The role of content marketing is rapidly expanding. A recent study from Clutch found that 82% of people were influenced by content marketing to completed a purchased.
Additionally, the team at Conductor’s recent research of 1000 consumers found that people were 131% more likely to buy from brands that educated them with content. Even more impressive, the study reveals content builds consumer trust and brand affinity grow over time.
Your company’s website is often new customers first interaction with you and what you sell. Content marketing adds pages to your website through blog posts which improve SEO, provides material to use in social media and email promotion, and creates the building blocks of information for your sales team and customer support representatives.
Here is the Role of Content Marketing Across all Channels
Blog
Content marketing fills your website with new information. Each article is an additional opportunity for you to connect with your ideal customers and to educate them as to why your products and services will solve their problems.
As internet searchers use longer phrases, or long-tailed keywords, blog articles give you the opportunity to address specific questions or pain points your ideal buyer has without changing the content on your main website page.
Each question you answer also helps to establish you as an industry expert. Consistency in publishing will build trustworthy relationships with potential and current customers. Remember, the Conductor study reveals trust builds over time.
Incorporating graphics and videos in addition to written content into a blog article expands your opportunities to connect with your audience the ways they prefer to take in content. Content marketing can also highlight your company’s personality, mission, and passions. For example, you can use customer success stories to celebrate client wins.
SEO
In addition to giving your customers information, your content also helps Google understand the context of your business. Every blog article you publish is another page Google will crawl and index for search results.
Internal and external links to and from other reputable sites help Google understand the importance of your content. As Google continues to create new ways to attract the attention of searchers through Knowledge Boxes and Featured Snippets the more content you have, the more opportunities you have for your website to own one of these specialized areas of search.
Google My Business (GMB) pages continue to add opportunities for businesses to expand their reach. If you have a brick and mortar location or are seeking to expand your reach with your local customer base, you need to spend time interacting on your GMB page. You can add a blog post with website link or infographic to your page as a post or as an answer to a customer’s question.
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Social Media and Email
Social media and email channels are excellent ways to promote your business, but if you only post your website link repeatedly, your customers will ignore your posts. You don’t want to say the same thing over and over with every post or email. Content marketing gives you a library of opportunities to fill your social media channels with a variety of information.
Additionally, you can also use emails or social posts to direct customers back to your website.
By highlighting a product and embedding a website link you can let your loyal customers know about sales or new items they may be interested in before the general public.
You can pull an interesting statistic or answer a question you address in your blog article and then post the link to the blog post with a note to read more encouraging your customers to spend time on your website.
All these opportunities for interaction extend the customer relationship and continue to build trust and your authority.
Sales Team Support
As a customer moves along in their buyer’s journey they will naturally seek your content to answer questions. If they download an offer or ask for a demonstration of a product the door opens for further engagement with a sales representative.
As potential customers ask questions, your salespeople can extend the conversation with customers by sending them a follow-up email with a link to a blog article with more information on a product or service.
Content marketing is a part of digital marketing that takes time and financial investment. By taking the time to look at the content you create strategically, you will make your marketing dollars go further and present a consistent message to your customers across all channels.
To learn more about the various ways you can use leverage content marketing download The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business Growth.
