10 (REAL) Benefits Of Content Marketing

Content marketing for small business (or any business really) is a great equalizer.

You might not be able to match the big advertising budgets of larger corporations, but you can still create content people want to read. Content marketing is something that requires time and expertise, and you can’t just throw money at it.

If you haven’t invested in it before, now is the time to do it.

It might seem like a daunting thing to try, but the long-term benefits of content marketing can be huge. It’s important to know that it is not just a temporary fad — content marketing has been one of the pillars for digital marketing for years.

It’s not going away, and it’s time for you to get on board. Still not convinced?

Here are the 10 REAL content marketing benefits.

10 Benefits of Content Marketing for SEOs (and Clients)

If you’ve ever asked “why is content marketing important?”, here’s a list that will answer your (or your clients) questions.

The benefits of producing content is the same for small businesses and big corporations, B2C and B2B businesses, and so on.

Let’s go.

1. More on-site content

The first benefit is self-serving.

When you execute a content marketing strategy, you wind up with more high-quality content on your website.

This is important because everyone likes more (good) content. For SEO, Google really likes content. The more content you have, the better it understands the topical relevance of your website.

Your audience of potential customers also really likes seeing more content on your website. With more content on your website, you will see the following benefits from your audience:

• They become more familiar with who you are as a business and a brand.
• They will come to trust your authority in your niche.
• They will stay on your website and on each page for longer.
• They are more likely to submit a lead, book an appointment, or buy a product.

But you don’t just have more content, you also have more high quality content. This helps engage with your audience more and lead to a higher conversion rate.

It will also help your content rank higher in Google searches.

Source: https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/why-is-content-marketing-important/

2. Improve keyword rankings

When you execute an effective content marketing campaign, you also improve the keyword rankings of your website.

This helps you increase your visibility in search results. Your website appears in more searches as you cover more keywords. You also appear higher in searches for important keywords.

When you do your research right, you will also specifically improve your keyword rankings for searches that drive results. That means improving the visibility of your product and service pages, so you generate more sales and leads.

3. Builds authority & credibility

Improving the quality and quantity of content on your website also helps establish credibility.

Having lots of good quality content convinces your audience and search engines that you are an authority in your field. This helps with a few things relating to authority and credibility:

• You earn backlinks and improve your website’s domain authority
• You get more people trusting in your business
• You earn topical authority in your niche among customers and peers

In order to reap these benefits, you really do need to focus on having lots of very good content.

You need to mix it up with different types of content to appeal to a broader audience. You also need to cover your business’ main topics of content comprehensively.

That’s where a hub and spoke model works well.

Take a look at how many of the top factors for domain authority are related to content:

Source: https://data-flair.training/blogs/domain-authority/

4. Builds brand awareness

One of the main goals for content marketing is to increase the amount of people who are aware of your business.

That doesn’t just mean the name of your business, it means the identity of your business: who you are, what you do, what you stand for, etc.

Think about this statistic:

91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to promote brand awareness.

Source: https://www.lucidpress.com/blog/25-branding-stats-facts

When more people find your content, they understand the scope of what your brand does.

They come to trust your expertise on matters relating to your field. You earn a reputation as an expert, so when they have a question or a need relating to your niche they come to you first.

5. Creates assets (with compounding value)

This is arguably the biggest benefit of content marketing.

When you generate more content you create tons of new assets that you can reuse and repurpose in the future. This is not only very cost-effective, but it also has compounding ROI.

The more you do it, the better the results you can get.

And that can be more rankings, more conversions or collecting more backlinks.

Part of this is related to the reduced costs.

Content marketing costs a lot less than paid advertising. The biggest cost is investing in the process and tools you use to create new content. After that, you have all the assets to use again, which further reduces marketing costs.

The long-term benefits for content marketing is potentially enormous.

6. More referral traffic.

Content marketing helps you earn more traffic to your website, in a variety of ways.

If you follow every strategy of content marketing, you will use things like guest publishing and social media promotion. This is in addition to creating content on your own website.

