Every now and then, I get this question: ”Why is content so important, anyway? All you marketers talk about it and how it’s so critical, but no one can tell me why.”
It’s a great question, and if you’ve had lots of luck with other, more traditional forms of marketing in the past, then I can understand your hesitation to invest in your static website content, the landing pages and service/product pages on your website that are designed to get customers to contact you.
Frankly, if you have a sales process that’s working for you, if your current marketing is doing its job, if you don’t need to increase your sales or leads, that’s awesome — who cares if your website sucks if you’re getting the results you need?
But if you’re not getting the results you need from your other forms of marketing, if you need your website to start pulling its weight, it might be time to start looking at your content.
Quality Content Is Important If You Want to Get Leads Through Your Website
If you wrote the content for your website yourself and you’re hoping people will simply browse your offerings and make a purchase, you might be in trouble.
One of the main ways a website makes money is through landing pages. Landing pages, combined with another form of marketing to drive traffic to those pages, is extremely effective.
If you’re not getting the results you need from your other forms of marketing, if you need your website to start pulling its weight, it might be time to start looking at your content
To put it simply, adding a variety of sales landing pages with clear calls to action to your website can turn your website into a lead generation machine.
Consider these statistics:
- Businesses with over 40 landing pages generate 12x more leads than those with 1-5 landing pages
- Companies that increase the number of landing pages on their website from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads
Landing pages are great, but even a well-written product page or contact page can convert just fine on its own. The question is this — were those pages created by a professional, or were they created by an amateur?
Dozens of poorly written sales pages aren’t likely to increase your conversions — even great landing pages aren’t very effective if you don’t know how to get traffic to those pages, if they’re not, at the very least, optimized properly for keywords.
Businesses with over 40 landing pages generate 12x more leads than those with 1-5 landing pages
That all requires the work of a professional content writer with an understanding of SEO.
It’s Extremely Important to Have Someone Who Understands SEO Write Your Content
Let’s just lay the statistics above aside for a moment and think about this logically:
Why do people go to a website?
If you’re a business and your goal is to get people to buy your stuff, the only real reason they might visit your website is to buy that stuff, right?
How do they know you exist in the first place?
If you’re a large, well-known brand, great, then they show up to your site because they know you have something awesome to sell — but what if you’re not?
If you’re not, then the most common way the modern consumer finds you is through a search online, right?
If the content on your website that describes your products and services is well written and properly optimized for search engines, then great, you’ll probably get some traffic on your website — people who actually click on your page when it shows up on a search engine and make a purchase — all because your content aligns with what they were searching for in the first place.
That’s one reason static content (your product, service, contact, and landing pages) is so important on your website — these pages either convert traffic into leads and sales, or, if they’re written poorly, they lose you business.
Your landing pages either convert traffic into leads and sales or lose you business
People who are searching for the services you offer and the products you sell, but who aren’t aware of you as a brand, are extremely unlikely to simply stumble on you online.
So ask yourself this — is your content properly optimized for search? Was it written by a professional? If it wasn’t, how are people in the wide world going to find your content? How are they going to get to your website in the first place to look at your products and services? What other types of marketing are you going to invest in to get traffic to those pieces of content that sell?
Static content isn’t the only type of content that matters — ongoing content is critical to the long-term success of your website.
Content Is Important If You Want to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Ongoing content is so important when it comes to converting traffic on your website into leads and sales, so if you rely on (or plan to rely on) your website for leads and sales, you absolutely need to be investing in content — it’s important to invest in both static website content and ongoing content (also known as content marketing).
Whether you’re B2B or B2C, if you aren’t blogging or writing articles for your website consistently every month, now is the time to get a plan in place — ongoing content creation create boosts search results, which means more opportunities to get traffic on your website.
By creating new pieces of content (new blog posts, new videos, new images), optimizing them for keywords, and putting them on your website, you continually give search engines new pieces of content to potentially serve to searchers, with each page being tied to different keywords.
As these pages accumulate, you get more and more opportunities for more and more searchers to find a page on your site and learn about your brand.
We’ve known for a long time that Google and other search engines include the production of ongoing content as part of a suite of important ranking factors — basically, when search engines decide if your content should match someone’s search, whether or not you’re producing regular new content consistently plays a role in how how those search engines rank your website.
Here’s another statistic for ya: In a recent study by Hubspot, companies that published 16+ blog posts a month got 3.5x more traffic than companies that published 0–4 blog posts a month. (Source: Hubspot)
Without fresh content added to your site on a regular basis, you are less likely to attract new visitors through search, and the visitors you do attract have no reason to stick around and start interacting with your brand unless they’re ready to buy right away.
