Content is at the basis of all types of marketing: social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing and even advertising. In order for a digital marketing campaign to be successful, it first needs great content – content that offers value to your audience and content that gets them to engage with your brand.

Ultimately, content marketing is important for businesses for one simple reason: it helps improve your conversion rates. By offering your audience something of value – i.e., content – you are boosting trust and awareness, improving your online visibility and increasing your conversions and sales.

However, because content marketing is such a complex marketing tactic, with so many different ways to leverage it, it’s difficult to convey all the different benefits of using content marketing in just a few sentences.

Instead, I’ve put together a comprehensive list of all the main reasons why content important is important and all the ways you should use content marketing for your business:

1. Content marketing builds up trust in your brand

One of the biggest challenges that brands face is that consumers simply don’t trust advertising and many traditional marketing tactics.

But in order to get their audience to buy from them, they need to get them to trust their brand.

And that brings us to one of the biggest benefits of a good content marketing strategy: it helps build up trust in your brand.

But how exactly does it do that?

There are actually several reasons behind this.

For one thing, content allows you to offer something of real value to your audience: not just selling to them and promoting your products or services, but actually helping them with a problem or need.

For example, brands like Hubspot and Buffer are masters at this; over the years, they’ve published numerous useful – and free – guides, templates and other useful resources that are highly relevant to their target audience:

By creating all of this valuable content for their audience, they have not only shown them they know what they’re doing, but also that they’re ready to show all that knowledge to their audience as well.

2.  Content helps improve your SEO and online visibility

SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing are very closely tied together: without great content, it’s very difficult to rank for good keywords.

And if you’re not ranking for good keywords, you’re not getting organic traffic – which means you’re losing out on the most important source of online traffic: search engines.

And, of course, without quality traffic coming steadily to your website, you’re likely losing a lot of potential leads.

If you publish new – and high-quality – content consistently, you’re massively improving your chances of ranking for the keywords you want.

That’s because great content also means:

• More backlinks: the better your piece of content is, the more people will link back to it (and link-building continues to be one of the most important SEO tactics)
• More pages to index: the more content you publish, the more pages Google (and other search engines) has to index
• More social shares: the popularity of your content on social media channels can influence your SEO directly; and the better your content is, the more shares you’ll get
• More engagement: likewise, the more people engage with your content (i.e. leaving comments), it will influence your SEO

3.  It helps you generate more traffic

Following up from the previous step, content is one of the most effective ways to get traffic to your website – period.

And the reason for this is simple: it gives people a reason to visit your website.

For one thing, you’ll be more visible on search engines (as mentioned earlier); but it’s not just search engines where you can get traffic.

For example, social media is another top source of online traffic; but, if you want people to click on your links from their social feeds, then you need to give them good content they want to see, whether that’s a blog post, a useful resource, an infographic or a video.

Without good content, it can be extremely difficult to get people to visit  your website – and to stay long enough to be converted into paying customers:

4.  Content keeps people on your site for longer

Getting people to visit your website is not enough. After all, what’s the point of getting people to your site if they’re only going to leave immediately and never come back?

The ultimate goal of any business is to keep people on their site for long enough to convert; or, at the very least, keep them coming back for more until they convert.

With content, this is much easier to achieve, especially if it’s people who aren’t that familiar with your brand. Content gives them a good reason to stick around and visit more pages while they’re there.

And, by keeping people on your website for longer periods of time, it can even affect your SEO: Google judges the quality of a website by also looking at how long people stay on that website. After all, if they bounce quickly, it can only mean that the page isn’t relevant to their search query.

5.  Boost your brand authority

Getting your audience to trust your brand is just one step; the next one is to also get them to see you as an authority in your industry.

In other words, getting them to see you as an expert in your niche, someone who knows what they’re doing and because of that, can also help them solve their needs.

Remember the Buffer and Hubspot examples from earlier?

All the great content that they created over the years didn’t just help them boost trust in their brand: it also showed people that the teams behind each product are true experts in their niche.

6.  Content helps you generate more leads

Another huge benefit of content marketing – and something that will certainly appeal to most businesses – is that it helps businesses of all kinds, generate more leads.

There are numerous ways to use content marketing for lead generation.

But the general rule is that using a really valuable piece of content – something that solves’ one of your audiences’ needs – is probably the best incentive to get targeted leads to subscribe to your list; here’s an example of a lead magnet from my homepage:

Likewise, you can use eBooks, webinars, online courses, targeted content downloads and other types of content to generate more leads for your business.

For a more in-depth look at how to generate leads from content marketing, check out my ultimate guide here.

7.  Content helps nurture leads to becoming customers

Content is a great asset for any stage of the funnel, from generating leads to turning them into customers.

But before you can turn your leads into customers, you need to nurture them with content.

You can do this in a variety of ways:

• Creating content highlighting your product/services and its benefits
• Sending them personalized drip email marketing campaigns
• Holding webinars for your leads
• Providing them with more valuable content such as free resources, guides, useful listicles, and so on

Content is a great tool at this stage of the sales process as it helps build up trust, showcase your knowledge and authority, as well as your products and services.

8.  Content marketing is cost-effective

When done right, content marketing can be a highly cost-effective form of marketing. For one thing, it can help you reach most marketing objectives: improving search rankings, boosting your domain authority, increasing traffic, generating leads and of course, making more sales.

And if you focus your efforts on creating high-quality content that is highly targeted, it can yield amazing results – without breaking your marketing budget. In the long run, even if you have to pay to create a great piece of content, it’s much better than constantly having to pay for PPC ads.

That piece of content – if it’s evergreen – will be a valuable asset for your business for a long period of time, helping you generate traffic and leads, while also helping you build up your trust and authority.

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