More and more businesses are realizing the importance of content creation. Over 85% of all businesses use content marketing, and 93% of the most successful content marketers say that they are extremely committed to their content marketing strategies. Here are six reasons why content creation is so critical for your business and why you should commit to it long-term.
1. It Helps Build Your Brand
Content allows you to build a unique brand. Whether you’re trying to build a personal brand as a motivational speaker or a business brand, content allows you to set your tone of voice and create an online persona. It enables you to connect with your target audience, and it lets them connect with you.
Creating content will also lead to additional exposure. Optimizing your content for SEO allows you to attract new organic traffic. Likewise, when you share your content on social media, you will be able to attract new fans. Some of your followers may even share your content with their own followers and friends.
Exposure is an important part of branding. The more you can get in front of your target audience, even if they don’t immediately make a purchase, the more your brand will be successful. Without organic content, the only way to do this is through costly, continuous advertising.
Good content also leads to more organic backlinks. Local content can lead to more organic local backlinks. Backlinks help increase exposure and improve your branding, especially if the link is coming from a trusted site in your niche. Moreover, having a healthy backlink profile is critical for SEO. For local SEO, both local backlinks and local citations are essential.
2. It Establishes Your Expertise in the Industry
Content allows you to establish your expertise in your niche. Maintaining an informative and updated blog shows your target audience that you know what you’re talking about. Your goal should be to become a go-to authority in your industry – a place people turn to when they want to get information that they know they can trust.
This trust is critical. It will increase your conversion rate, make it more likely for people to recommend you to a friend or share your content, and set you apart from your competitors.
When people see your site appear in the search results, they will be more likely to click on it instead of the others, knowing that they will get quality information. As a result, your rankings may improve, as Google often considers the organic click-through rate as a factor when determining rankings. After all, Google is only trying to give its search engine users information they find relevant.
3. It Generates Leads from Different Channels
A comprehensive content marketing strategy allows you to expand beyond your blog and publish content to different channels. An omnichannel content marketing strategy allows you to get more exposure and generate leads from multiple sources.
However, even if you are only publishing content on your blog, you can still generate leads from other channels. For example, by adding social sharing buttons to your blog posts, you can encourage users to share your content on social media, generating social media traffic and conversions for free. Many WordPress plugins make adding social sharing buttons easy.
So, which channels should you create content on? That depends on your niche, target audience, budget (both time and money), and conversion goals. Starting a blog is most important, as you can then share your blog content on social media. Here are some other channels worth incorporating in your content marketing strategy:
- YouTube
- Medium
YouTube is especially worth considering, as video content can complement your blog very well. You can talk about different topics than what’s on your blog, do live videos, and even embed your YouTube videos in your blog posts. That can help boost engagement and even rankings.
Medium is a blogging platform where you can publish content for free. It promotes trending content to its network of readers, and many Medium blog posts rank well on Google. You can link to your site from your Medium posts. Additionally, you can even import some content from your blog to Medium. Using the import function on Medium will add a tag telling Google to consider your blog as the original source and avoid duplicate indexing.
Finally, don’t forget about email content. An email list allows you to build longer relationships with potential customers. Most people won’t purchase anything when they first land on your blog. That’s why it is important to capture their email addresses, so you can develop the relationships you just started instead of losing them.
4. It Leads to Better Conversion Rates
There’s no doubt about it – content creation will boost your conversion rates. There are many reasons for this.
Content boosts engagement. When you post quality, engaging content on your blog, people will spend more time on your site. They may leave a comment, share your post on social media, or click on links or buttons on your site. The more time people spend on your site, the more of a relationship you can build with them.
Furthermore, small actions lead to larger actions. It might start with a visitor clicking on an inbound link. Eventually, they may sign up for your email list. A few weeks or months down the line, they might make a purchase or sign up for a free trial.
Furthermore, content increases trust, which increases conversions. When people do not trust you, they will feel comfortable giving you their money. When readers can trust your information, they will trust that your products are of good quality and that you provide quality customer support.
While both SEO and PPC boast excellent conversion rates, the advantage of SEO is that it is entirely free. That makes it easier to increase your profits and improve your bottom line. Furthermore, having a quality blog can help increase your conversion rates from paid PPC ads, too, as it increases trust.
5. It Is Good for SEO
Publishing content is good for SEO. Let me rephrase that: Content is critical for SEO. Without content, ranking well will be pretty tough, especially for keywords with any level of competition.
First, the more content you publish, the more keywords you will naturally rank for. You can target 1-3 main keywords per blog post, and you should choose them carefully. Keyword research is important. However, in addition to those main keywords, all content naturally includes LSI keywords that you may rank for without even knowing.
Furthermore, the more content you publish, the better your site will rank overall. Google likes to rank sites that are consistently adding new content. If you go without releasing content for a long time, you risk seeing a drop in ranking across all pages. The more content your site has, the more organic backlinks it will attract, and the higher your Domain Authority score will be.
Lots of quality content can help your homepage rank higher for your main target keyword. It can even help your product pages rank if you are running an ecommerce store.
6. It Complements With Your Other Marketing Efforts
Finally, content complements your other marketing efforts. For example, when running PPC or Facebook ads, you can feature some content from your blog posts in your ad or even send people to your most popular and highest-converting blog post. You can share and syndicate content you publish to your social media channels.
Building backlinks with manual outreach will be a lot easier if you already have quality content worth linking to. If you are creating a premium membership program, you can offer people premium content that only they have access to.
In your blog posts, you can talk about your upcoming product releases, projects, features you are working on, and more. Content allows you to offer better customer service. You can create how-to guides on your blog or FAQ-style blog posts that answer common questions. You can then direct customers to those blog posts to quickly resolve problems, without needing to talk to a customer representative.
Content opens up collaboration opportunities with other bloggers, allowing you to work together on webinars, ebooks, product releases, and more. Content also allows you to build a community of fans who interact with your blog and each other.
Content can even complement print and in-person marketing. You can give out flyers at your shop with QR codes that people can scan to read a blog post about an upcoming event. You can also give out materials with quick links or QR codes at events and presentations.
When advertising on billboards, in newspapers, or even on the radio or TV, you can also use QR codes or shortened links to direct people to your blog.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing should be a big part of your overall digital marketing strategy, as it serves as a foundation for building an online presence and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. Regardless of the industry you are in, it’s crucial to publish varied and informative content consistently. It’s not very expensive, and the results are massive and long-lasting.