Why use content marketing?

Does content marketing seem like a lot of work? Are you wondering if you’ll get the results you want from it? If you’re asking yourself ‘why use content marketing?’ then read on!

First of all, let’s look at exactly what the term means. Content marketing is publishing e-books, videos, articles, images and any other type of content online to market a business or product.

There are a couple of problems, though. Much of the content marketing advice you’ll read online comes from digital marketing agencies and it’s overwhelming for a small business that doesn’t have an in-house marketing team. How are you supposed to pump out all those videos and e-books when you’ve got customers to keep happy? Then, when small businesses do try content marketing, often they create a PDF and then tweet a little and post it on theirFacebook page a few times. This isn’t enough, which means they don’t get the results they expected and – understandably – feel despondent about the whole idea of content marketing.

Yet there are many great reasons why you should be marketing with content. Let’s look at the main ones:

Content brings you traffic

You need content to encourage visitors to your website, for example a Facebook page post or an Instagram image. Then you need content to let them get to know, like and trust you, such as blog posts, images and videos. And if they like what you create they’ll come back for more.

You need content for SEO

These days, search engine optimization has to start with quality content. True, you still need some keywords and backlinks to your site to do well in Google searches, but the days when just keywords and backlinks worked are long gone.

You also need content for for lead generation

Once you’ve captured attention with your content you’ll need more of it to generate leads. You can do this by exchanging a useful checklist or guide (yes, this is content too!) for your visitors’ email addresses.

Content builds trust

There are millions of websites out there, why should anyone buy from yours? You need to make a connection with your visitors, to show you understand them and can be trusted to deliver exactly what they need. Guess how you do that? Yes, with content.

…and it helps grow your brand

If your content has a consistent message that’s congruent with the rest of your business then your content will tell the world about what you do, how and why. In other words, content marketing grows your brand.

Content even helps you to sell

There is an art to writing product descriptions and articles that sell. But to make your sales content work at its best you’ll need to deliver it to your prospect when they are 100% ready to buy. How do you know when that is? If you’ve been nurturing and tracking their progress using content marketing, then you’ll have all the information you need.

As you can see, content marketing can bring you a stream of traffic, leads and even sales. But you must have a solid strategy and track your results carefully.

If you have clients who need help with content marketing, take a look at my done-for-you Content Marketing for Small Business course.

It’s a complete video course with source files, videos, worksheets, cover images and transcripts – just upload it to your training platform or membership site and you’re good to go.