8 minutes
Content marketing has been proven to deliver outstanding success.
Sharing high-quality content is one of the most effective methods of growing audience engagement, developing your brand presence, and driving sales. It is an essential growth method for most businesses.
Why is content marketing so important?
Because it answers the questions of your audience, content marketing is essential. It can help you build trust and connect with your audience. It also improves conversions, connects with customers, and generates leads. Customers expect consistent, high-quality content from their favorite brands in this day and age.
According to the most recent State of Marketing report, content creation is a top priority for 53% of marketers. Content marketing also accounts for 29% of all B2B marketing budgets.
Consistent, high-quality, engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique.
Your business’ success and growth will depend on your brand messaging. Successful brands know how to portray their brand consistently at every customer touchpoint.
Your content must be unique and have a distinct voice and style across all channels. Content consistency builds credibility and trust and strengthens your reputation.
We know that the content you create must be consistent. But why is content marketing so important?
12 benefits of content marketing
1. Quality content marketing builds awareness.
While any marketing strategy can help build brand awareness, content marketing is a different way to do it.
Quality content allows you to show who you are as a business and what your brand represents. It’s more than just name recognition — it’s how well people understand the qualities that make your brand stand out in your industry.
Unlike your revenue-driving content (like ads and even your content in product descriptions), the focal point of your brand’s content marketing should be sharing appealing, valuable, pertinent information about what you have to offer.
Content marketing that drives brand awareness should focus on selling your business values versus trying to sell your products.
Branded content is where you can shine by sharing details about your brand and why people should buy from you.
2. It offers consistent value for your audience — and Google.
When you consistently produce and distribute content, you provide ongoing value to your audience and demonstrate to search engines like Google that your content is fresh, relevant, and valuable. Your search rankings will improve as a result.
The point of good rankings in the search results is to gain as much traffic as possible from organic search. Therefore, the higher a page ranks in search results, the higher the chance a searcher will click on it and increase your traffic.
3. It produces sharable assets for word of mouth.
Word of mouth is still a powerful tool. For example, 93% of consumers reach out to their friends and family for recommendations before purchasing. These recommendations are far more persuasive than those from influencers or celebrities.
Your audience will be more likely to share information if you offer something worthwhile rather than merely promoting a product, which can translate to referral and repeat business for you.
4. Your audience will stay longer.
Content is an asset. It can create positive experiences for potential customers and encourage them to return for more. It is your ticket to capturing the attention of your target audience and sustaining a positive brand image.
5. Your audience will trust you.
Content creation helps you build relationships with your customers. They can ask questions, and you can interact with them. Your audience will trust you more if you provide value and don’t ask for anything in return.
Your brand’s reputation will improve when your content shows up at the right place at the right time with the right audience.
6. You will generate more and better-qualified leads.
Viewing your content makes it more likely that your audience will buy from you in the future. And including calls-to-action (CTAs) in your content can help you generate leads for your sales team.
How can content create leads?
Content is a great way to shepherd users to a landing page if it gives visitors valuable and free information. You can place CTAs anywhere you like: inline, at the bottom of the post, in the hero, or on the side panel. If visitors are delighted with your content, they will be more likely to click on your call-to-action and go to your landing page.
7. Original content increases conversions.
The content you publish influences conversions. It helps you connect with your audience and provides the information they need to make educated purchasing decisions.
Pro tip: if you’re using blog content to bring in traffic, try to use unique images rather than stock photos. Doing so can potentially increase conversions by 35%.
8. Social media will give you more traction.
It’s one thing for you to grow your social media following across all channels. But it’s another to create trending content. You don’t want your business to be a small, unpopular one. Instead, your business can gain traction via social media with quality content.
It’s a nice gesture to tell customers that you are available for any questions, but this doesn’t create engagement. It’s better to show your industry expertise regularly and build your reputation as an expert in your field. Your customers will trust you more if they view you as an industry expert.
Examples include:
- Sharing some industry statistics by creating an infographic
- Creating a how-to guide to move your prospects through your inbound sales funnel
Every piece of valuable and relevant content that you share builds your reputation. It also solidifies you as an expert resource for questions and when it comes time to buy.
10. You’ll nurture relationships.
The best thing about content marketing? It enables you to target specific segments of your audience regardless of their stage in the buying process and help them along the way towards conversion.
You will create loyalty is created as your relationships strengthen. You’ll soon have many brand advocates, which will help you expand your audience and increase brand awareness.
11. You’ll cultivate loyal fans.
People who rave about your content and associate great feelings with your brand are very likely to become brand fans before ever purchasing your product.
It’s true — brand fans can be just as loyal as your current customers. They can also influence the purchase decisions of their friends and family. Potential customers can then see that your business offers value to your existing audience. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways for you to create brand ambassadors.
12. Your content marketing strategy will save you money.
The benefits of content marketing far outweigh the time and money you put into it — it delivers high ROI and generates three times the qualified leads at 62% less cost than traditional marketing approaches.
Compared to traditional marketing and paid advertising, video marketing, or traditional marketing, content is the winner in the long term.
What is content scoring?
Content marketing is essential. But how can you succeed at it?
One way to tell is by evaluating the quality of your content. Content scoring is a great way to do this. You can then use the metrics in your marketing strategy.
Content scoring can help you measure and improve the performance of your content marketing and provide excellent value for your audience.
Content scoring refers to the process of assessing the potential of content and quantifying it by tracking the performance of individual pieces in generating leads and converting them.
Content scoring is a content marketing tool that helps marketers prioritize assets with a greater chance of generating or converting leads.
Content scoring provides a reliable and predictive way to evaluate the engagement potential of individual pieces of content before they are published.
Improving the quality of your content is central to the success of your marketing campaigns.
Your audience will determine the quality of your content by interacting with it (or not) — this will help you better understand their needs and continuously improve so your content resonates effectively. However, improving content is a slow process of iteration. Therefore, you need to frequently analyze your audience’s responses to identify and enhance the essential elements.
How to score your content
Content creators and writers often struggle to determine what content works best for them and their audiences. Scoring your content enables you to objectively measure the process and repeatedly use the same recipe to create similar content.
Here are some ways to score your content.
- Establish scoring criteria. To create a content scoring system, you need to determine the engagement metric that has the most significant impact on your content. Some people may consider page views critical, while others might consider the number of shares on social media as vital.
- Create a campaign. After you have determined which metric is most important to you, create a campaign. Add the content that meets or exceeds your threshold. If you decide that getting 1,000 pageviews is high-performing, include all content assets that match that criteria.
- Monitor content performance. Add content assets that meet your success metric (e.g., 1,000 page views) to your campaign, then monitor your social media metrics to track how each piece of content is performing. This will help you assemble your high-performing assets in one place, so it’s easier to leverage them going forward.
- Find out what works. Once you have separated the high-performing content, you can analyze what makes your content work. Even though it is difficult to quantify, you can identify patterns in your content that you can replicate.
- Rinse and repeat. These patterns change all the time, but this manual process is an excellent way to score your content.
Content scoring can be a laborious process, but it’s a thorough and vital process to implement.
Your brand can set a standard for itself by using content scoring. It will help you understand customer buying cycles and expectations. Once you have identified the best content types for each customer segment, it is easy to replicate your success.
It’s time to start creating consistent content.
A content marketing strategy is one of the most important steps that you can take to help your marketing team. First, audit your content to determine what works best for your business.