What is Content Marketing & How Can it Benefit Your Business?

Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, SEO, Social Media / By Helen Mackenzie

As the marketing landscape continues to become more competitive, many businesses are increasing their content marketing efforts as more and more savvy business owners realise just how important content is in engaging audiences, driving leads and boosting overall brand visibility.

Content marketing is crucial in answering questions about your business that potential customers may have. Additionally, it builds trust and helps cement you as a thought leader within your industry. In 2022, audiences expect high-quality, engaging and consistent content from their favourite brands across a variety of channels.

What Is Content Marketing?

In short, content marketing is the creation and distribution of material (including blogs, social media posts and videos) that is intended to generate interest in a brand’s products or services. It is not necessarily used to explicitly advertise a product or service like other more traditional forms of marketing, but instead highlights information related to the brand’s industry and services.

How can you benefit from a consistent content marketing strategy?

Below we discuss just a few of the many benefits you will receive by planning a consistent, high-quality content marketing strategy.

Increased quality and quantity of leads

Content marketing can help your business generate leads. Your future customers are more likely to purchase your products or services in the future if they have previously seen or engaged with your content. By creating free and useful information, you are inviting users to head to a relevant landing page. Additionally, by including CTAs (calls to action) within your content, you are giving audiences the opportunity to interact with your brand, make a purchase or provide a lead.

Brand visibility and organic search ranking will increase

By consistently producing high-quality content, you will see improvements in your organic search rankings on platforms like Google and Bing. The content you share helps your brand establish itself as a thought leader with internet users and by focussing on relevant keywords within the likes of blogs, your content will help your website rank higher within search engine results page.

Regular content inspires trust in your brand

Building a relationship with your audience can be assisted with the creation and distribution of content. The content you produce will help answer potential questions and enables a dialogue to spark between the brand and consumer. By offering added value to your audience without asking for anything in return, you are building trust. People will turn to your brand for recommendations and advice. Ultimately, content works when it aligns with the right audience and when it appears at the right place, at the right time, you’ll see your brand’s reputation soar.

Your potential customers are likely to stick around longer

Great content is a vital tool for businesses to capture and engage their audience’s attention. There is the potential to pull customers in and encourage them to come back time and time again for more, thus, encouraging them to pay for your services. With interesting and useful content, your audience is much likely to stick around your social media channels or your website longer – you’ll notice average session duration increase and with this, so too will customer retention.

Content marketing scales your audience for remarketing

While content marketing in and of itself is mostly an organic form of marketing, it ties in nicely with your paid advertising efforts. Display ads targeting audiences who have previously visited certain pages on your site without converting is one of the most effective marketing strategies to increase leads and revenue. With content marketing, you can build new audiences to remarket to. For example, you might write a blog answering the most frequently asked questions people ask when buying a couch. People who take the time to read the article are likely in the market to buy a new couch in the near future, so you can take this data and target this audience with a paid ad advertising one of your most popular couches. 

Best Channels For Implementation

There are a number of platforms you can leverage to share your brand’s content. Looking at the PESO model provides some insight into the most lucrative for content sharing. PESO stands for paid media, earned media, shared media and owned media.

• You may choose to share content across paid channels such as Google display advertising, email marketing or by sponsoring posts on social media.
• Earned media is what you typically know as either public or media relations. Getting your name out there via more ‘traditional’ media is also a great content marketing method – via good news stories, press releases for new product launches or appearing on a podcast.
• Sharing content on social media is referred to as shared media in the PESO model. Companies now typically use social media as the main source of communication with their audience. Some popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
• Your content is what is known to be owned This is where a strong content marketing strategy begins – by deciding on the content you will create and using your own channels (such as your website) as a place for the content to live. You are in control of the message you want to tell.

Regularly producing fresh content can be time-consuming, but given the significant results seen by those who consistently post high-quality content, it is an essential part of any marketing strategy. If you’re ready to create a new content marketing strategy, the best place to start would be an audit of your current content to see what works for your brand – but also look at what others are doing in your industry. Is this working for them?

At teclan, our expert content creators take the hassle out of generating new content, leaving you free to run your organisation. We explore your brand and research your industry in order to channel your content to the right audience, at the right time, on the right platforms. Get in touch to find out how we best promote your brand message while accounting for audience engagement and search engine visibility.