Content marketing is a marketing strategy that revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic (and therefore new customers) to your business.
Benefits of Content Marketing
When you craft compelling, valuable content for your target audience, you earn their trust. When you earn their trust, the more likely they will buy from you. Content marketing is cheaper and more effective than traditional forms of advertising. It is also proven to influence conversions. Here are a few more reasons why you should invest and commit to content marketing:
- Websites that produce regular content receive 8x more traffic
- Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing
- Content marketing generates 3x as many leads as outbound marketing
- Content marketing adopters have nearly 6x as many conversions non-adopters
- Content marketing enhances your email marketing and social media marketing efforts
Real World Example
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re a wellness coach and sales have dipped over the past few years. You’re still looking to grow your client base, so you start a blog and write 2 to 3 keyword-optimized posts each week that explain how to get fit, eat right, and lose weight. These posts start to rank in the search engines over time and when spring hits, people start to search online about ways to get in shape for summer. They come across your blog, read your expert posts, and keep coming back to learn from you week after week. While some of these people choose to make changes on their own, others decide that they should trust the expert to do what they do best and call you for a free consultation, eventually signing up for one of your training programs.
The content marketing example above is one of the most effective ways to drive inbound leads to virtually any business. While there will always be tactics that produce quick, short-lived spikes in traffic, content marketing goal is for continual long term marketing impact. Invest in proper content marketing now and it will reward you for years to come.
