website, there is no cost to keep it up and running. Even if one attempt fails or you learn your audience responds to one content marketing channel versus another (e.g. blogs rather than videos) you can make the necessary changes, publish new content, and not lose much in the process.
4. Everyone else is doing it.
Not to go against everything you were taught growing up, but if all of your competitors are leveraging content marketing and you're not you will fall behind. Recent research even backs this up. It has been shown that 88 percent of B2B organizations and 76 percent of B2C companies are leveraging content marketing, in some form or another, to grow their business. Roughly 50 percent of businesses plan to expand their content marketing in the future. If you haven't started yet, how long will it take you to catch up? Don't get left in the dust when it comes to growing your content marketing strategy. Use some of these simple tips to get started.
