Do You Really Need Content Marketing?

Long story short, YES! There are various ways content marketing can help improve your website, SEO, lead generation, and more. In fact, content marketing leaders get up to 7.8 times more traffic than websites not utilizing content marketing.

A lot of people think content marketing consists of just blog posts, but it can come in various forms, whether it be emails, social media posts, or newsletters – basically, anything your customers can read or interact with.

So why is content marketing so useful?

1. Your Customers Expect Content Marketing

Nothing is more annoying than navigating to a website and not being able to find the information you were looking for. We’ve all been there, and sometimes you don’t have the time or energy to contact the website and get more information.

Potential customers reaching your website are the same way. Traffic can come at any time of the day and there is no way to tell exactly what someone is looking for. That’s why you want to try and cover every base possible.

What do you typically expect when visiting a website? It may depend on the product or service, but I always expect a main/homepage, about us, products/services, FAQ, and contact pages.

I’m impressed when a website has an active blog and social media pages, but I’ve come to expect it more and more. Other visitors to your website are the same way. Companies that regularly update their blogs get 55% more website visits.

Think about what potential customers will expect when they get to your website. Ask yourself some questions about their behavior.

What questions will your customers have when they search for your website? What questions will they have once they get to it, or a certain page of it? It’s important to remember that while people are looking for all this information, they also want to be able to find it quickly and efficiently.

Include lots of detail, but don’t make it overwhelming or hard to read. More detail and content also helps provide a sense of trust with the viewer. Strong content can help show your company is professional.

Blog posts can help show website viewers that you have expertise in an area. If you continue to post, over time they will also be able to see your website is active and you have had experience over the years.

2. Content Marketing Can Improve Your SEO

Content Marketing and SEO go hand in hand. If you don’t have high-quality content on your page, then you won’t have good SEO.

How often do you use Google every day? Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second. Utilizing that popularity is an amazing way to get leads and views with content marketing. You don’t want to miss out on all those potential searches.

If you search for something on Google, or another search engine, it will crawl various websites to determine what information best suits you. This can be done with different keywords on your website, but an important factor is the quality of your content.

The higher quality your content is, the more likely you are to get more leads and people engaging with your company. The content must be relevant, have no grammar and spelling errors, and be free of spam. For example, content like “Stop! Click in the next 30 seconds!” would be recognized as suspicious and ranked lower in quality.

Your content must also be up to date. For example, if you put a 2020 holiday sale on your homepage and never removed it, that could hurt your SEO. Or if you changed your company name but kept the old name up on some pages. That could be flagged as lower-quality content. Look back at your past content to make sure everything is up to date and continues to be relevant to the website.

You also need to make sure to keep track of any Google algorithm updates. Since the algorithm is constantly changing, it’s important to make sure your content doesn't suddenly start getting marked as lower quality.

3. Content Marketing is Cost-Effective

The best part about content marketing is it is cost-effective, especially compared to other forms of marketing. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and can lead to 3 times as many leads.

It takes time and effort to produce high-quality content, but the results are worth it and you can share it for free across various social media platforms.

Although you can choose to pay for advertisements on social media, you don’t need to in order for people to see your posts. Save a few bucks and start growing the organic reach of your social media accounts.

Don’t be discouraged if you write some amazing content and it takes some time to be seen. It may take patience to see change, especially on the SEO side. Google and other search engines will need time to crawl your website again and rank the quality of it.

While you are waiting on this, write more content! Think about your target audience and what they would like to read or interact with on your website and social media pages.

All in all, there are various ways content marketing can be beneficial for your company. Even if content marketing doesn’t work the first time around, people still came to your website for information. They now know your name, a little about you, and the potential to reach them again is still there.

Content Marketing is definitely a must-have for your marketing plan. Start getting more website views, more often. Hudson,Ink can help improve your SEO strategy with content marketing using automated campaigns. To get started, contact [email protected].