Social media is as prevalent as ever and more diversified, so whether you’re choosing video or text content, generating content has many benefits.
Here’s some reasons why content marketing is important:
It keeps your business visible
Whether on your website blog, email newsletters or on social media, keeping up with good quality content is essential to keeping your business front of mind for your clients.
Your audience has tangible brand touchpoints to reference and learn from, so keeping them consistent is key here.
As world-leading marketer Marcus Sheridan outlines, 80% of a prospects decision to buy is decided before they engage with you, and the chances are it will be your content that has led them to that point.
It builds trust and demonstrates expertise
When a business invests in your services, they need to be sure they can trust that you’ll deliver, and that they’ve chosen the right partner.
Regular, useful content will cement that trust and show that you’re invested in progressive business and supporting your clients.
And if you’re able to reference ideas and further explanation from your own website in your proposals or sales journeys, it proves you’re the expert in your field.
You’ll win more business
Following the ‘do I know you, do I like you, do I trust you’ buying psychology, prospects will read content on social media or Google ads, follow through to more content on your website, and either stay to read more, or contact you there and then.
Having good content in place ensures you keep prospects interested in your business and reassured in your ability.
It reinforces your brand
In very crowded marketplaces, it’s important to make sure your brand has a unique voice, and your content is the perfect vehicle for this. Consider bucking the trend if you’re brave – why can’t accountants be entertaining as well as diligent with your business finances?
When you look at how award winning brands have been successful, tone of voice and clever copywriting plays a huge part.
- Innocent have a minimal, very friendly approach to reference their ethos in business.
- Nike portray cutting edge apparel for winners.
- Apple have even become a category owner in their unique style of product copywriting, and are copied the world over.
Most successful brands will have invested a lot into messaging and brand style and its undoubtedly been a huge factor in getting them where they are today.
It helps your search engine (SEO) rankings
This is a big one – organic rankings are driven by original content on your website, and the best thing is that it’s evergreen and works harder for you over time, without you having to do anything after you’ve published your content.
Leading WordPress Analytics platform MonsterInsights has positioned high quality content as the number one ranking factor in 2022 so it’s worth paying attention to.
The criteria they outline is:
- It must be original – don’t just copy and paste snippets from other articles, or use the same headlines – reinterpret and add your own brand spin on it.
- It must be valuable – make sure it will benefit your audience and keep them engaged enough to read more
- It’s up to date – the world changes at an alarming rate so make sure you’re not behind!
- It’s of a substantial length – hotly debated, but long-form content is still important for SEO, and MonsterInsights suggest around 1900 words is what to aim for. Whilst this is the ideal, aiming for at least 900 will put you in a good position to build on in future
It all plays a part in the bigger picture for your overall business marketing strategy.
It helps you utilise all marketing channels
There’s nothing worse than seeing huge gaps in your business blog or social media channels. Consistent content marketing demonstrates consistency in business, and gives you the platform to drive it all from.
Start with understanding what your clients pain points are, and what they need to succeed that your business expertise can help them with.
This can then inform your messaging, give you something meaningful to talk about on social media and drive prospects back to your website.
It helps engage your team and yourself in your business
As Marcus Sheridan discovered when he came up with, and made ‘They Ask, You Answer’ the business mantra, it delivered phenomenal results and positioned the business as world leaders in their field.
But core to that approach was involving the whole team to contribute.
- It made Marcus really get under the skin of what the business did, and problems they could solve for their customers.
- It got the team more engaged in not just what they were doing it, but why they were doing it
They discovered that it helped the overall business succeed, not just the marketing. Of course, not everyone in your team (if any!) will be a professional copywriter, but writing about what you know and believe in can come very naturally.
And even if your team contribute the bullet points of topics to cover, it can help them engage more and be proud they are contributing more than ‘just their job’.
Your clients become your brand ambassadors
This is truly magic – if your clients are engaging with and sharing your content, they are in effect becoming external members of your sales and marketing team.
People like to buy from recommendations, and if your clients are supporting your content, the recommendations are passive, and therefore more empowering.
Tag a colleague or client in your social media posts if it’s relevant to them, and watch it start to happen.
It builds longevity in your business
As we mentioned earlier, regular good quality content builds up your rankings over time, and gives your business a wealth of information and resources to draw from. Showing your prospects years worth of useful information is invaluable and as this content all embeds in Google, it can boost domain authority in the long term.