You must have heard content is the King. Earlier content marketing was used to be a way to set your business apart from your competitors, now it has become a crucial aspect of any modern brand. The critical difference between traditional marketing and content marketing is that content marketing stimulates interest in your brand, company, or products as compared to explicitly promoting a specific service or product.
This inbound marketing technique helps you engage, attract, and delight existing as well as prospective customers by delivering quality content that offers value for everyone who comes across your website. This is especially beneficial for those who have just started up.
Content marketing is amongst the most practical, useful, and effective digital marketing strategies that your startup business can use to engage and reach more quality customers and leads.
Before promoting the content, you need to form it. And there are several ways that organizations can distribute content to engage the attention of people they think will be interested in. These ways are:
Social Media Uploads
People are always sharing links to blog posts, articles, videos, and other media that interest them with their friends and family members. The higher the quality of the blog post, the greater are the chances that it will create sparks in the readers and end up getting viral.
The people who visit your website to read blogs might get influenced to buy services or products that you are offering, and eventually end up being your customers.
Blog Posts
A blog is a place where you can regularly post your articles that are either of your interest or related to the product or service you are selling. Content marketing by forming interesting, compelling articles and updating them on a blog is a great way to use social media to grow your business.
There are other additional benefits like trust, branding, traffic, SEO or search engine optimization, etc.
Making and Posting Video Content
The world of content marketing is dynamic and currently, only blogging is not the solution. You can create videos as well. Videos are extremely powerful because it engages the viewer more than a blog does.
E-books
If you are an expert in a particular field, you can even think about forming an ebook on that subject. It should have material of intense interest to the audience since it will have to keep their interest longer than several minute long video or a short blog post.
It can be offered as a freebie where people sign up for your business’ newsletter, which lets you link more traditional ways of email advertising to your content marketing efforts.
How Content Marketing Can Boost Your Start-Up In The Right Direction
1. Improves Brand Reputation
Amongst the greatest benefits that truly shows the need for content marketing is its reputation building qualities of strong content. In today’s busy digital market area, it is important that startups build trust with their customers and leads. Building trust can aid your business in establishing a positive brand reputation.
This happens as when customers read your content, they begin to develop an opinion of your business. If your content is educational, valuable, and engaging for them, they will consider your brand as more valuable.
2. Content Marketing Drives Conversions
Your company can drive multiple conversions over time. According to research, the companies that form constant marketing content see conversion rates that are almost 6x higher than their competitors who do not focus on content marketing.
This shows that powerful content marketing needs a specific investment of money, time, and resources frequently. However, it eventually pays by bringing more conversions.
3. Effective Content Brings More Traffic
Publishing consistent blog posts that are effective and engaging can aid you in bringing more traffic to your website over time. In fact, as per reports, companies that publish more than sixteen blog posts in a month see 3.5x more traffic than those which publish four or fewer posts.
If you are seeking to improve your website traffic, publishing high-quality blog content more frequently and consistently might help you immensely.
4. Build Trust with Amongst Your Customers
The more you educate and offer value for your target audience, the more trust you can form over time. By informing and educating your target audience about their biggest pains and challenges through blog posts and other types of content, you begin to create a relationship with your prospective audience and work to create trust that relies on the value that your content offers.
If you want to encourage repeat business and wish to turn customers into your brand advocates, it is important that you foster your current customer relationships. The best way to do this is probably continuing to offer value to your customers through engaging, quality content.
Whether you keep your current customers updated through email marketing content or guide them on important topics through your blog posts, you can work to foster and build these relationships with existing customers through relevant content.
5. Valuable Content Helps You Form Authority and Credibility
As you begin to form quality content that offers value for your customers and leads, you work to create authority and credibility with your target audience. For example, writing blogs about common challenges that are faced by your customers or issues that pertain to your business’ industry helps show website visitors that you know your stuff.
This will encourage the visitors to trust your advice and guidance when it comes to services and products that are capable of adding value to their lives. Valuable content may help you leverage all of the advantages of content marketing.
6. Your Business Can Be Industry Expert
By employing engaging content to form authority and credibility within your customer base, you can begin to position your brand as an industry expert. Consumers seek thought leaders in the industry to attain relevant information that aids them in understanding their challenges and needs in a better way.
By making quality content that is considered valuable by others, you can begin to position your business as the industry thought leader that others consider for support and guidance.
7. Quicker Purchasing Decision
Every customer goes through several stages before they make the final purchase. First, they are supposed to recognize their challenge, then they are required to identify as well as evaluate potential solutions.
And finally, they will arrive at a purchasing decision based on their research. By offering content that engages customers during every step of the journey of the buyers, you can guide them to make a purchasing decision more quickly.
