Is Content Marketing Part of Your Strategy?

It’s no secret that content creation should be at the heart of any digital marketing strategy. And as a business, you need your content to reach your target audience to turn them into leads and then customers.

That’s exactly what content marketing does - it bridges the gap between your business and your audience.

As one of the most effective ways of boosting audience engagement, increasing brand awareness and attracting new customers, content marketing is a crucial growth method for all kinds of businesses.

Below, let's explore content marketing and the benefits of it for small and medium businesses.

But first, let's start with the basics.

What is Content Marketing?

When you hear about content marketing, you're most likely to think about

• written blogs (just like this one!)
• social media posts
• videos

But these are just a tiny part of content marketing.

In a nutshell, content marketing is a long-term strategy that leverages various formats of content to establish trust between you and your audience, capture their attention, and improve engagement.

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Here are a few stats to show why content marketing is important for your business:

• 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
• 24% of marketers plan to increase their investment in content marketing in 2020.
• Content marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI than those who don't.
• Content marketing generates 3x the leads but costs 62% less than any other digital marketing method.

As a small business, the goal of your marketing efforts is to reach your audience, engage with them to turn them into customers, and build a loyal customer base. One of the best plus cost-effective ways to do that in the present scenario is through content marketing.

But what exactly are the benefits of content marketing for small businesses?

Benefits of Content Marketing For Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Boosts SEO and Website Traffic

This is the most basic thing and anyone who knows about inbound marketing knows that SEO and content work hand in hand. After all, an effective content strategy is the foundation of organic search and the most preferred way of driving traffic to a website.

Is doing only the technical SEO of your website enough? No, it's not. In order to drive traffic through search engines, you need to rank in the search engine results page for multiple queries. And that's why you need to create high-quality content. When you create valuable content that quenches the thirst of your audience.

Moreover, high-quality back-links are another important ranking factor that boosts Google to trust your website. However, you can't expect someone to link to your website unless you have high-quality, data-driven, and valuable content that can help your audience base.

Shows Your Expertise on Specific Niches

When you start creating content for your audience you get a chance to show your expertise on topics that are related to your industry, products, or services.

With the help of in-depth and comprehensive content pieces related to your target market, your business becomes a thought leader in your industry. This in turn makes the website a destination for anyone looking for trustworthy resources about the respective field.

Also, it will help you feed positive word-of-mouth marketing among your target audience segment and will make them your business's biggest promoters.

Encourages Visitors To Return To Your Website

Before people leave your website, you need to provide your visitors with a reason for returning and to keep coming back. Posting regular and fresh content will provide them with this reason.

In the digital space, your website acts as the storefront of your brand and so the more you provide your existing customers with the content of their interest the more you encourage them to buy your products and services.

According to recent stats, posting 16 blogs per month will give you 3.5x more traffic than posting less than 4 blogs/month, and 68% of bloggers who publish daily see strong results.

Although the frequency of your content depends on your time and availability, however, it's advisable to post at least one piece a week.

Provides You Content To Share on Social Media

What will you share on social media if you don't have content? Of course, you can re-share stuff from different platforms but that won't help you to stand out.

So if you have your own original content, you'll be able to schedule and share that content with your audience. And this will give you a chance of engaging with your potential audience.

Moreover, if you want to take your social media marketing and content marketing to the next level, then you can even re-purpose your content to various formats and then share on social media.

Boosts Lead Generation

Providing valuable content to your audience and becoming a trusted source of information is great for your rankings as well as traffic. Also, if you continue to share high-quality content it will help generate leads for your business.

This works even well when you map out your content strategy and start creating content for each stage of the funnel, especially at the top of the funnel.

The right kind of content will help you to attract more visitors and then if you use an attractive lead magnet, you'll be able to generate more leads.

According to a study, businesses who consistently create content for their blog see as many as 126% more leads than the companies without a blog.

Keeps Your Website Fresh and Relevant

When it comes to creating "quality content", it's about context or depth of the content but there's one more thing that matters - freshness of your content.

When a search engine like Google ranks a website on the basis of fresh content, it's based on factors such as-

• When was it posted?
• How often has it been updated?
• Changes to the original content.
• How often has the content been edited?
• The rate of new inbound links.
• Traffic and engagement rate.

When you consistently create content for your small business website, you start to produce an ongoing stream of fresh content along with links to the older ones.

However, it's not just about creating fresh content but also content that is relevant to your audience.

Exposes Your Business to New and Larger Audiences

When you start to share original and fresh content, your audience will also start to share it.

And the more they share the more people you will reach.

Also, if you create content that is evergreen, it will be shared over a long period of time, unlike news pieces that only get shared for a short span of time.

To Conclude

For a small or medium-sized business, creating brand awareness and making sales are major challenges, fortunately, content marketing can solve both of these.

The best part-- it doesn't cost a lot. In fact, it's way more cost-effective than other marketing methods like advertising. All you need to do is, keep creating relevant and quality content and use the right methods to reach your audience, i.e. SEO & social media.

There might be several huge brands creating content relevant to your audience but that doesn't mean there's no space for your brand. You just need to start and the rest will follow.

HubSpot Partner Agency 

As a HubSpot Partner Agency, we can help businesses of all sizes with their content marketing strategy, using the world's best digital sales & marketing software.

Find Out About Our Content Marketing Services