What are the Positive Benefits of Creating a Content Marketing Strategy on an Organisation’s Marketing?
Marketing is about growth. And content marketing is about creating customer focused assets and material that help guide their decision making and ultimately encourage them to choose you.
There are also a wide range of benefits that creating a consistent content marketing strategy has on the effectiveness of an organisation’s marketing.
Here’s five to start with. What else would you add?
1. Content marketing strategy boosts your visibility on the web and your organic search traffic.
Businesses that are searched out, or get found, attract more traffic and give themselves the best chance to convert.
Effective content creation is critical to achieving success organically (without advertising). The best website content involves answering the questions your target searchers are punching into search. Google will reward you with better rankings in its results pages as a result.
Content marketing helps you build third party credibility and all-important backlinks and with a solid keyword strategy embedded in every piece of content you produce, helps improve your appearance on page one.
2. Content marketing strategy builds trust through consistency and expertise sharing.
Google is well known for ranking content based on the EAT acronym. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust and the beauty of adopting a content marketing strategy is that it can pinpoint all three.
Shopify is a brand that has done well in space, optimising content effectively around “ecommerce”. Any kind of search is likely to deliver Shopify in the first results page.
Like many technology brands, Shopify has effectively harnessed content marketing to present its’ platform as “beginner friendly” through targeted evergreen content that addresses customer challenges.
Consistently bringing helpful advice through content can lead to other opportunities for your spokespeople – whether it is online or event presentations, podcasts, panels, ebooks, books and much more.
Check out our Content Marketing Bitesize training here.
3. Content marketing strategy helps a brand stand out.
Another one of the many benefits of content marketing? Brand personality.
Branding is so much more than a logo and colour palette. The most respected and successful brands develop a core set of values that propel them forwards and deeply connect with the customer base. Brand touchpoints then help customers experience those values in a multitude of ways.
There are an infinite number of ways to stand out in a given sector. It might be through a team blog, starting a CEO podcast, crowd-sourcing ideas from the industry, starting communities or running student competitions.
Whatever your goal, align it with your purpose and your audience so it is authentic and it will attract the right people.
4. Content marketing strategy allows you to educate and not just sell.
Through your research, you’ll create a core set of pillars that your content will be focused around. Staying consistent is key. Once this is established, you’ll have a better understanding as to the problems, obstacles and aspirations your customers have and you’ll be able to produce better content.
You then need to think about how to deliver that content. People have less time and need to skim content quickly. If it’s of interest they are then more likely to deep dive later. So, short takes that nurture people into longer form content like guides, ebooks, webinars are going to work best for B2B, whereas fun, engaging, gamified content might work better for B2C.
Check out technologies for benchmark reporting – like Hubspot’s Website Grader or the ScoreApp – to see how technology can be used to bring your content marketing efforts to life. People like to get a score and see how they might be able to improve.
Check out our Customer Centricity Bitesize training here.
5. Content marketing strategy supports lead development and conversion.
Content marketing (and related SEO) are perfect in helping marketers target each of the core stages in marketing and sales conversion – conversion, awareness, consideration, or decision.
It doesn’t matter where your customer is in their journey or what they’re looking for. You can produce the content that addresses their needs at the precise time they would find it most valuable.
Run a Google search for Smart Insights “Content Marketing Matrix” and you’ll get a single page infographic that identifies the best content to use at different stages of the buying journey – for both emotional b2c journeys and more rational b2b journeys.
What do you think? What have we missed?
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