8. Blogs Continue to Generate Traffic for a Longer Time
Blogs are similar to the gifts that keep on giving. According to HubSpot, out of ten blogs, one is compounding, which means that such a blog helps increase website traffic via organic search over time. What is more that though the compounding blog posts only form 10% of entire blog posts, they are still responsible for 38% of all traffic.
The key to fabricating blog posts that continue to attract organic traffic to your website after they are published is to highlight the topics that will always be relevant to your target audience. This is what is called evergreen content, and it can aid you in getting the most from your blogging efforts.
9. Your Website Visitors Will Stick Longer
Your company has a small amount of time to interact with the consumers after they have landed on your website. Because a human’s attention span is very little, creating compelling content is extremely necessary.
The more engaging, quality content that you offer on your website, the more reasons your visitors will have to stick around for longer. Content helps entertain, engage, and educate them so they are able to better understand the value that your brand can offer.
10. Content Helps You Improve SEO and Online Visibility
Many customers turn to search engines when they are seeking a service or product. SEO is a procedure to optimize your website to rank higher on the SERP or search engine results page. The more quality content your website has, the better is your SEO.
Similarly, your website will have better visibility or will rank higher on SERPs if it is optimized for the search engines. For example, if someone looks for the functions of an air compressor on Google, and they locate a blog you have written with the same title, this will bring this interested person to your website to learn more about their query as well as find out how your brand can answer their questions and solve their issues.
11. Targeted Content Lets You Reach a Particular Audience
When it comes to reaching customers online, you need to be selective about who you attract to your business’ website. Not every online customer is interested in your services or products.
Content that is designed with a target audience in mind helps you better reach those customers who will be more interested in your service or products. For example, you would not sell people living in chilly area air conditioners or cooling agents, or school supplies to elderly people.
12. Aids You in Staying Competitive
Content marketing is very effective at engaging, attracting, and delighting your website visitors and consumers. Your customers might forget you if you do not publish content regularly and opt to buy services or products from your competitors who are very active online.
If you wish to remain competitive in the busy online marketplace, you will require to prioritize publishing blog content and other content assets like infographics and e-books.
13. Content is Shareable
One of the most effective ways to increase your visibility online is to get your current customers, brand advocates and leads to share your business with others. Content happens to be highly shareable.
Whether consumers forward your blog post with their friends in personal messages or share your social media posts on their social media, getting your content shared is an effective method to increase visibility in the marketplace.
A startup needs to be present online and shared by numerous people to instantly increase its visibility and awareness amongst prospective customers.
14. Improved Brand Awareness
Content marketing is the easiest way to create brand awareness amongst the online audience. The best way is to publish unique, educating, and engaging content that prompts the readers to share it immediately with their friends and family.
If the content is enticing and engaging, it will attract traffic easily. Moreover, a single viral blog post can bring loads of traffic to your website. This will improve your brand awareness significantly.
15. Stay Apart from Competitors
In the busy online marketplace, it is important for your business to differentiate itself from the competitors. Content marketing is a highly effective way that startups can work to be unique in the industry and why their company is special.
The topics that you form content around as well as the value of the content you offer can be the reason why a customer will choose your brand over your competitor’s. For example, in case a buyer is conducting the research about their challenges and specific products that can aid in solving those challenges, they will be more interested to work with the business that has provided them with helpful information.
16. Suitable for Any Business in Any Industry
You might think that content marketing is not going to work for your industry. However, the reality is that content marketing is a highly effective digital marketing technique for businesses in any industry from customer retail to manufacturing to technology.
The key to success is discovering the right topics and kinds of content that best speak to your unique audiences.
17. More Content Means More Touchpoints with your Customers and Leads
If you do not wish to spend a lot in engaging your audience, try making enticing content for them. Not only it can generate 3x more leads but also costs less than 60% as compared to other outbound marketing techniques.
The more content you have updated on your website and shares on social media and other channels, the more opportunity you have to connect with your target audience. Taking into consideration that most customers will visit your website a few times before transacting and making a purchase, you will want to ensure that you have the chance to engage them and strike a conversation to help guide them down the conversion path.
Content marketing provides you many touchpoints where you can connect and communicate with leads before they purchase.
The Key Takeaway
Startups usually do not like to keep a massive amount of money aside for marketing. The above-mentioned benefits of content marketing are sufficient to start taking this form of marketing seriously.
Content marketing is the easiest and the most cost-effective form of marketing that only requires posting high-quality content consistently. Not only content marketing helps you build stronger relationships with your customers and leads but also boost visibility.
If you really want to benefit from the importance of content marketing in action, it is time to get started on. Google Spider is a kind of popular organization which works to walk the path of success through effective content marketing.