An Initial Guide to Content Marketing. How Can Content Marketing Help Businesses Grow?

Content Is King, we all read this phrase with great curiosity. But do we know the whys and hows of it? Well, a lot of us know the basics but we are hardly sure about them. To ease your learning, I’ve put together an initial guide to content marketing. It’s more of how much I’ve learned about content marketing over the years than a formal and straightforward guide. So, bear with me as it unfolds and open up to you the great mystery of content marketing.

What Is Content?

Everything that communicates our brand to the audience. 

How Can Content Marketing Help Businesses Grow?

Strong Brand Awareness.

For instance, you sell makeup products and have just started writing a blog about beauty and fitness. People who will read your blog and get engaged in it will definitely get to know your products, their descriptions, and reviews better even before using them. Additionally, these people are also likely to mention your blog in front of friends and family if your words have caught them well. This is where your brand awareness begins to spread. From one to two and so on, people get to know your products even before purchasing and using them.

Respect and Admiration.

This is a time taking thing but if you put in the right efforts and make sure to write true things and that too without any exaggeration, your audience can soon begin to respect and admire your brand. People will test you in the beginning, if you fail you are gone but if you pass you will remain their choice for life unless your quality and trustworthiness decline. Let’s suppose you run a beauty and fitness blog where you keep on reviewing different products and share real-life experiences of different people. If you will correctly do that, soon an extended audience would be built and they will also believe in you and the products you talk about. That’s respect and admiration.

Indirect Customer Conversion.

Without even letting you know; your content converts several audiences into clients if it has the right approach and an engaging tone. So, you run a beauty and fitness blog that is liked by so many people around and they have begun to trust in you. They read your content, follow your guides and love them, as soon as they get to know that you are selling a particular product, they would surely go and buy them out of trust, respect, admiration, and belief even if you have never written about those products or tried to sell them in your blog.

Team Coordination.

Unlike many business operations, content marketing has this potential to strengthen the unity and coordination within a team. It has roots in almost every team. From graphic designers and web designers to social media campaign executives and sales executives, everyone has something to do with the content marketer.

These are a few intangible benefits of content marketing to your business which might not be seen in the beginning but you can feel them strengthening the roots of your business pretty soon.

Site Traffic.

This is the most obvious benefit of content marketing. The content you share via blog posts, etc. it will help the potential audience reach up to your website and the traffic would be increased. For instance, you run a beauty blog where you have reviewed different products and then you add external or hyperlinks to your website, they will lead the readers to your website or sure.

Improved SEO.

Alright so SEO has the most benefits when it comes to content marketing. A content that is authentic and good to catch up with attracts editorial links through which the google crawls up what your business is about and help your potential customers reaching you with ease. This is just the beginning, content has so much more to do for SEO. However, the benefits can be summarized as, if there were no content, what would you optimize?

Direct Customer Conversions.

As mentioned before, content is everything you write to communicate with your audience. The fancy product descriptions you right using catchy phrases and keywords as well as the social media ad copies are a great form of content marketing. Thus, they bring indirect customer conversion when made with perfection. For instance, you post impeccable ad copies about your makeup products on your social media platform and a bunch of ladies are directed to your inbox and make the deal. Yes. That’s direct customer conversion. Tada!

These are few tangible benefits of content marketing to your business which can be seen, measured, and evaluated over time.

Flywheel Marketing

You see all these benefits of content marketing. They look promising and attractive. You will invest in a blog or two and put in all the right efforts but wait, all of them do not show up instantly. Content marketing is rightly termed as flywheel marketing. Do you know what is a flywheel? Remember the cart we all have watched in old cartoon films. It takes a while to get started and a lot of effort as well. But as soon as it grabs the pace, the need for effort keeps declining and you get closer to the destination. Yay. That’s how content marketing works.

At first, a lot of effort would be required and you will hardly get any outcome. Don’t be disheartened if none of these benefits comes up in the beginning. This is what happens with almost everyone. But remember that the moment you are planning to quit out of being disheartened and dissatisfied, your success lies right after that moment. You are just a step away from your destination. So, pals, hang on. Even if you feel like all your investment is drowning and nothing is gonna come out, hang on. Things will get better soon.

Content marketing is a savage I must say. You can get away with it even in a small budget and almost zero resources. All you need to have is a good knowledge of marketing, your audience, a few incredible writers (you if you can write), and command over recent google algorithms and trends.

Lack of Resources and Budget Isn’t Always A Drawback.

It does have a silver lining too. The less of them you will have, the fewer areas you’d be able to conquer. And the fewer areas you conquer, the more focus you put into them. Remember the phrase quality is better than quantity, huh? That’s what is the silver lining of low budget and resources. Whatever you do, it will be worthy and qualitative in the end. And quality has the potential to attract the right audience itself.

To cut the story short, blogs, webinars, etc. are the first layer in the marketing funnel and do not bring about an instant conversion rate for the business. However, if you invest the right efforts and budget into it, they can be the primary source of filling your marketing funnel with all the potential audience, converting them into clients and expanding your revenue and growth.

ReadMore: Essential Marketing Trends on Social Media Content during COVID-19