Why Content Marketing is Essential to a Marketing Strategy

Online competition is intense. Businesses implement various techniques to persuade people to choose their company over the competition. What are these techniques? Online merchants optimize stores by enhancing ecommerce platform search results relevance. More companies use artificial intelligence to personalize the user experience.

Content is essential to the digital marketing process. Content is everything for any business, whether SaaS, ecommerce, or finance and banking. What can you consider content? It’s anything you create, such as videos, blog posts, images, emails, social media posts, podcasts, etc.

Content is a universal tool for businesses to achieve various goals. It drives website traffic, positions you as an expert and engages prospects. The more value you provide, the more often people come to your resource.

And it means they’ll spend more time on the page and become interested in the products and services. In this post, we’ll enumerate several benefits of content marketing and how it impacts digital marketing strategies.

1. Informing Your Audience

One of the most widespread reasons to incorporate content into the website is to inform the audience. Why did people come to the page? What will they find there? You need to present the business. For example, a SaaS company may place images of its tool dashboard, customer reviews, and benefits of choosing it instead of competitors.

You can explain to readers this tool and why they should purchase it or at least book a demo. You can go further and educate people about using the software. State the values they can gain from it.

Maybe, they can automate tasks and improve employee efficiency. Or they can integrate the tool with other software and see a complete view of their operations and customers.

Here is how Zoho leverages content marketing for business growth. One of the recent articles zeros in on apps in Zoho Projects and how they boost productivity.

Another illustration is how Check Point introduces its security architecture in a YouTube video.

Posting valuable information is a win-win for you and visitors. It encourages people to make a purchase decision and saves time for the staff to repeat the same facts. So, content marketing isn’t just about telling exciting stories. It’s about moving prospects further along in the sales funnel.

Content can have a long lifespan. Generate evergreen content to boost your online visibility and refresh it every 6-12 months. Furthermore, publish current trends to attract potential customers.

2. Becoming Accessible from Search

Most users look for information, products, and services from Google. It’s the most popular search engine with its ranking factors. According to Statista, Google owns 91.9% of the market share, Bing with 8.88% and 2.55% belonging to Yahoo! as of July 2022.

How do you appear in search results? You must post something on the website to answer the users’ requests. People utilize specific phrases while searching.

These are keywords. You also need to integrate them into the content for search engines and visitors to understand whether the page answers the required questions.

Conduct keyword research to reach your audience. Dedicated SEO tools like Semrush, Soovle, Jaaxy, Google Search Console, and others provide insights into the following aspects:

what words your competition ranks for;
what you should use;
what search volume do the keywords have.

Check the Semrush example in the screenshot below:

Image via Semrush

A powerful tactic includes a call to action (CTAs) — unique buttons or links encouraging people to take the desired action. They may consist of calls like “Contact Us,” “Buy Now,” “Download Our Free Guide,” etc.

Once the content is live, website crawlers index it, and it appears in search results and attracts users.

READ MORE: Would you like to see how SEO enhancement increased sales for a global beverage company? View our case study here.

3. Earning Backlinks from Other Websites

Another way how content marketing assists in digital marketing is link building. Content doesn’t just let you appear in search results. It helps you reach the top of the list and outperform your competitors. It’s possible because quality content is Google’s ranking factor.

First, unique content attracts more readers. They spend more time on the page, improving the website metrics. If Google receives positive signals from the page, itboosts it in search. Second, visitors are likelier to share helpful information on other websites, messengers, and social media. It also leads to more visitors and backlinks.

Shares on social media or websites can expand your reach to new audiences. Other resources may cite your article, put images and infographics, or embed a video link. All these mentions are crucial ranking indicators.

They point at the website as a trustworthy resource, and Google improves its position. That’s why a solid content marketing strategy is essential.

4. Getting More Opportunities for Conversion Rate Optimization

Apart from acquiring visitors, content assists in increasing conversions. Conversion is an action you expect from your potential customers. It may be signing up, following the profile on social media, buying products, or similar.

As mentioned above, CTAs are ideal for prompting action. So, how do you determine the best CTA? What wording, color, or placement is more powerful? That’s where A/B testing comes into play.

A/B tests are valuable for pinpointing the best calls to action from a marketing perspective. No matter what you want them to do (click on a link, fill out a form, etc.), CTAs should attract attention and convince site visitors to take action.

For example, a bank is promoting savings accounts on its website. They post a banner on the homepage with a one-sentence intro and button. They conduct a test with several variations, dividing the audience into categories, like who lands on the homepage and then showing them different options.

The A/B testing allows the bank to determine which colors and text get a better reaction. Notably, the longer you run the test, the more accurate the results. Perhaps the CTA “Start saving” is more influential than “Sign me up.” Or, site visitors prefer a blue color scheme over red. Marketers can modify the campaign, change graphic elements, and acquire new accounts based on findings.

Would you like to learn more about B2B conversion optimization? Read on!

5. Building Authority

Rich, meaningful content lets you demonstrate extensive subject matter expertise to your audience. For example, copywriters share tips for building effective landing pages or hints on stress management. For example, fashion and lifestyle brands often post articles on trends, or a plumbing company may post articles on home plumbing maintenance or safety.

These topics are practical, appropriate and meaningful to audiences because they are helpful and demonstrate industry knowledge. This knowledge is valuable, with a high link-building potential, and lets you show your industry expertise.

Also, articles are an excellent place to link to products or services for sale. Include links to products or company web pages in YouTube video descriptions and social media posts.

For example, Instagram provides growth marketing tips. It directs followers to its website to continue reading and learn more about its services.

Final Thoughts

Content includes humorous blog stories, engaging Instagram posts and informative articles on technical websites. Why create content? It improves SEO, raises brand awareness and keeps site visitors coming back.

Infographics, texts and images are shareable, so you can place backlinks to boost search engine rankings. They also let you expand your reach to social media. At the same time, content marketing doesn’t require a significant investment.

It may be challenging to stand out above the online marketing noise. Your digital content marketing strategy needs quality and creativity to drive website traffic and convert leads. Solid, impactful and optimized content builds strong customer relationships and drives revenue.

About the Author: Kate Parish is the Chief Marketing Officer at Onilab. She has over eight years of digital marketing and website promotion experience.

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