What is Content Marketing and Why is it Important for Businesses?

Nicholas Amundson

June 30, 2021
9 min read

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Have you googled “what is content marketing” and found lightweight fluff. Or, worse, ultimate guides with so much information. Reading them seems like having a drink from a water hose. If that’s the case, this easy primer is what you’re looking for.

What do you think about this?

A marketing channel that.

It stands the test of time. It's something you can do for years without the channel falling out of style. Or your work is becoming ineffective.
It produces a favorable compounding return on investment that improves with time. You invest $100, and by the third year, it has grown to $10,000.
It assists you in attracting, converting, and retaining customers. It does double-duty and triple-duty without taking triple the work or investment.

All you can do is only one thing with one skill.

It’s content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing channel that increases user engagement by consistently producing and distributing digital content.

From individual consultants and small business owners to large media and eCommerce businesses. All different types of businesses use content marketing.

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

Most marketing professionals new to content marketing will post a few blogs and analyze their success for a few weeks. And then worry when Google Analytics tells them that they did not make any sales.

“We did content marketing, and it didn’t seem to work.” They’ll argue before moving onto another platform to get success.

Unfortunately, they did not give content marketing a fair shot.

Content Marketing Serves as the Driving Force Behind All Other Marketing Efforts

The large majority of content-driven sales will not be “final touch” conversions. Because content marketing is hardly offered for sales, it continues to drive.

Although, without content marketing, you wouldn’t be retargeting on Facebook or LinkedIn. With the advertising that drove you to subscribe to their email list.

To put it another way:

A customer’s initial engagement with you is through a content marketing campaign.

How does Content Marketing Helps Business? / Content Marketing Benefits

Content marketing is one of the effective marketing channels open to digital marketers.

Still, it is one of the best channels with the most far-reaching benefits since it allows several other channels to become more effective.

A well-functioning content marketing strategy can help all stages of the marketing funnel.

Here’s how it works:

1. Drives Sales Conversions

Like any marketing channel, the primary goal of content marketing is to increase sales and conversions.

Some of your content is towards the bottom of the marketing funnel. Like sales pages and landing pages, it will generate direct conversions.

Even yet, most content attracts users at the awareness and interest stages of the funnel. And it helps in driving sales.

2. Boosts Website Traffic

With a few exceptions, you cannot convert individuals who have never come to your site.

Skilled marketers use content marketing to drive traffic to the site. And build relationships with their target customers.

The best part about content marketing is that the traffic it generates is most targeted and qualified.

You provide valuable content that is relevant to your products. Or services, and your website visitors are searching for them. People are more likely to be warm leads.

The warmer the lead, the more likely it is to convert into a new customer.

3. Improves Brand Awareness

Assume you’re starting a new yoga mat brand from scratch. You have no customers, no traffic, no brand reputation, and nobody has any idea who you are.

But then you start publishing high-quality content consistently.

Your target audience and clients will begin to recognize your company brand. At the same time, they are searching for related content.

On YouTube, the video related to morning yoga video content you developed is popping up when they’re searching for any yoga video guides.

On the Search engine, the content you created about the different poses and the benefits. And the types of yoga come into focus in their search queries.

They begin to notice your brand due to the infographic you created and shared on social media.

As you develop and post more relevant content. Your target audience will start to see your brand everywhere, and that’s how you can build your brand awareness.

It’s because content marketing is useful in increasing brand awareness on the internet.

A staggering 81 percent of survey respondents in a recent CMI study acknowledged this. The complete effectiveness of content marketing in growing brand awareness.

In a nutshell, content is everything, and content marketing works.

4. Enables Other Marketing Channels

A good content marketing strategy may ease your work. And generate a return on investment for many other marketing channels since content marketing generates traffic and brand awareness.

For example, if you attract visitors to your website with useful, valuable content, you may get their email and activate your email marketing campaign.

Suppose you don’t get their email address. You might even be able to retarget them with a social media marketing or PPC ad. And bringing them back to your website to convert over time.

5. Acts as a Backlink Magnet

Backlinks, whether real or not, are still seen as the holy grail of digital marketing.

“We’d be able to rank for any of these search terms. We have higher domain authority and become more trustworthy if we had more backlinks.”

“If we could have more backlinks. We’d be able to attract more partners, affiliates, and influencers.”

Although the term “link building” is not used as a verb, it’s not something you should go out and do.

Anyway, sites that are eager to link to your content when you approach them. And you requested them to. Or in exchange for a monetary incentive or reciprocal action. You are unlikely to be the type of site you want links from.

Some of those who write for or run the websites from which you want links, like news organizations, prominent bloggers, and influencers.

You will only link to the best, most relevant content as they don’t want to lose the audience’s attention on something else.

When you publish the best content online on a particular topic, and you’re building a backlink magnet, backlinks will start coming to you. You won’t get to go looking for them.

6. Builds Your Email List

Apart from content marketing. Email marketing is generally renowned for providing one of the highest ROI.

It’s also fair.

An individual who wanted to hear from you enough to give you their email is more likely to convert than anyone else.

Content marketing gives enough opportunity not only to create quality traffic. But it’s also a good way to get them to sign up for your email list.

How Many Content Marketing Types Are There?

When people think about content marketing, then they are writing content, such as blog posts. Although, this is the most well-known type of content. Other ways can provide audio, visual, written, and video.

1. Written Content

Written content is the most well-known type of content. That you are consuming while reading this article. It includes the following:

Written content is the most preferred type of content, and it allows businesses to target specific keywords. So, it can appear on the first page of google search results for that search query.

For example, the Guitar World website offers electric guitars. It ranks first in Google for the used search term “best guitar for kids”.

This likely drives a large amount of traffic.

It will happen someday. Google is smart enough to identify these keywords from the indexing data. Thus, when developing an effective content creation strategy. Most content marketers begin with written content. It aims to encourage new ideas, experiment with new blog promotion tactics, and increase your blog traffic.

2. Audio Content

We all listen to our favorite audio content while driving on our way to and from work. While workout in the gym or while cooking in the kitchen.

Here are some examples of audio content:

If you’re a regular podcast listener, you experience that you know the episode host personally.

That’s because it’s difficult not to get friends with someone when you hear their voice. That discussing something important to you every day!

You may engage with your audience more by using audio content.

To increase rank for relevant keywords. Many marketers support their audio content with written content, like a blog post or transcript.

3. Video Content

When you think about search engines, you usually think of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

But, believe it or not, YouTube is one of the world’s largest search engines. You consume video content every time you watch something online. There is video content available on:

YouTube
Facebook (Facebook Watch, Facebook Live)
TikTok
Instagram (IGTV, Live videos, Instagram Story, and feed videos)
Recorded webinars
Digital course platform

Video content can be effective in educating, promoting, and increasing brand awareness.

4. Visual Content

Visual content marketing is another popular type of content marketing.

Here, we have listed a few Visual content marketing types as an example are:

Marketers are creating High-quality visual data to support and boost writing. Or video content. But it is also consumed and worked alone.

Content Marketing is a Marketing Force Multiplier

When it comes to marketing, high-quality content marketing is like sharpening an axe. It improves the effectiveness of all your other marketing efforts.

It is long-term, sustainable, and strategic. It offers an impressive return on investment. And it’s organic, and it’s one of the few marketing platforms where you don’t have to “pay to play.”

Take Away

If you want to increase traffic, improve brand awareness. Want to grow your email list as well and generate sales? It would help if you started developing a solid content marketing strategy right away.