Companies that publish 16+ blog posts a month get 3.5x more traffic than companies that publish 0–4 blog posts a month
That’s the main benefit of content marketing — you create many different pieces of content over time that speak to your customers in varying stages of the buyer’s journey, ensuring that not only do you attract people who are ready to buy today, but that you also plant the seed for future purchases in the minds of readers who aren’t ready to buy just yet.
Fresh Content Is Important If You Want Traffic on Your Website and Leads in the Future
Static content (product and service pages, landing pages, contact pages, even home and about pages) only pulls people who are specifically looking for what you offer — usually, that means someone who is ready to buy today.
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What if they’re not that far along in the buyer’s journey yet?
What if they’re only vaguely aware they have a problem? How are they going to find out that you exist, that you offer a solution to their problem, that you may be able to help them in the future?
How do you get people on your website who aren’t specifically looking for your product or service today, but who will be, one day, in the near or far future?
It’s not the static content on your website that does that — it’s your ongoing content. Blog posts, ebooks, short videos, checklists, infographics — these are all different forms of content marketing, and they’re critical to reaching future customers, those people who won’t buy today, but will definitely buy in the future.
Content marketing generates more than 3x the leads of outbound marketing and costs 62% less
They’re free, useful, valuable pieces of content that help your audience while simultaneously introducing you to them as a brand.
Here’s what makes this type of content so important:
- Content marketing gets 3x more leads per dollar spent than paid search ads (like Google Adwords)
- Content marketing generates more than 3x the leads of outbound marketing (advertising, basically) and costs 62% less
- Content marketing has a conversion rate 6x higher than other method
Your ongoing content that discusses problems or issues related to what your business does, that dives into your industry and related industries, that draws in traffic that may not make a purchase today but that will almost certainly make a purchase at some point in the future, that’s the content that prepares potential customers to become actual customers.
If you want to generate more leads over time, content marketing is the way to go. It’s an investment in the future of your business, and it’s the key to long-term growth for your website.
You need to take care of that investment — not only do you need to be consistently creating new pieces of content, but you also need to be regularly updating your content to ensure it’s working.
Your Content Will Age — It Requires Investment and Upkeep Over Time
You invested in your website when you paid a developer to create it, when you paid a designer to design it, and you’re investing every day to keep it secure and running well — the next step is to invest in ongoing professional content writing services.
If you want to generate more leads over time, content marketing is the way to go
Just like a house ages over time and continually needs to be maintained, with small investments of time and money here and there, your website ages as well, and it needs similar investments of time and money to continue to function as a valuable marketing tool for your business.
Not only does the design of your website or the actual code underlying your website need to be updated or revamped from time to time, but even if you’re not paying for content marketing, the existing static content needs to be updated and changed over time.
Even a simple website will need updated product descriptions, changes in what services are available, changes to the about page as new employees join and others move on — even something as simple as the change of a phone number will require some edits.
But for many businesses, large changes to content become necessary every 5 years or so — businesses change, and if your content doesn’t change with it, your customers are going to be left confused and annoyed that your content doesn’t align with what your business is actually doing.
One of the more common areas where we see businesses fall behind on the maintenance of their website is with their imagery — if you’re producing a lot of awesome written content, you need images to go with it if you want that content to get noticed on social media.
Custom Imagery Improves Social Media Efforts and Keeps Your Website Looking Fresh
Creating ongoing imagery is just as critical for the evolution and growth of a new website as the creation of new written content.
Many clients struggle to keep up with design projects, like creating custom website graphics, formatting reports and marketing materials, or designing new landing pages.
It’s especially important if you want to make a splash on social media. Investing in a professional writer to create custom blog posts doesn’t do you a whole lot of good if you don’t have beautiful images to go along with them, to catch the eye of readers as they scroll through their newsfeeds.
Articles with images get 94% more total views
We know that custom images matter, that they drive engagement and make it more likely that your written content will be noticed:
- Articles with images get 94% more total views
- Including a photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
- For an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” when deciding what to purchase
- On Facebook, shares with images have a 37% higher level of engagement than text-only shares
If you’re going to invest in sales copy and content marketing, it doesn’t make much sense to stop short on design. Written content makes up the bones of your website — beautiful imagery is the icing on the cake that draws people in.
Content Is Important — Start With Your Static Website Content
If you’re ready to take your content from “meh” to “wow!” start with our website content template — it will walk you step by step through the process of writing all the content you need for your website.
Click to grab it free.
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