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As a small business owner, you likely wear many hats: you play the role of a manager, a regular employee, and so on. The last thing you want to do is to be in charge and invest in a fully-fledged marketing strategy, right?
Sure, posting on social media from time to time and doing a few Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tweaks might seem like enough. But there’s so much more you can do to take your business strategy to the next level, without needing to blow the budget.
One effective marketing strategy is content marketing. In short, this is the process of creating and publishing informative, valuable, and consistent content to attract a targeted audience.
So what makes it so effective, and why is it worth considering it? Let’s take a look.
1. Builds Trust With Your Brand
It’s pretty safe to say that people are bombarded with advertisements that scream “Buy Me!” across the internet.
Although this is not necessarily a big deal, focusing all of your efforts on advertising campaigns might make your target audience see your brand as being pushy.
On the other hand, content marketing aims to provide users with valuable information that addresses their needs and helps them make an informed purchase decision without necessarily asking for something in return.
Given that 70% of consumers prefer learning about products or services by reading blogs posts overviewing ads, you can’t go wrong with posting content.
That doesn’t mean you should abandon advertising campaigns, though. Think of content marketing as a means of cutting through the noise and backing up your statements.
2. Boosts SEO
Companies that blog consistently can experience an increase of 55% in website visitors. Moreover, blogs may notice a 97% boost in inbound links and a whopping 434% increase in indexed pages.
In other words, good content will help improve your website’s visibility within the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
That’s because Google values user experience above anything else. By providing content relevant to your target audience, you’ll encourage visitors to spend more time on your website.
Consequently, you’ll get to improve dwell times and decrease bounce rates, which are direct ranking factors.
Furthermore, publishing content that caters to your target audience’s interests will likely lead to a healthy flow of recurring visitors.
This lets Google know that people enjoy your content and will push your website up the SERP as a result.
Lastly, content helps you establish yourself as an authority within your niche, allowing you to demonstrate your expertise.
Thus, other content creators may look at your blog for research purposes and cite you in their articles by linking back to you, thus helping your link-building strategy.
Speaking of which, posting blogs regularly can also boost your internal link building. The more content you have, the easier it is to connect it to other web pages within your website via internal links.
This allows users and search engine bots to navigate your website more easily.
3. Helps With Social Media
Content marketing goes hand in hand with social media marketing. You can attract followers to your website and encourage visitors to share your content across their social media pages. If done right, that is.
Instead of posting full-fledged blog posts on your social media page, it might be a better idea to distribute interesting fragments of your content.
Social media is a fast-paced environment, and users will likely not be interested in reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of text. That said, sharing fascinating snippets might capture their attention and persuade them to visit your website.
Also, imagery plays a key role here. As social media platforms are mostly made up of visual content, like images and videos, users may unintentionally skip over posts that contain plain text.
To put it differently, investing in graphic design tools to help you create captivating illustrations that go along with your posts might be worth it. If you’d like to save a little money, sites like DontPayFull can help you find discount codes for a variety of different graphic design platforms.
In terms of encouraging visitors to distribute your content on their social media accounts, make sure to integrate social sharing buttons in your pages. Although it may not seem like much, it simply makes it more convenient for users to share content.
Consequently, they’ll be more inclined to do so.
4. It’s Cost-Effective
Lastly, in contrast to other marketing strategies, content marketing costs 62% and still attracts roughly three times as many leads. This comes down to the matter of earning your audience’s trust and establishing a solid connection with it.
Providing value-packed content, like how-to guides or tips and tricks-type blogs, will show your audience that you are genuinely interested in helping it out, and visitors will be more likely to purchase your products.
Moreover, given that content helps you boost your website’s rankings in the SERP, you’ll no longer need to spend as much on other strategies to generate traffic, like PPC advertising.
As a bonus, once you’ve earned your audience’s trust, theý’ll probably talk about your business with others, essentially turning it into a powerful marketing tool.
Also, keep in mind that you can repurpose existing content. For instance, you can take successful blogs posts and turn them into videos, newsletters, etc. This allows you to use other marketing channels and reach new audiences without much effort.
Final Words
All in all, there’s no reason not to give content marketing a shot. It’s cost-effective and goes along well with other marketing strategies, like SEO and social media.
But keep in mind that to make it work, you’ll need to strive for quality and provide valuable information to your consumers. That said, take some time to understand your target audience through and through, including their needs, wants, pain points, and create content based on these factors.