Consensus amongst the marketing gurus of the world is that content marketing is the premier strategy when it comes to search marketing. The reason often cited for this consensus is that content marketing can vastly improve search engine rankings. That’s very true, yet quality, effective content marketing does a whole lot more than just that.
Content marketing is more than just a marketing strategy. It’s a marketing art form. Done correctly, the benefits for a business are wide-ranging. For those who, for whatever reason, haven’t implemented content marketing as a marketing strategy, continue reading so you can see how the benefits of content marketing go far beyond just improving search engine rankings.
It Solves a Problem
Content marketing can help solve a problem. More importantly, it can help solve your customers’ problems. If you create content that’s relevant to your customer base and whatever it is that your business does, that content can help eliminate many of your customer’s headaches.
Consider this scenario: you've just launched a new product, and you've been getting nonstop emails to your support department about a certain feature. This is the perfect example of how implementing a content marketing strategy can help benefit both your search engine rankings and your loyal customers.
Create a piece of content to address the problem. What works best is a short article or blog post hosted on your company’s website, and then sent out in an email blast to your customers who are experiencing the problem. If the problem is wide-reaching enough, simply sharing it on social feeds may be enough. You should also consider linking to this content from email signatures of certain staff or reproducing it on any off-line if appropriate.
By addressing client issues via a piece of content and then spreading the word about it, you can cut down on customer service hours and have generally happier clients.
It Can Help Establish You as an Expert
The value of being considered an “expert” in a certain niche is incredibly high, especially in today’s e-commerce driven marketplace. Having authority can go far, especially if you’re a smaller, locally based consultant or business.
High quality content that offers some sort of value to the reader will get shared. With every share that your company’s content gets, the chances of earning more social followers and fans is increased. As that number increases, so does your company’s authority on the niche. It is widely speculated that Google's recent addition of Authorship Markup is attempting to tie content to its creators in efforts to isolate experts on different subjects and reward them with higher rankings.
Have a single author publish the content that’s created under your content marketing strategy. Even if it’s written by other people, the goal is to attempt to create this one person who can be the expert that represents your company. Whether that’s the CEO, marketing director, or anyone else, it doesn't matter too much.
Taking advantage of content marketing in order to help become an established niche expert can lead to invitations on conference panels, great leads, and more. It can also give you additional exposure in Google via authorship markup and Google+.
It Creates Better Relationships With Your Customers
Plain and simple, content marketing can help foster better and more productive relationships with your clients and customers. This is especially important for repeat and loyal customers, as creating a constantly updated stream of meaningful, helpful, and high quality content is something that your customers will enjoy.
This content shouldn't be limited to solely blog posts. Videos, images, apps, and more are all fantastic examples of content marketing that can help create better customer-business relationships that aren’t produced with a keyboard.
Better yet, get your customers involved and get them creating content for you. Guest authors, create a contest where entrants have to submit articles or videos, reviews, comments, are all great ways to involve customers, or potential customers and brand ambassadors. User generated content can be a real boon. But be careful if you're getting tons of it, you need to monitor it for spammers and other trouble makers.
Many people think of content marketing solely as a way to improve SEO and drive traffic to a site. This is so far from the truth, as customers old and new will benefit from a successful content marketing campaign.
Image credits:
nichepursuits.com (content is king)
forbes.com (content hug)
