Content marketing is a branch of digital marketing. In this type of marketing, various types of content (such as blogs) are used to attract customers, spark their interest in your brand and then retain that interest.
The goal is to gather a loyal following of customers who can regularly spend money on your products or services.
Content marketing is good for achieving this goal due to several benefits. Digital marketing costs less than traditional marketing where overhead costs and limited advertising space can result in large expenses.
Digital marketing costs approximately 62% less than traditional marketing. Content published on the internet stays up indefinitely and continues to generate leads over a long period of time.
Some Reasons Why Content is Important for Content Marketing
Now, we will look at some reasons why the content used in marketing is important. It can provide a lot of benefits and you can read on to learn about them.
- Content can Help Define Your Brand
Content marketing aims to inform the public about the services and products offered by your brand. It lets them know what you are offering and how it can be beneficial to them. That’s what it means to define a brand.
The first thing potential customers do before they are ready to invest in a brand is to garner information about it. They want to learn what is being offered, and how they can take advantage of it.
In content marketing, people are educated via blog posts, product descriptions, and tutorials. These posts, descriptions, and tutorials are supposed to be helpful to potential customers and provide them with the information they need.
When people become sufficiently knowledgeable about your brand, then they can make the decision to invest in it.
The transparency that content provides also makes it easier for people to interact with your brand. Transparency means that there is no attempt at hiding information. If people are unaware of your policies, or how your products work, they will be confused, unhappy, and very unlikely to interact with your brand in the future.
By addressing these concerns, content helps you to provide a brand image that is positive and attractive to your potential customers.
- Readable Content Can Help SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is the act of boosting a website’s visibility on the SERPs (search engine results pages). It is very dependent on the content of a site.
Search engines look for certain behaviors that visitors show when they visit a site. These behaviors are measured through specific metrics. Some of the important metrics are:
- Dwell time: the amount of time a visitor spent on a page.
- Bounce rate: rate of how many visitors leave the site from the landing page.
If a visitor feels that the content is difficult to understand, then they will leave the site. This increases the bounce rate and reduces the dwell time. This signals to search engines that the content is not good and as a result, the SERPs ranking of the site falls.
However, when the content is readable, visitors tend to stay for longer and read it. This reduces the bounce rate and increases the dwell time, which signals to search engines that the content is useful to the visitors. As a result, the SERPs ranking rises and website visibility is boosted, and ultimately, more organic traffic is generated.
Content readability can be improved easily by paraphrasing. As a writer, you can simply rephrase online any part of your text that is difficult or confusing to read.
Online rephrasers are tools that can paraphrase any text in various ways. They often come with various modes, which you can choose from as per your need and requirements.
- Concise Content Can Improve Customer Engagement
By this point, you already know that content is supposed to educate potential customers and that it needs to be easy to read as well. But there is one more hurdle here. People are not very willing to read large articles or posts. They want to learn what they need quickly.
That’s why concise content is required. If you can summarize a large post into a shorter one, then potential customers will be more likely to read all of it. Naturally, this improves customer engagement since more people will read the content from start to finish.
If you feel that your content will lose some of its quality if it is shortened, then you can try two things:
- Add a “synopsis” or “key takeaways” section at the beginning of the article. This section should practically provide a summary of the entire article.
- Add a conclusion that summarizes the post and provide a link to the conclusion in the beginning.
To summarize text, writers can simply utilize an online text summarizer. These are online tools that can automatically judge which parts of the text are the most important and then extracts them to create a summary.
Obviously, summaries can be created manually, but in the marketing industry, saving time is quite important. That’s why text summarizers are utilized as they can create good summaries in mere seconds.
- Regular Content Fosters Brand Loyalty
Good content helps with SEO, it helps with the brand image, and it improves customer engagement. But good content that is published regularly does one additional thing; it creates brand loyalty in the readers.
People like to consume a steady stream of content from brands they like. If a brand is unable to provide content regularly, then it makes its readers lose interest.
A consistent content stream keeps your regular viewers happy, and happy readers tend to be loyalists.
They start referring the brand to their friends and family. If they find a service or a product that they cannot utilize themselves, but they know someone else who can, they tell them about it.
This kind of behavior is due to fostering brand loyalty. Loyalty is created when you display a positive brand image, create transparency, and provide a steady stream of valuable content to your customers.
Conclusion
In this article, we saw how good content helps in marketing. In summation, content allows brands to control their brand image, educate their readers about their products/services, improve SEO and customer engagement, and finally, create loyalty in the customers.
These are all important outcomes with respect to digital marketing. All of these outcomes ultimately result in positive exposure for the brand and a satisfied customer base. These are the two things that any business needs to thrive and with great content, both of them can be acquired.