This means you will get more traffic from the following:

• Organic searches due to
• Referral traffic from people clicking on your guest post links or looking you up
• More traffic from social media posts, and followers who click on future posts

But how much traffic can you get? It will depend on a number of factors, but here’s one study that showed how much more referral and organic traffic you can generate:

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-increase-referral-traffic-to-your-site-by-77-in-90-days/ 

7. More conversions

In the end, all you want from your marketing is to drive results.

You want sales, you want appointments, you want leads. Content marketing has huge potential for generating more conversions. Not only that, it can be more cost efficient than any other strategy.

Content marketing can be the best way to get people into your conversion funnel.

Source: https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/content-marketing-funnel

But there are a couple of if’s:

• If more people trust you, they’re more likely to become a customer.
• If you improve your keyword rankings and domain authority, you will appear higher and in more search results.
• If you have high quality content, your pages will lead to a higher conversion rate.

8. Better customer relationships

A big benefit of improving the trust people have in your brand is building better relationships with your customers.

You can:

• Answer recurring customer questions with FAQ content
• Use conversational marketing tactics to engage with visitors
• Show off your product, services or expertise
• Simply show customers your business exists.
• Utilize customer relationship automation.

You won’t just convince someone to become a customer just the one time. It comes back to the customer journey:

Source: https://www.vendasta.com/blog/following-modern-customer-journey

You can ensure greater brand loyalty so they come back to you again and again. Your content continually ensures that they trust you. They will learn everything they need to know, and they will trust you more than your competitors.

The goal is to have them see you as their main source of information relating to your niche.

9. Supports other marketing and customer service

One very underrated benefit of content marketing is how much it helps your other teams.

It helps answer questions that your customers have before they reach out to your customer service team. It also gives them information to access if they need to look something up as a reference.

Just remember: 89% of customers have switched to a competitor following a bad customer experience. 

Source: https://financesonline.com/45-key-customer-support-statistics-analysis-of-trends-data-and-market-share/

Content marketing done right can support the rest of your marketing team. You get more leads to use for all your marketing efforts, be it email, social media, or traditional marketing. It gives your sales team more leads and loyal customers to work with.

10. Less annoying than traditional marketing

One of the most annoying parts of marketing is being invasive.

Kinda like this:

Most people will not react positively to a direct mail in their mailbox, or a newspaper ad taking up a half or full page. They don’t like banners or pop ups that follow them online either.

What they do like is being able to do their own research. Even people who are hostile to paid advertising will be able to find your business in their own time with content marketing.

This is another way people will trust your business more.

Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/shopping-research-before-purchase-statistics/

Sidenote: 6 Disadvantages of content marketing

However, despite all of the benefits listed above there are some disadvantages to it as a marketing strategy. And in fact, it may not be everyone, or at least it may not be the right time to start pumping out content.

Disadvantages of content marketing include the following:

1. It can seem complicated with a high learning curve — there is a higher barrier to entry for it compared to other marketing strategies.
2. It can be time-consuming and expensive — it requires a lot of time over the long-term and can be expensive if not done right.
3. You need a diverse set of skills — you need a team of copywriters, SEO specialists, graphic designers, social media managers, and more. 
4. It can be hard to attribute results — if you want to report on results, it can be difficult to know what is a regular organic lead and what came from your new content.
5. It can be difficult to manage effectively — you need a lot of expertise in multiple areas to execute a campaign properly.
6. Content marketing tools are expensive — there are a lot of content marketing tools to make various tasks easier, but the costs can add up.

While all of this can make it seem daunting, it’s important to keep everything in perspective.

There are similar disadvantages to other marketing strategies as well, but content marketing offers much greater long-term benefits and opportunities.

Summary

In the end, content marketing is relatively inexpensive compared to other strategies. It may take a bigger investment in time, but it also has much longer lasting results. With any paid advertising, you only generate results as long as you keep paying to run ads.

But with content marketing, when you do it right you will continuously reap all of the benefits listed above for a long, long time. No matter what your ultimate goal is, content marketing can help drive better results.